Why physicists need to study consciousness/artificial general intelligence

[ProgrammingGodJordan]

This thread concerns a discussion about why physicist need to study consciousness, and probably involve themselves in the development of artificial general intelligence.

Firstly, below is a scintillating talk on artificial general intelligence given by, Theoretical Physics PHD, and former Dwave CTO, Geordie Rose.

He left Dwave, and is now instead CEO and co-founder of Kindred Ai. 

He gives an entertaining talk in the tech-vancouver video below, about why the development of artificial general intelligence is crucial for mankind.

Extra: See also a talk here, by Suzanne Gildert here (She also left Dwave, to start Kindred Ai. She has an Quantum Physics PHD as well, and used to work on superconducting chips at Dwave)

 

Secondly, as Max Tegmark expressed in a youtube video here, physicists have long neglected to define the observer in much of the equations. (The observer being the intelligent agent)

Alert: Notably, when I refer to consciousness below, I echo Bengio's words from one of his recent papers, "I do not refer here to more elusive meanings that have been attributed to the word “consciousness” (like qualia (Kriegel, 2014)), sticking instead to the notion of attentive awareness in the moment, our ability to focus on information in our minds which is accessible for verbal report, reasoning, and the control of behaviour."

As far as science goes, consciousness is likely definable in terms of very complex equations, from disciplines, like Physics; as an example, degrees of general structures such as manifolds central to physics and mathematics, are now quite prevalent in the study of Deep Learning.

 

Footnote:

As I indicate in the content above, there are two crucial end points:

(1) Physics intends to describe the cosmos, and as Max Tegmark mentions, a non trivial portion of physics, namely the observer has long eluded physics, and so the observer's framework/consciousness (as described in the alert above) warrants non-trivial analysis/development.

(2) Understanding consciousness (as described in the alert above), may lend large help to the development of artificial general intelligence, which is often underlined as mankind's last invention, that apart from solving many human problems, (i.e. Self-taught artificial intelligence beats doctors at predicting heart attacks) may also aid in the development of physics. (i.e. Ai learns and recreates Nobel-winning physics experiment)

 

Edited October 11, 2017 by ProgrammingGodJordan

[swansont]

!

Moderator Note

Ignoring moderator notes is probably not a good idea.