Cristopher Moore: evaluation

Transcript context

…I know whether you would mean, you're the perfect person to ask about this out of all the people we've interviewed. And, you know, do you think he's right to think about like, you know, Turing completeness as as being a way to demarcate different forms of of intelligence? And do you agree with his theory that if it were possible for us to train a Turing machine, rather than a finite state automata, so imagine we could empirically train it. Would would that lead to amazing things? Well, yeah. I mean, of course, Turing, in his 1951 paper, is this classic paper where he says that, artificial intelligences, although I don't remember him. He's I'm not even sure if he used that phrase, artificial minds or something, would be trained or almost raised like children are rather than programmed. Turing machines as an architecture, I think, are rather brittle. And, I mean, I think that the partly analog nature of neural networks and, and LLMs, this ability to, I mean, I know that they can be made discrete and so on, but somehow their ability to work in a continuous way with high dimensional vector spaces and embeddings, I I think that that is important to their trainability, even if it's not ultimately important to their cognitive abilities. I mean, I guess an easy repost to your question is that I am also a finite state machine. I mean, I have a very large number of states. I will I will not have within my lifetime the ability to explore more than a few of them. But I'm composed of a finite number of neurons, a finite number of elementary particles, so I have a very large but finite number of states. Now, I think the difference is that because I am also a tool using and tool making entity, if I realize that there's a problem which is difficult for me to do in my head, which is most problems of any size at all, I can then build things whether that's a a tablet or an abacus or a computer that extends my workspace, extends, if you will, the tape of my Turing machine. And Yeah. And that gives me, in principle, recursion. I mean, then we can get into, oh, well, is the universe actually finite? Blah blah blah. That that's not very interesting to me because we can reach fairly far into the kind of asymptopia of recursion. Famously, humans, people joke about German speakers having a a stack depth of 3 or 4 and English speakers having a stack depth of 1 or 2. I I'm not sure that I contain a stack, unlike what Noam Chomsky supposedly said. I mean, if I had a stack in me, then it would be a lot easier for me to repeat a string of words backwards. Yes.…

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