Perhaps idiosyncratic to some is my focus in the previous post on the theoretical background to machine learning that derives predominantly from algorithmic information theory and, in particular, Solomonoff’s theory of induction. I do note that there are other theories that can be brought to bear, including Vapnik’s Structural Risk Minimization and Valiant’s PAC-learning theory. Moreover, perceptrons and vector quantization methods and so forth derive from completely separate principals that can then be cast into more fundamental problems in informational geometry and physics.
Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is then perhaps the hard problem on the horizon that I disclaim as having had significant progress in the past twenty years of so. That is not to say that I am not an enthusiastic student of the topic and field, just that I don’t see risk levels from intelligent AIs rising to what we should consider a real threat. This topic of how to grade threats deserves deeper treatment, of course, and is at the heart of everything from so-called “nanny state” interventions in food and product safety to how to construct policy around global warming. Luckily–and unlike both those topics–killer AIs don’t threaten us at all quite yet.
But what about simply characterizing what AGIs might look like and how we can even tell when they arise? Mildly interesting is Simon Legg and Joel Veness’ idea of an Artificial Intelligence Quotient or AIQ that they expand on in An Approximation of the Universal Intelligence Measure. This measure is derived from, voilà, exactly the kind of algorithmic information theory (AIT) and compression arguments that I lead with in the slide deck. Is this the only theory around for AGI? Pretty much, but different perspectives tend to lead to slightly different focuses. For instance, there is little need to discuss AIT when dealing with Deep Learning Neural Networks. We just instead discuss statistical regularization and bottlenecking, which can be thought of as proxies for model compression.
So how can intelligent machines be characterized by something like AIQ? Well, the conclusion won’t be surprising. Intelligent machines are those machines that function well in terms of achieving goals over a highly varied collection of environments. This allows for tractable mathematical treatments insofar as the complexity of the landscapes can be characterized, but doesn’t really give us a good handle on what the particular machines might look like. They can still be neural networks or support vector machines, or maybe even something simpler, and through some selection and optimization process have the best performance over a complex topology of reward-driven goal states.
So still no reason to panic, but some interesting ideas that shed greater light on the still mysterious idea of intelligence and the human condition.
Edit pass!