To expand, I actually think it applies much more to AI than to animals. Part of the advantage of being an animal is our interface to the rest of the world is extremely flexible regarding the kinds of inputs it can accept and outputs it can produce. Software systems often crash because xml doesn’t specify whether you can include whitespace in a message or not. Part of why AlphaGo isn’t really “intelligent” isn’t anything about the intrinsic limitations of what types of functions its network architecture can potentially learn and represent. It isn’t intelligent because it can’t even accept an input that isn’t a very specific encoding of a Go board and can’t produce any outputs except moves in a game of Go.
It’s isn’t like a dog and more like a dog that can only eat one specific flavor of one specific brand of dog food. Much of the practical difficulty in creating general purpose software systems is just that there is no general purpose communication protocol. It’s why we have succeeded so far in producing things that can accept and produces images and text, because they analogize well to how animals communicate with the rest of the world, so we understand them and can create digital encodings of them. But even those still rely upon character set encodings, pixel metadata specifications, and video codecs that themselves have no ability to learn or adapt.
To expand, I actually think it applies much more to AI than to animals. Part of the advantage of being an animal is our interface to the rest of the world is extremely flexible regarding the kinds of inputs it can accept and outputs it can produce. Software systems often crash because xml doesn’t specify whether you can include whitespace in a message or not. Part of why AlphaGo isn’t really “intelligent” isn’t anything about the intrinsic limitations of what types of functions its network architecture can potentially learn and represent. It isn’t intelligent because it can’t even accept an input that isn’t a very specific encoding of a Go board and can’t produce any outputs except moves in a game of Go.
It’s isn’t like a dog and more like a dog that can only eat one specific flavor of one specific brand of dog food. Much of the practical difficulty in creating general purpose software systems is just that there is no general purpose communication protocol. It’s why we have succeeded so far in producing things that can accept and produces images and text, because they analogize well to how animals communicate with the rest of the world, so we understand them and can create digital encodings of them. But even those still rely upon character set encodings, pixel metadata specifications, and video codecs that themselves have no ability to learn or adapt.