Adam Marblestone: preference

Transcript context

…The French AI researchers are coming for you, Adam. So it’s important that I have that instinctual response. But of course, evolution has never seen Yann LeCun or known about energy-based models or known what an important scientist or a podcast is. Somehow the brain has to encode this desire to not piss off really important people in the tribe or something like this in a very robust way, without knowing in advance all the things that the Learning Subsystem of the brain, the part that is learning cortex and other parts… The cortex is going to learn this world model. It’s going to include things like Yann LeCun and podcasts. And evolution has to make sure that those neurons, whatever the Yann-LeCun-being-upset-with-me neurons, get properly wired up to the shame response or this part of the reward function. And this is important, right? Because if we’re going to be able to seek status in the tribe or learn from knowledgeable people, as you said, or things like that, exchange knowledge and skills with friends but not with enemies… We have to learn all this stuff. It has to be able to robustly wire these learned features of the world, learned parts of the world model, up to these innate reward functions, and then actually use that to then learn more. Because next time I’m not going to try to piss off Yann LeCun if he emails me that I got this wrong. We’re going to do further learning based on that. In constructing the reward function, it has to use learned information. But how can evolution, which didn’t know about Yann LeCun, do that? The basic idea that Steve Byrnes is proposing is that part of the cortex, or other areas like the amygdala that learn, what they’re doing is they’re modeling the Steering Subsystem. The Steering Subsystem is the part with these more innately programmed responses and the innate programming of these series of reward functions, cost functions, bootstrapping functions that exist. There are parts of the amygdala, for example, that are able to monitor what those parts do and predict what those parts do. How do you find the neurons that are important for social status? Well, you have some innate heuristics of social status, for example, or you have some innate heuristics of friendliness that the Steering Subsystem can use. And the Steering Subsystem actually has its own sensory system, which is crazy. We think of vision as being something that the cortex does. But there’s also a Steering Subsystem, subcortical visual system called the superior colliculus with innate ability to detect faces, for example, or threats. So there’s a visual system that has innate heuristics and the Steering Subsystem has its own responses. There’ll be part of the amygdala or part of the cortex that is learning to predict those responses. What are the neurons that matter in the cortex for social status or for friendship? They’re the ones that predict those innate heuristics for friendship. x that is learning to predict those responses. What are the neurons that matter in the cortex for social status or for friendship? They’re the ones that predict those innate heuristics for friendship. You train a predictor in the cortex and you say, “Which neurons are part of the predictor?” Those are the ones that, now you’ve actually managed to wire it up.…

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