Kenneth Stanley: belief

Transcript context

…1 thing that is lingering in my mind a little bit, and we talk about this a lot in in many different ways on MLST, is in in the real physical world, we we seem to have this emergent phenomenon of intelligence and even evolution actually. I mean, you know, like, we could all agree as materialists that you have these physical rules and you have these particle interactions and you have these dynamics that emerge and and that's evolution. And it's beyond our our cognitive horizon. We simply can't conceive of it. So what we do is we create these abstractions and we think about it with algorithms and and these are idealizations or abstractions. And it's just it's too it's unimaginably complicated. But there's always this question of does does it even make sense to think that we could, a disconnected electronic way, recreate something which had many of the properties of the thing in the real world? Even with pig breeder, for example, I think we've been couching it as an algorithm. But actually, it is also a constraint. The magic comes from humans, and humans are still embedded in the physical world to a high enough fidelity that, you know, we we we see we see the phenomena that we're interested in. But even with pick breeder, does it really have the evolvability that you're talking about? Like, if humans stopped using it, wouldn't wouldn't it just mode collapse? So there's there's always this question of don't we just need the world, right, to actually give us the type of intelligence that we want? I mean, think that Yeah. It could be that, like, a process that yields representations as good as presumably what humans have at their best would require some interaction with the the real world. But I don't know I don't know if that's really, like, that prohibitive. Like, I mean, that we are getting to the point where effectively computers are directly interacting with the world. Like like, I think, you know, it's interesting, like, in the field of AI that if you go back 10 years or so, like, most of the interactions of AIs with dynamic training environments would be in simulations. Like, it's not the real world directly. The the the environment is an abstraction of the real world too. But we're now, like, getting to a point where these models are actually directly interacting with real world data. And so I think it's it's conceivable that they, like PickBreeder users, could simply explore the world itself. I mean, of course, they're not I mean, unless they're robots, they're not literally out there exploring. But the Internet is a proxy for the world. And so they could explore the Internet. They could they could gain knowledge in some more natural way, which is more like a PickBrider user. And, you know, the important part of it is that allows them to discover an order or a chronology on their own, the way we do to a large extent. Know what mean? We develop curricula for students. Obviously, that's what school is. But it doesn't account for the first 3 or 4 years of life, I mean, which are obviously very formatively important. And then there's lots of life outside school too. You know, and so, like, if you take a person who, like, invented mathematics independently of going to school, presumably that person is gonna be a better mathematician than somebody who just read the textbooks and memorized it and gets the same exact score on the test. So it's like, what led you to knowing this is gonna affect what you're gonna do in the future? These are things that involve real world interaction. And so I think it's it's conceivable that now with Internet access, you can imagine a world where where there's more control on the model side in terms of how it goes off and experiences the world. It's not it's not easy. It's not like it's not as easy as, oh, well, we'll just dump in all the world's data, like, and just, like, train. Like, obviously, that's that's what we do, and it's because it's it's easier to think of. It's harder to conceive of what I'm saying, but I don't see it as impossible, and it could end up a lot cheaper. You know? Because, like, I mean, 1 of the 1 of the offshoots of that could be that it's multiple orders of magnitude more efficient to to happen in a natural way. And so it while we might think it sounds like a tough haul, it might actually be easier in some sense because it is so much more efficient. To to that point then, do you think that the the structure of organization of the Internet or even language is a great example? It's incredibly diverse and different cultures have different words for different concepts and so on. You know, we spoke about this before, Kenneth, but 1 school of thought is that there are kind of natural categories. And give it, you know, if you if you could press play on evolution thousands of times over that you would see this just as we have morphological convergence in evolution, there would be a kind of informational convergence. Do you do you subscribe to that?…

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