Mind Matters Natural and Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis

TagJudea Pearl

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BIG letters inside a London store

Does Creativity Just Mean Bigger Data? Or Something Else?

Michael Egnor and Robert J. Marks look at claims that artificial intelligence can somehow be taught to be creative

In Define information before you talk about it, neurosurgeon Michael Egnor interviewed engineering prof Robert J. Marks on the way information, not matter, shapes our world (October 28, 2021). In the first portion, Egnor and Marks discussed questions like: Why do two identical snowflakes seem more meaningful than one snowflake? Now they turn to the relationship between information and creativity. Is creativity a function of more information? Or is there more to it? This portion begins at 10:46 min. A partial transcript and notes, Show Notes, and Additional Resources follow. Michael Egnor: How does biological information differ from information in nonliving things? Robert J. Marks: I don’t know if it does… I do believe after recent study that the mind Read More ›

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Cybernetic Brain. Electronic chip in form of human brain in electronic cyberspace. Illustration on the subject of 'Artificial Intelligence'.

AI: Still Just Curve Fitting, Not Finding a Theory of Everything

The AI Feynman algorithm is impressive, as the New York Times notes, but it doesn’t devise any laws of physics

Judea Pearl, a winner of the Turing Award (the “Nobel Prize of computing”), has argued that, “All the impressive achievements of deep learning amount to just curve fitting.” Finding patterns in data may be useful but it is not real intelligence. A recent New York Times article, “Can a Computer Devise a Theory of Everything?” suggested that Pearl is wrong because computer algorithms have moved beyond mere curve fitting. Stephen Hawking’s 1980 prediction that, “The end might not be in sight for theoretical physics, but it might be in sight for theoretical physicists” was quoted. If computers can now devise theories that make theoretical physicists redundant, then they are surely smarter than the rest of us. The program behind the Read More ›