Jeff Hawkins, in his book On Intelligence, likened the study of AGI to a massive jigsaw puzzle. I may be making up some of this, but imagine a billion piece puzzle where the the pieces are black on both sides and there is no clear border. Furthermore, you only start with a few hundred pieces, and every month a few more pieces – some of which are duplicates and others are for completely different puzzles – are mailed to you. Something like that. It’s a good analogy.
But, like a definition of intelligence, i have to contribute my own. Imagine a maze like the ones on kids’ place mats in family restaurants. You need to show the monkey the way through the maze to get to the french fries on the other side. If you’re like me, the first line you drew was around the outside of the maze. I mean, sheesh, if you’re that hungry, why bother going through?
But, after you ate your fries and decided to solve the maze, the easiest way to do it is not to start at the beginning and find the end, or vice versa. The easiest way is to start a both the beginning and the end, and use the information about where each leads to link them up.
Now imagine a maze like that the size of a province (or state – a big one – for those unfamiliar with the term). There are only a few ways in/out, and all you get to decide on is where exactly you are going to be helicopter-dropped into the middle of it. You can choose memory (somewhere central), speech (north west), perception (north), vision (south), or cognition (the location of which is a secret, jealously guarded). No one knows where the ways out are. There are plenty of paths that quickly lead nowhere, and most of the rest lead nowhere after a lengthy exploration. In 60 years, no one has found a way out.
My thinking – and i’m not alone, it should be noted – is to find a way in, a way out, and try to connect the two. Returning to reality, the way in, in my opinion, is sensory data. If you can inspect the signals that the brain receives (including the spinal cord or not, but preferably including), you can begin to understand what different constructs in the brain are trying to do.
The way out is two-fold. Obviously there is movement, the physical manifestation of brain output. But there is also unprovoked thought, such as imagination. It may be debatable, but i think it’s clear that the simpler an animal is, the less unprovoked thought there is going on. So, for a basic understanding of what the brain is doing, which i contend is what we all desperately need, we should first focus on movement.
I’d like to write a longer post, but paying work beckons, and so i’ll need to leave this for now. Stay tuned for more!
I often return to thinking about this post as I read more about various AGI attempts, and listen to modern discussion on the topic. It seems especially insightful as I read emails bouncing around the AGIRI list (http://www.agiri.org/email/). It seems probable to me that there are vast swaths of territory that seem related to AGI, but are lost so far in that it’s unclear how they link up with known entrances or exits, if at all.
We have an advantage. There are many mazes to explore, of varying lengths, with similar landmarks. Let’s start small; learn to explore the simplest mazes. We can try our luck at the hard stuff once we have a track record of success.