Neurosymbolics et al

 

Three ideas, drawn from the cognitive sciences, by Gary Marcus. at The New York Times.

Link to Article

My comment:

“Scaling hasn’t gotten us to AGI, or ‘superintelligence”, let alone AI we could trust. The field is overdue for a rethink”

Scaling introduced new meanings for words (“set” has 60, “run” has 80) so of course LLMs made more mistakes. AI doesn’t need a rethink, it needs a think. First rule – don’t call something what it is not – “an artificial neural network” is a directed resistor network, with none of the properties of a real neural network – bathed in free resources, self-modification. It is as though AI folk had never heard of feedback, feed forward, thermal runaway (brake fade?). Don’t assume everything is static, or that logic can be distanced from what it controls (Symbolic Logic is a pig to use and not accurate – does it easily handle existential logic, temporal logic, locational logic (can’t be in two places at once)? Does it handle the “balance of probabilities” of Civil Law? What to do when logic doesn’t apply – a person is enraged, or quantum entanglement. What to do when someone is lying through their teeth (what not to do is translate the problem into some mishmash language which has stripped off all the things that are hard to describe.

There is an alternative to all this junk – English (or whatever natural language you are familiar with). We don’t need an expert in cognitive science – all humans have a severe limit on the input to their Conscious Mind – the Four Pieces Limit – everything more than that is treated as a constant so they can’t think about complex things. English has been adapted to our cognitive abilities over centuries, yet is instantly up to date on new technology, and it takes us a long time to learn – say 20 years. We use it to communicate with other humans, so it is no leap to assume we should use it to communicate with a machine which doesn’t have our limits (it was the dream in the 1950s, it has been possible since the 1990s, it takes a long time to do, with all its figurative language – we have been kicking the can down the road ever since). Enough with dead ends!