Understanding Artificial General Intelligence — An Interview With Hiroshi Yamakawa
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is something of a holy grail for many artificial intelligence researchers. Today’s narrow AI systems are only capable of specific tasks — such as internet searches, driving a car, or playing a video game — but none of the systems today can do all of these tasks. A single AGI would be able to accomplish a breadth and variety of cognitive tasks similar to that of people.How close are we to developing AGI? How can we ensure that the power of AGI will benefit the world, and not just the group who develops it first? Will AGI become an existential threat for humanity, or an existential hope?
Dr. Hiroshi Yamakawa, Director of Dwango AI Laboratory, is one of the leading AGI researchers in Japan. Members of the Future of Life Institute sat down with Dr. Yamakawa and spoke with him about AGI and his lab’s progress in developing it. In this interview, Dr. Yamakawa explains how AI can model the human brain, his vision of a future where humans coexist with AGI, and why the Japanese think of AI differently than many in the West.
This transcript has been heavily edited for brevity. You can see the full conversation here.
Why did the Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory make a large investment in [AGI]?
HY: Usable AI that has been developed up to now is essentially for solving specific areas or addressing a particular problem. Rather than just solving a number of problems using experience, AGI, we believe, will be more similar to human intelligence that can solve various problems which were not assumed in the design phase.
What is the advantage of the Whole Brain Architecture approach?
HY: The whole brain architecture is an engineering-based research approach “to create a human-like artificial general intelligence (AGI) by learning from the architecture of the entire brain.” Basically, this approach to building AGI is the integration of artificial neural networks and machine-learning modules while using the brain’s hard wiring as a reference.
I think it will be easier to create an AI with the same behavior and sense of values as humans this way. Even if superintelligence exceeds human intelligence in the near future, it will be comparatively easy to communicate with AI designed to think like a human, and this will be useful as machines and humans continue to live and interact with each other.
General intelligence is a function of many combined, interconnected features produced by learning, so we cannot manually break down these features into individual parts. Because of this difficulty, one meaningful characteristic of whole brain architecture is that though based on brain architecture, it is designed to be a functional assembly of parts that can still be broken down and used. Read more...
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