Richard Sutton: preference

Transcript context

…We’re trying to replicate intelligence. If you want to understand what it is that enables humans to go to the moon or to build semiconductors, I think the thing we want to understand is what makes that happen. No animal can go to the moon or make semiconductors. We want to understand what makes humans special. I like the way you consider that obvious, because I consider the opposite obvious. We have to understand how we are animals. If we understood a squirrel, I think we’d be almost all the way there to understanding human intelligence. The language part is just a small veneer on the surface. This is great. We’re finding out the very different ways that we’re thinking. We’re not arguing. We’re trying to share our different ways of thinking with each other. I think argument is useful. I do want to complete this thought. Joseph Henrich has this interesting theory about a lot of the skills that humans have had to master in order to be successful. We’re not talking about the last thousand years or the last 10,000 years, but hundreds of thousands of years. The world is really complicated. It’s not possible to reason through how to, let’s say, hunt a seal if you’re living in the Arctic. There’s this many, many-step, long process of how to make the bait and how to find the seal, and then how to process the food in a way that makes sure you won’t get poisoned. It’s not possible to reason through all of that. Over time, there’s this larger process of whatever analogy you want to use—maybe RL, something else—where culture as a whole has figured out how to find and kill and eat seals. In his view, what is happening when this knowledge is transmitted through generations, is that you have to imitate your elders in order to learn that skill. You can’t think your way through how to hunt and kill and process a seal. You have to watch other people, maybe make tweaks and adjustments, and that’s how knowledge accumulates. The initial step of the cultural gain has to be imitation. But maybe you think about it a different way?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.