Gary Marcus: belief

Transcript context

…Ah, Okay. You're saying it'd be orders of magnitude more data efficient, but still only about as data efficient as humans? Or Possible you could find better. I mean, humans are pretty good data efficiency wise, but I doubt that they're at the theoretical limits. There are some things in psychometrics where people really are at the theoretical limits. So like we can notice the presence or absence I think of a photon. Like you can't do better than that. So, there are things where we're at the theoretical limits. There are things where we're not. Like we are constrained very much, I argued in my book Cluj, by a lack of location addressable memory. And so like, you know, my daughter just memorized a 105 digits of pi, which I could never do. But it's still nothing compared to what a computer can do, memorize billions of digits of pi. And so, you know, there are some advantages to machines in places where they should really be doing better than people if we had the right way of writing the software. So at least we should be able to get to human levels like humans are in existence proof of data efficiency. And humans are fabulously data efficient on many problems, not all. And then we have problems like we have cognitive impairments such that we have confirmation bias and motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning is like, I want this argument to be true and so I kind of play little games. And we all do this. I mean scientists are better because we recognize the behavior in ourselves and try to self correct, but scientists do it too. Machines shouldn't need that. Like some of our things are, to use Freudian technology, the terminology even though I'm not a Freudian, we have ego protective ways of reasoning. Machines should not need that. Right? Like I believe in my political party and so when my political party does dumb thing then I go and try to, you know, come up with a rationale for it. Machines shouldn't need to do that kind of stuff. And so in that way, you know, certainly the upper bound is gonna be way beyond who we are. I I did a panel once with Daniel Kahneman and he's he well, he's not with us anymore. He was very fond of these studies that showed that in certain domains machines were already better than people. And these are problems basically of multiple regression weighing multiple factors. And he was right. And I think I came back with some, you know, where the machines were not very good and people were better. And in the end, he said something like, you know, humans are a really low bar. And, you know, his whole research well, not his whole he had many research. But 1 of his whole research lines was showing that humans, in fact, were pretty bad at all kinds of reasoning. So he says humans are a low bar. We're doing this panel. I said, yeah. And machines still haven't met them. They will someday. They will exceed them. There's no question about that in my mind. It's a question of when and how and and so forth. But we really are a low bar because of the all of the kind of cognitive biases and illusions, the problems with memory. uestion about that in my mind. It's a question of when and how and and so forth. But we really are a low bar because of the all of the kind of cognitive biases and illusions, the problems with memory. My book Cluj was all about this kind of stuff. There's absolutely room to do better. And yes, it could happen in 10 years. I don't you know, probably it will happen on some of those dimensions and not others. It already did on like math, you know, 60 years ago or 80 years ago. It will happen, you know, dimension by dimension, maybe several all at once when there's a breakthrough or something like that. But it will happen and it could happen in 10 years. Again, I don't think it can happen in 2. I think we're missing some ideas right now. We're missing some critical ideas. But when we get those critical ideas, they could go fast just like molecular biology. Once Watson and Crick figured out, you know, DNA, things move pretty fast. In 40 years, you know, now we can do CRISPR and stuff like that. Like or not 40 years, but 70 years, you know, in remarkable progress. There will be, I think, periods of AI progress that exceed the last few years. I know that the last few years feel like a lot to a lot of people. But I think in hindsight, 30 years from now, AI will be enormously ahead of where we are now. I mean, almost on any of these kinds of projections. Right? And we will be like, yeah, a bunch of stuff happened, they were really proud of themselves. But, you know, the way that we look back at, like, flip phones, they're like, yeah, those were kind of cool, but they didn't know about smartphones.…

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