At least seven patients in Beijing who doctors said had “no hope” of regaining consciousness were re-evaluated by an artificial intelligence system that predicted they would awaken within a year. They did.

submitted by magnora7 from scmp.com

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[–]magnora7[S] 3 insightful - 1 fun3 insightful - 0 fun4 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

That's a very interesting take. I have been recently saying something related about the direction that the AI field is going to take. Right now one of the biggest problems keeping it from having human-level intelligence is the lack of compartmentalization. It's always trying to solve everything simultaneously. Neural nets simply lack the behavior to focus on perfecting one specific sub-task, like how you might master throwing a ball before attempting to play baseball. The computer just tries to learn baseball, and walking, and throwing, all at once, as if it's one big problem.

Any smart human would see "I do not understand how this works, so let's break the task in to smaller pieces and work on those skills individually then come back to the full task". Neural networks cannot do this, and I think it's the key thing holding AI back right now.

So my proposed solution to this, is to work on developing compartmentalized tasks. If you can solve the "throw a ball" algorithm, then you can lock that in place and then access that locked-in neural net when you play baseball, when you need to throw a ball. So the computer must develop 3 skills:

  1. Recognizing when it doesn't know something

  2. Breaking that task in to smaller sub-tasks

  3. Practicing each sub-task until it can assemble them together to complete the larger task

If neural nets could learn to do these 3 things, I think AI tech would move forward 20 years. This is very similar to what you're saying, in a way. By breaking each task in to a compartmentalized separate neural net, then having a meta-neural net that controls how those smaller ones all connect to each other, not only would the intelligence perform better, but like you said it would be possible to "query" parts of the intelligence. And say "Why did you do this" and be able to actually investigate that question because of the ability to answer sub-questions about choices made. Instead of the whole thing being essentially one giant thousand-part equation that we cannot really predict or understand.

The tough question is how exactly to do this... I think you could do 1 and 2 by hand at the start. Skill 3 is where the next advancement should be. Making a neural net of neural nets, perhaps...

[–]Mnemonic 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

The tough question is how exactly to do this... I think you could do 1 and 2 by hand at the start. Skill 3 is where the next advancement should be. Making a neural net of neural nets, perhaps...

There you might (in step 3) run into real complex problems. Throwing while running might to too different to assemble from throwing and running that you would get absurd behavior like running, dropping like a brick, stand up and throw a perfect ball (kinda like children do).

Some interaction within the learning process by humans might not only speed things up but also prevent some comically disastrous solutions. But this won't be cheap and there is the "out of the box" solutions the system may come up with that are never reached because the humans interrupt it when it wants do to a flip {still the baseball example}.

Learning amongst humans isn't that well understood so hopefully these two problems wholesomely help to solve eachother.

And if it all works like we want it to, in a time far far away, some ***bag would go "Can we MKUltra this system?".