The society of mind
An authority on artificial intelligence introduces a theory that explores the workings of the human mind and the mysteries of thought.
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36% recommend62% neutral1% critical
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- As much as I want to, I sadly don't think Information Theory makes sense in this setting, and I really wanted to believe this. When Shannon made his theory of information, he was always dealing with informational representations on the abstraction level of bits. At Bell Labs, a lot of the work was on the compression of data for transfer over telephone wires. Entropy coding, later codexes like algorithmic coding, and all compression on this level assumes that you have a bit-based X, and you compress it.
However, in deep neural networks, you are dealing with compression on different levels of abstraction. How do you decide what shared features a peacock and a palm tree have? At what scale should they be represented? How do you deal with invariance under affine transforms? Do you want to open the box of invariance under non-affine transforms?
When you start looking at what it would mean to compress feature representations, you immediately get to the question of data. You realize that Shannon simply was given a form of a very low abstraction data and that information theory came out to handle data at this level, but it's not suited for the data representations of many higher level modalities.
If you read Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky, which has aged well to about 80%, you can get the hint of the kind of abstractions that humans make and what would be needed to represent them, this is not representable in bits, you need to go to higher level shared features, and then you open all of the questions above as well as credit assignment, mutual information approximation, Fischer information between bayesians, etc.
- That's basically what the GOFAI field was for decades before the new neural net boom. Go read Minsky's Society of Mind, or the AGI Conference series papers.
- One thing that I recall reading (but can't find now) is that people are statistically significantly likely to finish books with shorter chapters. It just makes so much sense to me - I want a feeling of accomplishment as I go through the content, with clear stopping points, making it easy to keep going, and also easy to pick up again.
My favorite in this regard is Minsky's "Society of Mind" where essentially every chapter/mini-essay is one page, a form which he argued is a good fit for our mental processes.
- Go back to the fundamentals and read society of mind from Marvin Minsky or anything cybernetics from Norbert Wiener
- Quite telling -- thanks for the insightful comment as always, Simon. Didn't know that, even though I've been discussing this on and off all day on Reddit.
He's a smart man with well-reasoned arguments, but I think he's also a bit poisoned by working at such a huge org, with all the constraints that comes with. Like, this:
It might take a decade to work through this issue if you just want to put a single LLM in a single computer and have it be a fully-fledged human, sure. And since he works at a company making some of the most advanced LLMs in the world, that perspective makes sense! But of course that's not how it's actually going to be (/already is).You can’t just tell them something and they’ll remember it.LLMs are a necessary part of AGI(/"agents") due to their ability to avoid the Frame Problem[1], but they're far from the only needed thing. We're pretty dang good at "remembering things" with computers already, and connecting that with LLM ensembles isn't going to take anywhere close to 10 years. Arguably, we're already doing it pretty darn well in unified systems[2]...
If anyone's unfamiliar and finds my comment interesting, I highly recommend Minsky's work on the Society of Mind, which handled this topic definitively over 20 years ago. Namely;
A short summary of "Connectionism and Society of Mind" for laypeople at DARPA: https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA200313.pdf
A description of the book itself, available via Amazon in 48h or via PDF: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_Mind
By far my favorite paper on the topic of connectionist+symbolist syncreticism, though a tad long: https://www.mit.edu/~dxh/marvin/web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/pa...
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/
[2] https://github.com/modelcontextprotocol/servers/tree/main/sr...
- The Society of Mind by Marvin Minsky will help anyone interested in the topic of multimodality. The book covers several interesting ideas about organizing systems made up of more than one "model" or agent.
