Reddit reviews On Intelligence: How a New Understanding of the Brain Will Lead to the Creation of Truly Intelligent Machines

You might be interested in a book called On Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. He describes something similar to your simulations idea, but he calls it a predictive hierarchical memory system (or something like that). It is a fascinating idea, actually, and makes a lot of sense.

I too suspect that speech is a central unifying aspect to what we call consciousness. A lot of AI guys seem to agree. There is a theory by Noam Chomsky (I think), called Universal Grammar. As I recall, he suspects that may be key to modern intelligence, and he suspects the genetic mutation for it happened about 70,000 years ago, which gave us the ability to communicate, and allowed Homo Sapiens to successfully move out of Africa. I've also read that mutation 70k years ago referred to as the cognitive revolution. But it seems everyone agrees that's when the move out of Africa began, and communication started; it's not just a Chomsky thing.

Your brain uses memory as a way to anticipate the effort required in these situations. There is a book called On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins that discusses this. You've opened thousands of doors, lifted thousands of objects. Your brain remembers how it felt to engage in that activity. So when you approach a door, your brain sees what type of door it is and anticipates how much effort will be required to open it. Sometimes your brain gets it wrong.

edit: a word

I really enjoyed On Intelligence:
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1288992873&sr=8-1

On intelligence by Jeff Hawkins is an amazing book an artificial intelligence. Hawkins' company has an open source project called [NuPIC] (http://numenta.org/) that would be a good place to get some hands on experience. It is Python based, and has a somewhat steep learning curve, so it might serve better as a beacon that you can work towards, rather than an actual project as of right now.

"and what exactly does 'learning' mean?"

I stopped there.
Read a book.

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252350466&sr=8-1

Most of my stuff is going to focus around consciousness and AI.

BOOKS

Ray Kurzweil - How to Create a Mind - Ray gives an intro to neuroscience and suggests ways we might build intelligent machines. This is a fun and easy book to read.

Ray Kurzweil - TRANSCEND - Ray and Dr. Terry Grossman tell you how to live long enough to live forever. This is a very inspirational book.

*I'd skip Kurzweil's older books. The newer ones largely cover the stuff in the older ones anyhow.

Jeff Hawkins - On Intelligence - Engineer and Neuroscientist, Jeff Hawkins, presents a comprehensive theory of intelligence in the neocortex. He goes on to explain how we can build intelligent machines and how they might change the world. He takes a more grounded, but equally interesting, approach to AI than Kurzweil.

Stanislas Dehaene - Consciousness and the Brain - Someone just recommended this book to me so I have not had a chance to read the whole thing. It explains new methods researchers are using to understand what consciousness is.

ONLINE ARTICLES

George Dvorsky - Animal Uplift - We can do more than improve our own minds and create intelligent machines. We can improve the minds of animals! But should we?

David Shultz - Least Conscious Unit - A short story that explores several philosophical ideas about consciousness. The ending may make you question what is real.

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Consciousness - The most well known philosophical ideas about consciousness.

VIDEOS

Socrates - Singularity Weblog - This guy interviews the people who are making the technology of tomorrow, today. He's interviewed the CEO of D-Wave, Ray Kurzweil, Michio Kaku, and tons of less well known but equally interesting people.

David Chalmers - Simulation and the Singularity at The Singularity Summit 2009 - Respected Philosopher, David Chalmers, talks about different approaches to AI and a little about what might be on the other side of the singularity.

Ben Goertzel - Singularity or Bust - Mathematician and computer Scientist, Ben Goertzel, goes to China to create Artificial General Intelligence funded by the Chinese Government. Unfortunately they cut the program.



PROGRAMMING

Daniel Shiffman - The Nature of Code - After reading How to Create a Mind you will probably want to get started with a neural network (or Hidden Markov model) of your own. This is your hello world. If you get past this and the math is too hard use this

Encog - A neural network API written in your favorite language

OpenCV - Face and object recognition made easy(ish).

Someone's been reading Hawkins

If you like the video, you'll love the book!

"processing power as human brains" is more difficult to quantify than one would think. The human brain is not some massively parallel simulator. The way the brain structures data, generates models, and the prediction/response loop require not simply raw processing power, but a different architecture.

Read Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence

I found this book incredibly enjoyable, and it provides a very different perspective:

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1291376673&sr=8-1

I'm an engineer, and did my Masters in voice compression. But I read Jeff Hawkin's On Intelligence a while back, and it was quite eye-opening (and a good read) about how the neo-cortex works and what its role is. I look at everything mind-related through this lens now.

My suggestion is to opensource it under the GPL. That would mean people can use your GPL code in commercial enterprises, but they can't resell it as commercial software without paying for a license.

By opensourcing it, people can verify your claims and help you improve the software. You don't have to worry about languishing as an unknown, or taking venture capital and perhaps ultimately losing control of your invention in a sale or IPO. Scientists can use it to help advance knowledge, without paying the large license fees that a commercial owner might charge. People will find all sorts of uses for it that you never imagined. Some of them will pay you substantial money to let them turn it into specialized commercial products, others will pay you large consulting fees to help them apply the GPL version to their own problems.

You could also write a book on how it all works, how you figured it out, the history of your company, etc. If you're not a writer you could team up with one. Kurzweil and Jeff Hawkins have both published some pretty popular books like this, and there are others about non-AGI software projects (eg. Linux, Doom). If the system is successful enough to really make an impact, I bet you could get a bestseller.

Regarding friendliness, it's a hard problem that you're probably not going to solve on your own. Nor is any large commercial firm likely to solve it own their own; in fact they'll probably ignore the whole problem and just pursue quarterly profits. So it's best to get it out in the open, so people can work on making it friendly while the hardware is still weak enough to limit the AGI's capabilities.

This would probably be the ideal situation from a human survival point of view. If someone were to figure out AGI after the hardware is more powerful than the human brain, we'd face a hard takeoff scenario with one unstoppable AGI that's not necessarily friendly. Having the software in a lot of hands while we're still waiting for Moore's Law to catch up to the brain, we have a much more gradual approach, we can work together on getting there safely, and when AGI does get smarter than us there will be lots of them with lots of different motivations. None of them will be able to turn us all into paperclips, because doing that would interfere with the others and they won't allow it.

What about On intelligence. It is required reading in my neuroscience lab.

Good ones!

I suggest trying to wear two “outer” shirts for one waking day - dress,polo, or any other type of collared shirt.

Find and buy one item solely for airplane miles arbitrage.

Watch an anime from John Siracusa and have Him as a guest. I want to hear Max and Merlin pick on John a bit, though he is almost always “good cop”.

For a serious one (if they ever want to do “serious”) I would love for all of them to expound on their thinking of how the mind handles memory/ consciousness - though this might be a Rec/Diffs topic just for John and Merlin:

I read a fascinating book (On Intelligence) that not only explained in lay terms how your brain (logically) processes inputs, but had a good theory of how a single method of working explained learning, practice, memory, and actually moving your muscles to do something - most theories can’t explain them all in a single method.

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Speaking of miles arbitrage, my brother in law is a frequent traveler using arbitraged miles. He routinely buys money orders that offer some kind of very large miles bonus, then deposits it into the bank to pay the bill; the small fee for the money order is offset by the mileage gain. He has travelled more in a couple years than I have in my entire life - some of it paid, some on miles. considering he is the one who handles money responsibly, and I am most certainly not, he must be onto something. <br />
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That might also be a good topic: revisit a lesson they learned about handling money. 

Thanks for the heads up -- I'll definitely look more into Hassabis, sounds like an incredibly interesting guy with his plunge into neuroscience.

Thx, I went to a few universities and picked up several graduate coursebooks on AI, and also went through some online and conventional book sources. On Intelligence really opened my eyes to the power of hierarchical learning, and the mechanics of cortical hierarchies. Absolutely fascinating stuff.

Hahaha and yeah, I agree that the point of games is not to just kill the player. Despite the "adversarial" nature of most AI enemies, they're actually teachers, gently guiding the player towards more nuanced strategies and better reactions.

this is personally my favorite book, as an engineer interested in AI

http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1314019670&sr=8-1

Oh, I have a bunch of recommendations.

First, I really think you should read Elkhonon Goldberg's The New Executive Brain. Goldberg was the student of neuropsychology legend Alexander Luria. He was also a good friend of Oliver Sacks, whose books are both informative and highly entertaining (try The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat).

I also think Jeff Hawkins' On Intelligence is a great read. This book focuses on the neocortex.

I think you'll also appreciate Sapolsky's Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers. Sapolsky is a great storyteller. This book is a pretty good primer on stress physiology. Stress affects the brain in many ways and I'm sure this book will be very eye-opening to you!

More suggestions:

The Age of Insight and In Search of Memory by Eric Kandel are good. The Tell-Tale Brain and Phantoms of the Brain by Ramachandran are worth checking out. If you are interested in consciousness, you should check out Antonio Damasio and Michael Graziano. And Giulio Tononi and Gerald Edelman.

If you're up for a challenge I recommend Olaf Sporn's Networks of the Brain and Buzsáki's Rhythms of the Brain.

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins

It will change the way you think, about the way you think, about the way you think.

Some reading I'd recommend.

Don't be scared off by his masters in theology - theology as an academic subject is a very relevant historical study into the psychology of man (and if it helps legitimize the author at all, the South Park guys are fans). The book is basically about psychoanalysis and the problem of identity. I'm a physics lover, engineer by trade, rationalist to the bone, and it gets my stamp of approval for making logical arguments. I've taken up an interest in neuroscience as well, to which I'd recommend this book. For me, those two books are approaching similar ideas from opposite directions.

Good luck broseph.

Very interesting. You might be interested in

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Intelligence

https://www.amazon.de/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533

It was pretty popular and was read among AI researchers alot. It's easy to understand.

Consciousness prepare to be understood!

Exactly. Check out this book sometimes. It's a dry read, but a good one.

Great list, thank you...

I would add:
http://www.amazon.com/Body-Shapes-Mind-Shaun-Gallagher/dp/0199204160
http://www.amazon.com/From-Molecule-Metaphor-Language-Bradford/dp/0262062534
http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/

Jeff Hawkins, if you don't know, wrote "On Intelligence", which is a fantastic [layman, which is what I am] book: http://www.amazon.com/Intelligence-Jeff-Hawkins/dp/0805078533/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1323396864&sr=8-1

Youtube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOkiFOIbTkE

>For how could something count as a language (or conceptual system) >that organized only experiences, sensations, surface irritations or sense >data? Surely knives and forks, railroads and mountains, cabbages and >kingdoms also need organizing.

There's a couple of things Davidson could be referring to, it's pretty vague in any case Davidson is merely making an argument from ignorance here, his lack of imagination hasn't pointed to anything that's stopped HTMs or the corollary neural network emulators at IBM (in the broad sense, some of the newer ones used in business for categorizing, people, accounts, equipment, etc. and finding novel relationships between them or those used in diagnostics now out performing their human M.D. counterparts or those used to detect fraud have become more than mere emulation and more their own refined algorithms). Basically this is a really old now out dated introduction to how raw input get organized into representations in a neural networks here's a general introduction to how if you want the math basics behind it too, also I also check out the work of his understudy that is mentioned throughout the book and his papers they delve much deeper into the maths involved so you can impliment some nets yourself. As of now they are much further a long, same basic principles apply, but many things have been overcome, made more efficient, etc.

• On Intelligence - Jeff Hawkins
  
  
• The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric - Sister Miriam Joseph
  
  Seconding On Killing and Thinking, Fast and Slow, both mentioned already

Computers are 100% logical. They do exactly what you tell them. If you show them a picture of a child, they will scan it pixel by pixel and, only if somehow you tell them that this exact arrangement of pixels is a child will it recognise that picture as a child. (artificial intelligence and image recognition technologies improve this but they capabilities are still fundamentally limited.)

The human mind is vastly different. It is experiential. Every thing that we see is added to our minds as an impression. So when a human sees a picture of a child - that human has seen many children before in it's life and can use the features of that child (the roundness of the cheeks, smoothness of the skin and the proportion of the head to the torso) to identify that as a child.

It'd be an immense amount of work to get the computer to even identify that the thing in the image HAS shoulders.

See On Intelligence! for more information.