Adam Marblestone: belief

Transcript context

…So, evolution: model-free. Basal ganglia: model-free. Cortex: model-based. Culture: model-free potentially. I mean you pay attention to your elders or whatever. Maybe there’s like group selection or whatever of these things is like more model-free. But now I think culture, well, it stores some of the model. Stepping back, is it a disadvantage or an advantage for humans that we get to use biological hardware, in comparison to computers as they exist now? What I mean by this question is, if there’s “the algorithm”, would the algorithm just qualitatively perform much worse or much better if inscribed in the hardware of today? The reason to think it might…. Here’s what I mean. Obviously the brain has had to make a bunch of tradeoffs which are not relevant to computing hardware. It has to be much more energetically efficient. Maybe as a result it has to run on slower speeds so that there can be a smaller voltage gap. So the brain runs at 200 hertz, it has to run on 20 watts. On the other hand, with robotics we’ve clearly experienced that fingers are way more nimble than we can make motors so far. So maybe there’s something in the brain that is the equivalent of cognitive dexterity, which is maybe due to the fact that we can do unstructured sparsity. We can co-locate the memory and the compute.…

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