Sound Research WIKINDX

Summary: Lack of concensus on both intelligence and AGI. Highlights the conundrum of defining a concept as it is being scienfitically pursued—working definitions are essential but can lead research astray, needs frequent updating. ASI/AGI without learning or creativity is an oxymoron—the physical world demands both constantly. Intelligence is what figures out what knowledge is required in a world that can be considered constantly novel (at least to some degree). Specifies that goals and the ability to adapt and alter goals to different situations is a necessity for (A)GI (any general intelligence).

Relation to Wang: Strongly agrees. Doesn't alter, but constrains. Defines intelligence as "Discretionarily constrained adaptation under insufficient knowledge and resources" (p. 11). Her own words: "the adaptation may be arbitrarily constrained at the discretion of the agent itself or someone/something else".

My thoughts: Thórisson emphasises creativity, reasoning, learning as well as goals and adaptation of goals as absolute necessities to any form of general intelligence. This suggests a need for embodiment (or embodied intelligence), as well as self and intentionality.

Connections: 

• Boden - AI: Its nature and future (2016): Both emphasise creativity, learning, reasoning as essential. Thórisson doesn't mention hybridism, but her claims indicate embodiment of some kind.

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Quotes:

p. 8 - Absurd amount of definitions of intelligence

"there seem to be so many things relevant to the phenomenon of intelligence that by the end of the last decade AI researchers had come up with over 28 (working) definitions (cf. (Legg and Hutter, 2007; Monett and Lewis, 2018)), a number that undoubtedly has grown since"

p. 8-9 - Specifies creativity/learning as necessary for handling constant novelty the physical world presents. Intelligence figures out which knowledge is needed. 

"The concept of ‘novelty’ is of course a gradient: The scenarios we encounter every day may be in many ways similar to the ones we encountered yesterday, but they are never identical down to every detail. And sometimes they are very different. But due to the impossibility of defining everything up front, and knowing everything beforehand, both natural and artificial intelligences must rely on creativity and learning as a major way to operate in the physical world. Because the world presents this wealth of novelty, we are constantly in a state of lacking knowledge. The purpose of intelligence is to figure out what knowledge is needed, produce that knowledge by any means necessary, and allow us to move on. This is the way both natural and artificial intelligences can handle novel problems, tasks, goals, environments and worlds. No task takes zero time or energy to perform—and neither does thinking. Time and energy present additional constraints on this effort, and cannot be removed. Addressing these challenges is what all intelligent agents must be able to do, as well as any and all other constraints that may come their way. This is why we continue to push our machine’s abilities increasingly towards the ‘general’ end of that spectrum."

p. 10 - There can be no intelligence without goals and adaptive goal-setting, therefore without self or intentionality.

"There is no denying that intelligence requires the ability to create sensible goals and use reasoning to manage them—goals define what is accepted and not accepted when addressing some task, environment, or problem; by specifying their constraints. Goals are thus a kind of temporally-bounded requirement on intelligence, and trying to create a generally intelligent machine that does not have this ability seems tautological." [...] "Based on an agent’s changing needs and wishes relative to its environment, an agent forms multiple (explicit or implicit) sub-goals, which it uses in combination with reasoning to cumulatively build up a collection of reliable and actionable knowledge, to predict, achieve goals, explain, and re-create the phenomena that it models from experience (Bieger, Thorisson, and Steunebrink, 2017; Thórisson et al., 2016)"