Friday, February 21, 2020

Innate concepts

As a result of millions of years of evolutionary history the newborn human brain appears to have innate, genetically hardwired concepts of objects, numbers, probabilities, faces, language, etc.* These are a result of adaption to the specific environments that we and our animal ancestors encountered. They may not be ideal for environments we will face in the future. They may not tell us much about Kant's "thing in itself." I can give A.s.a. H. these same concepts, but should I?** I don't want my AI to BE human. The boundaries of human intelligence are partly an accident of evolutionary history. With A.s.a. I want to expand those boundaries not retain them.

* See, for example, Stanislas Dahaene, How We Learn, Viking, 2020.
** For example, number neurons that activate when they see 1 thing, or 2 things, or 3 things...

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