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Elliot Olds's avatar

Parts of current machine learning systems are still coded by humans, but my point is that it's no longer the "content" of intelligence that is coded, but just a general learning framework.

For instance, consider the DeepMind system that can play ~50 Atari games. In traditional machine learning, humans would have to define a bunch of features, then the learning algorithm would take those feature values as input. Figuring out the best features was difficult work that involved a lot of human labor and insight. In the DeepMind case, an example feature might be "is any moving object on a course that will collide with my character in the next 2 seconds?" You can train an Atari playing system by defining and manually coding up hundreds or thousands of such features, hoping that the combination is enough that your model can learn how to play the game well.

How DeepMind's Atari system actually works is that the only inputs to its learning algorithm are the pixel values on the screen. It is trivial to write the code to give the learning system the pixel values. The input "features" are identical for every Atari game. So none of the intelligence about how to play the game is hand coded. (I think the only other hand coded part is some function that extracts the score from the screen). The amount of work replaced by not having to manually define features is huge.

This is a continuation of a shift in how AI systems are built. Before machine learning, humans would specify both the "features", and also how the features should interact to produce intelligence. With traditional ML, you let the system learn the interactions and only hand-code the features. Now, we can let the system learn both (instead of defining features, you let the system 'perceive' raw input). This is the distinction that I see you not acknowledging when you talk about non-em AI involving "hand coding" intelligence.

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Lord's avatar

The future can be a lot different than we can know. For example, our quasi intelligent agents will probably remove any need for ems, though I think there would still be great incentive for the challenge of immortality that would outweigh it being non economic. And knowing enough to do it may still leave a biological solution preferred.

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