Thinking Complete

In this post I summarise four lines of argument for why we should be skeptical about the potential of deep learning in its current form. I am fairly confident that the next breakthroughs in AI will come from some variety of neural network, but I think several of the objections below are quite a long way from being overcome. Theoretical Impediments to Machine Learning With Seven Sparks from the Causal Revolution -  Pearl, 2018 Pearl describes three levels at which you can make inferences: association, intervention, and counterfactual. The first is statistical, identifying correlations - this is the level at which deep learning operates. The intervention level is about changes to the present or future - it answers questions like "What will happen if I do y?" The counterfactual level answers questions like "What would have happened if y had occurred?" Each successive level is strictly more powerful than the previous one: you can't figure out what the effects

Thanks to Tom for pointing me to this presentation by a couple of Oxford philosophers who may just have solved Fermi's Paradox (the puzzle of why we haven't seen any alien civilisations, given that plausible estimates for terms in the Drake equation predict that there should be many thousands in this galaxy alone). The main idea is actually quite simple: that people have generally tried to find plausible expected values for each term, then multiplied them together to give an expected number of alien civilisations in the thousands or millions. But if we instead multiply together a whole probability distribution for each term, we get the same mean but a median less than 10, and a double-digit probability that there are no other alien civilisations (the first couple of slides explain this quite well). Their final best guess, given our observations so far, is that there's something like a 40% chance that we're alone in the universe. While this isn't a particularly d

I was recently discussing with a friend whether or not competitive debating makes you better at figuring out what is actually true. This is an interesting question, because debating influences people in a variety of different ways. The most basic is that participating in debates, or preparing for them, teaches you a lot of facts about the world; I would know much less about international politics in particular were it not for debating. It also markedly improves your ability to notice flaws and fallacies in arguments, which obviously helps you avoid falling for them. This skill can extend too far, though: debaters can be very good at rebutting even very sensible arguments. In the American Parliamentary style of debate, the proposing team is allowed to choose and prepare in advance any motion which is not so blatantly, obviously true that it would be impossible to debate (e.g. "murder is bad"). A lot of proposition teams skirt quite close to that line - but even so, opposing t