Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!msellers From: msellers@mentorg.com (Mike Sellers) Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy Subject: Evolutionary and developmental views of intelligence Summary: Does ontogeny recapitulate phylogeny? :-) Message-ID: <1991Feb13.071834.22703@mentorg.com> Date: 13 Feb 91 07:18:34 GMT References: <22951@well.sf.ca.us> Distribution: comp Organization: engr Lines: 67 In article mikeb@wdl31.wdl.loral.com (Michael H Bender) writes: >John Nagle writes: > > .... There is a bit of hubris in trying to address human-level intelligence > from our present level of ignorance .... > We will not achieve lizard-level competence until we have ant-level > competence well in hand. We will not achieve rodent-level competence > until we have lizard-level competence. And we will not achieve primate- > level > competence until we can build rodent-level brains. And until we have > achieved primate-level competence, we will not successfully build a > general-purpose human-level AI. > >[...] >Clearly, AI will be more successful when it marries the cognitive approach, >which has been so popular of late, and the "developmental" approach >which John recommends. But that does not mean we should go to the other >extreme and ignore the "higher-level" aspects of human intelligence. > >Mike Bender Your comment spurred something in me that I've thought about from time to time, and that may be implicit in Nagle's statement: What he is referring to is the necessity of 'scaling up' artificial intelligence in a phylogenetic or evolutionary fashion, not a developmental one. However, the developmental view of intelligence will doubtless be invaluable too. Consider that no one is born intelligent/conscious, and yet at least most of us become conscious somewhere along the way (thus we have an existance proof that it is possible to do!). Very little attention has been paid to the phylogenetic-based changes in intelligence that can be observed and inferred, and even less to such developmental aspects in humans (strange as that sounds). Artificial intelligence practitioners tend to focus almost exclusively on the adult organism when they refer to biological systems at all, and rarely take into account the continuing developmental aspects of an intelligent/cognitive agent. The study of the emergence of consciousness is still so slippery as to be taboo in most academic circles (on the other hand I've written a paper about this subject and wouldn't mind seeing some discussion of the subject here). While we should not ignore the higher-order aspects of human cognition, I do not think we will be able to do more than model these in a prescriptive fashion (e.g. KBS) until we can support the emergence of the desired properties from an evolutionary and developmentally viable functional architecture. Modelling the higher-order aspects can be very useful in an applied sense, but I do not believe it will move us any closer to the transmutation of artifice into general-purpose human-level AI. P.S. It might be worth noting that I chose the word "transmutation" above carefully. I do not believe we will be able to say that we can 'create' or 'assemble' or 'formulate' an intelligence like something in physics or mechanics or chemistry. Rather I think those people who are in on the emergence of the first true AI will be much more easily likened to alchemists: They will be practitioners of a high and somewhat mystical art who are searching for the correct combination of artifact and environment that will enable a previously mundane collection of things and circumstances to emerge as an entirely new and coherent whole, much like the ancient alchemist's goal of finding the correct combination of ingredients and components for turning lead into gold. -- Mike Sellers msellers@mentor.com Mentor Graphics Corp. "I used to think that the brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this." -- Emo Phillips