I was going to use “Artificial Intelligence” in the title here but realized after thinking about it that the idea is really more specific than that.

I came up with the idea here while thinking more about the problem I raised in an earlier post about a serious obstacle to creating an AI. As I said there:

Current AI systems are not universal, and clearly have no ability whatsoever to become universal, without first undergoing deep changes in those systems, changes that would have to be initiated by human beings. What is missing?

The problem is the training data. The process of evolution produced the general ability to learn by using the world itself as the training data. In contrast, our AI systems take a very small subset of the world (like a large set of Go games or a large set of internet text), and train a learning system on that subset. Why take a subset? Because the world is too large to fit into a computer, especially if that computer is a small part of the world.

This suggests that going from the current situation to “artificial but real” intelligence is not merely a question of making things better and better little by little. There is a more fundamental problem that would have to be overcome, and it won’t be overcome simply by larger training sets, by faster computing, and things of this kind. This does not mean that the problem is impossible, but it may turn out to be much more difficult than people expected. For example, if there is no direct solution, people might try to create Robin Hanson’s “ems”, where one would more or less copy the learning achieved by natural selection. Or even if that is not done directly, a better understanding of what it means to “know how to learn,” might lead to a solution, although probably one that would not depend on training a model on massive amounts of data.

Proposed Predictive Model

Perhaps I was mistaken in saying that “larger training sets” would not be enough, at any rate enough to get past this basic obstacle. Perhaps it is enough to choose the subset correctly… namely by choosing the subset of the world that we know to contain general intelligence. Instead of training our predictive model on millions of Go games or millions of words, we will train it on millions of human lives.

This project will be extremely expensive. We might need to hire 10 million people to rigorously lifelog for the next 10 years. This has to be done with as much detail as possible; in particular we would want them recording constant audio and visual streams, as well as much else as possible. If we pay our crew an annual salary of $75,000 for this, this will come to $7.5 trillion; there will be some small additions for equipment and maintenance, but all of this will be very small compared to the salary costs.

Presumably in order to actually build such a large model, various scaling issues would come up and need to be solved. And in principle nothing prevents these from being very hard to solve, or even impossible in practice. But since we do not know that this would happen, let us skip over this and pretend that we have succeeded in building the model. Once this is done, our model should be able to fairly easily take a point in a person’s life and give a fairly sensible continuation over at least a short period of time, just as GPT-3 can give fairly sensible continuations to portions of text.

It may be that this is enough to get past the obstacle described above, and once this is done, it might be enough to build a general intelligence using other known principles, perhaps with some research and refinement that could be done during the years in which our crew would be building their records.

Required Elements

Live learning. In the post discussing the obstacle, I noted that there are two kinds of learning, the type that comes from evolution, and the type that happens during life. Our model represents the type that comes from evolution; unlike GPT-3, which cannot learn anything new, we need our AI to remember what has actually happened during its life and to be able to use this to acquire knowledge about its particular situation. This is not difficult in theory but you would need to think carefully about how this should interact with the general model; you do not want to simply add its particular experiences as another individual example (not that such an addition to an already trained model is simple anyway.)

Causal model. Our AI needs not just a general predictive model of the world, but specifically a causal one; not just the general idea that “when you see A, you will soon see B,” but the idea that “when there is an A — which may or may not be seen — it will make a B, which you may or may not see.” This is needed for many reasons, but in particular, without such a causal model, long term predictions or planning will be impossible. If you take a model like GPT-3 and force it to continue producing text indefinitely, it will either repeat itself or eventually go completely off topic. The same thing would happen to our human life model — if we simply used the model without any causal structure, and forced it to guess what would happen indefinitely far into the future, it would eventually produce senseless predictions.

In the paper Making Sense of Raw Input, published by Google Deepmind, there is a discussion of an implementation of this sort of model, although trained on an extremely easy environment (compared to our task, which would be train it on human lives).

The Apperception Engine attempts to discern the nomological structure that underlies the raw sensory input. In our experiments, we found the induced theory to be very accurate as a predictive model, no matter how many time steps into the future we predict. For example, in Seek Whence (Section 5.1), the theory induced in Fig. 5a allows us to predict all future time steps of the series, and the accuracy of the predictions does not decay with time.

In Sokoban (Section 5.2), the learned dynamics are not just 100% correct on all test trajectories, but they are provably 100% correct. These laws apply to all Sokoban worlds, no matter how large, and no matter how many objects. Our system is, to the best of our knowledge, the first that is able to go from raw video of non-trivial games to an explicit first-order nomological model that is provably correct.

In the noisy sequences experiments (Section 5.3), the induced theory is an accurate predictive model. In Fig. 19, for example, the induced theory allows us to predict all future time steps of the series, and does not degenerate as we go further into the future.

(6.1.2 Accuracy)

Note that this does not have the problem of quick divergence from reality as you predict into the distant future. It will also improve our AI’s live learning:

A system that can learn an accurate dynamics model from a handful of examples is extremely useful for model-based reinforcement learning. Standard model-free algorithms require millions of episodes before they can reach human performance on a range of tasks [31]. Algorithms that learn an implicit model are able to solve the same tasks in thousands of episodes [82]. But a system that learns an accurate dynamics model from a handful of examples should be able to apply that model to plan, anticipating problems in imagination rather than experiencing them in reality [83], thus opening the door to extremely sample efficient model-based reinforcement learning. We anticipate a system that can learn the dynamics of an ATARI game from a handful of trajectories,¹⁹ and then apply that model to plan, thus playing at reasonable human level on its very first attempt.

(6.1.3. Data efficiency)

“We anticipate”, as in Google has not yet built such a thing, but that they expect to be able to build it.

Scaling a causal model to work on our human life dataset will probably require some of the most difficult new research of this entire proposal.

Body. In order to engage in live learning, our AI needs to exist in the world in some way. And for the predictive model to do it any good, the world that it exists in needs to be a roughly human world. So there are two possibilities: either we simulate a human world in which it will possess a simulated human body, or we give it a robotic human-like body that will exist physically in the human world.

In relationship to our proposal, these are not very different, but the former is probably more difficult, since we would have to simulate pretty much the entire world, and the more distant our simulation is from the actual world, the less helpful its predictive model would turn out to be.

Sensation. Our AI will need to receive input from the world through something like “senses.” These will need to correspond reasonably well with the data as provided in the model; e.g. since we expect to have audio and visual recording, our AI will need sight and hearing.

Predictive Processing. Our AI will need to function this way in order to acquire self-knowledge and free will, without which we would not consider it to possess general intelligence, however good it might be at particular tasks. In particular, at every point in time it will have predictions, based on the general human-life predictive model and on its causal model of the world, about what will happen in the near future. These predictions need to function in such a way that when it makes a relevant prediction, e.g. when it predicts that it will raise its arm, it will actually raise its arm.

(We might not want this to happen 100% of the time — if such a prediction is very far from the predictive model, we might want the predictive model to take precedence over this power over itself, much as happens with human beings.)

Thought and Internal Sensation. Our AI needs to be able to notice that when it predicts it will raise its arm, it succeeds, and it needs to learn that in these cases its prediction is the cause of raising the arm. Only in this way will its live learning produce a causal model of the world which actually has self knowledge: “When I decide to raise my arm, it happens.” This will also tell it the distinction between itself and the rest of the world; if it predicts the sun will change direction, this does not happen. In order for all this to happen, the AI needs to be able to see its own predictions, not just what happens; the predictions themselves have to become a kind of input, similar to sight and hearing.

What was this again?

If we don’t run into any new fundamental obstacle along the way (I mentioned a few points where this might happen), the above procedure might be able to actually build an artificial general intelligence at a rough cost of $10 trillion (rounded up to account for hardware, research, and so on) and a time period of 10-20 years. But I would call your attention to a couple of things:

First, this is basically an artificial human, even to the extent that the easiest implementation likely requires giving it a robotic human body. It is not more general than that, and there is little reason to believe that our AI would be much more intelligent than a normal human, or that we could easily make it more intelligent. It would be fairly easy to give it quick mental access to other things, like mathematical calculation or internet searches, but this would not be much faster than a human being with a calculator or internet access. Like with GPT-N, one factor that would tend to limit its intelligence is that its predictive model is based on the level of intelligence found in human beings; there is no reason it would predict it would behave more intelligently, and so no reason why it would.

Second, it is extremely unlikely than anyone will implement this research program anytime soon. Why? Because you don’t get anything out of it except an artificial human. We have easier and less expensive ways to make humans, and $10 trillion is around the most any country has ever spent on anything, and never deliberately on one single project. Nonetheless, if no better way to make an AI is found, one can expect that eventually something like this will be implemented; perhaps by China in the 22nd century.

Third, note that “values” did not come up in this discussion. I mentioned this in one of the earlier posts on predictive processing:

The idea of the “desert landscape” seems to be that this account appears to do away with the idea of the good, and the idea of desire. The brain predicts what it is going to do, and those predictions cause it to do those things. This all seems purely intellectual: it seems that there is no purpose or goal or good involved.

The correct response to this, I think, is connected to what I have said elsewhere about desire and good. I noted there that we recognize our desires as desires for particular things by noticing that when we have certain feelings, we tend to do certain things. If we did not do those things, we would never conclude that those feelings are desires for doing those things. Note that someone could raise a similar objection here: if this is true, then are not desire and good mere words? We feel certain feelings, and do certain things, and that is all there is to be said. Where is good or purpose here?

The truth here is that good and being are convertible. The objection (to my definition and to Clark’s account) is not a reasonable objection at all: it would be a reasonable objection only if we expected good to be something different from being, in which case it would of course be nothing at all.

There was no need for an explicit discussion of values because they are an indirect consequence. What would our AI care about? It would care roughly speaking about the same things we care about, because it would predict (and act on the prediction) that it would live a life similar to a human life. There is definitely no specific reason to think it would be interested in taking over the world, although this cannot be excluded absolutely, since this is an interest that humans sometimes have. Note also that Nick Bostrom was wrong: I have just made a proposal that might actually succeed in making a human-like AI, but there is no similar proposal that would make an intelligent paperclip maximizer.

This is not to say that we should not expect any bad behavior at all from such a being; the behavior of the AI in the film Ex Machina is a plausible fictional representation of what could go wrong. Since what it is “trying” to do is to get predictive accuracy, and its predictions are based on actual human lives, it will “feel bad” about the lack of accuracy that results from the fact that it is not actually human, and it may act on those feelings.