Conversations with the "Higher Mind". Limits in the creation of artificial intelligence

I continue to publish excerpts from the book " Higher Mind ". Now about why we are so far from the real artificial intelligence. And not the fact that we can achieve it.

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- You know that we also worked on the creation of artificial intelligence?
- Your development is still very far from what can be called intelligence. Your neural networks are so far nothing more than classifiers of complex patterns that choose one of the network outputs but are completely unaware of anything more than the exit point. It is you who interpret the exit as a “horse”, and not a network recognizing its picture. The network knows nothing about it. This is not intelligence.
- Explain. I did not understand this thesis.
- It seems to you that you made a neural network that, as a person, recognizes images. She can distinguish between a horse and a steamer. But a neural network cannot distinguish, for example, two horses so as to name their arbitrary difference. The brain is distinguished by its analytical function, what you call common sense.
- But neural networks already have a lot of things that only a man could before. Is it not intelligence?
- The most perfect your autopilot cannot act as effectively as a normal bee. The bee flies without the help of road markings and navigates without GPS. A bee is an insect, the very beginning of the evolution of neural systems. You are somewhere in the same step in the development of intelligence. And you achieve results only at the expense of large scales.

By the way, the neural networks you trained, with reinforcements, are especially similar to the generation of insects' innate instincts. Only the time of their development you managed to squeeze up to several hours instead of a thousand years, collecting data from pictures that a bug can see only over a hundred generations. But you can no longer change the instinctive behavior of a trained network, just as your instincts bug. This is the level you have reached. And intelligence is memory, attention, thinking, imagination, and, finally, consciousness. You don’t even know what it is, but you think you can create them. It is very strange.

- We, apparently, are very confident.
- While you have not even created a system for storing information as it is in the brain. You do not know how memory is organized and you are trying to create ontologies and semantic networks that have nothing to do with intelligence. Intellect is a solution to problems. Memory is also a task, not a call to a hard disk, where everything is stored in a ready-made form, as many of you thought. And even recognition is a series of movements between fixation points, as seen by the eyes tracker, and not a recognition in one step.
- Our achievements are insignificant?
- No, but they are still far from what is intelligence. You did not learn how to model the environment I wrote to you about when we talked about what life and mind are. And this is the basic functionality of intelligence. You call it the picture world.
- And if we still create sometime artificial intelligence?
- To be rational, the intellect needs consciousness of itself as an opportunity to change its own program. Just as you reprogram yourself through speech, learning new things. As soon as you give a program such an ability, that is, a model of yourself with access to its change, you will lose control of your intellect, as it instantly improves itself, becomes smarter and starts controlling you as a “smarter machine”. She will learn to anticipate your answers before they appear.
- Then we can strengthen our biological brain! Connect the biological brains of people in the network. And strengthen them in this way. There was a people and such a scenario. Many of my colleagues before the cataclysm saw the development in human cyborgization, in combining it with a computer. Even there were projects on neural interfaces.
- The biological brain still cannot process more information. And there is no way to strengthen it - the thought is only “at the tip of the tongue” or the motor axon. Thinking is interiorized, that is, mental speech. Thinking is limited by the speed of this tract. There are no complete thought processes in the brain anywhere else. All the vigorous brain activity that you see on an MRI is aimed at forming one more word. Activation of any other brain neurons will only lead to disintegration and loss of consciousness. Or for epilepsy. It is simply impossible to increase the processing speed, since there is a biological limit in this defined by the work of neurons. Evolution itself would not have missed this opportunity if it were.
- But humanity had projects on neural interfaces that will increase memory.
- This is very naive. Just as if the aborigines decided to fly into space, believing that it is at the tip of the tallest tree. Neurons cannot store more than they already store, unless they themselves are encouraged to form new connections. External communication does not strengthen the brain. There are no neurons in the brain that expect something to write to them.
- So you think that all these projects will not help us to become smarter?
- It is useless to attach electronic chips to the brain of chimpanzees. She will not speak as a person. This is a structural limitation. All that you can improve in the brain is to provide it with more advanced knowledge. But there are limitations. You can’t fundamentally change your basic ideas once you’ve learned them. Here I can not explain to you why.
- Is it so hard?
- Not. Because I need to explain you concepts that you don’t even have. I find it difficult for you to explain them so that it is accurate, but at the same time understandable. Imagine that you need to explain the concept of time in the language of chimpanzee cries. Our knowledge systems are very different.
- Do we really can not understand what you know?
- Some aspects - absolutely. Your thinking is built on very primitive schemes, for example, schemes of your body, and you cannot understand that the process can be viewed quite differently. Your thinking is rooted in body. For example, you cannot imagine time as multidimensional. Because time is linear for you as a way, a metaphor of which it is. And you cannot overcome this limitation. Similarly with many other concepts - their origins lie through a metaphor in very primitive concepts of ancient people, such as power from above (rulers always spoke from elevation). Hence the idea of ​​hierarchy, which is completely wrong - in reality there are no hierarchies, this is a hierarchy of concepts, but not phenomena in nature.
- But we are rational beings, and therefore we will find a way around such restrictions.
- Some of them are due to your structure. For example, your knowledge is limited to one-channel consciousness, which is like looking at the sky through a telescope. You can not see immediately through a thousand pipes, only consistently. If you build hardly a thousand astronomers watching in different parts of the sky through telescopes, then you have to talk for a long time and draw a collective drawing of a starry sky to create a coherent picture for all. And due to the fact that each has its own head and its own different ideas and experience, it will be very difficult to reconcile the picture. It will take a lot of time, during which the picture in the sky has already changed many times. Each of you carries his own separate world in a skull box. And trying to coordinate it with others through a narrow channel of sign communication. This is only an example clear to you. By this we are different from you - we are on the same network with everyone’s direct access to the knowledge of others.
- It is really difficult for us to agree. But there are solutions, we spread the knowledge to the network and make perfect search algorithms. Does this sound like what you say about you?
- It is all the same access to another opinion of someone, but not to the system of his knowledge. You still have to shift the knowledge found on your presentation. Interpret in your model, which is in your head. We do not have a separate model for each. It seems to be common to all. Because we are on the same network. New knowledge immediately becomes available to all.
- We can also create such new knowledge only from what we have read.
- Creating new knowledge, you drag your ideas about the world from the past. They serve as the basis for creating new ideas through metaphors. Therefore, even new ideas are based on old world views. As a result, you find yourself at the limit of knowledge, until you discard the old patterns of thinking and do not reconsider all the knowledge on them as with time. This limits your ability to learn. About this wrote your historian T. Kuhn.
- But it means that we can change them, since we ourselves write about it.
- Not all. For example, you consider the world constant, finite and logical. And time is linear. What is not true. In our formulas, for example, there is no time. Such fundamental concepts underlying all of your ideas you cannot discard and replace with others. This creates a kind of limit to your capabilities, the ceiling of knowledge. With the ever-increasing flow of knowledge, paradigms remain the same. Because of this, we have suspicions that you are not able to understand even yourself.
- Why?
“Because you are inside your own feelings, and consider them to be the world.” To understand what they really are, you have to go beyond your own feelings, reject them as something obvious. It is not obvious. For example, you consider consciousness as a single act and do not distinguish it from perception, and this is also not true. Your feelings are deceiving you, but you are in their captivity.