Geoffrey Hinton: “We're toast. This is the actual end of history”
&gt;&gt; “Your understanding of objects changes a lot when you have to manipulate
them,” Hinton said. (LeCun has described this as being “easier said than
done”.)<p>LeCun is right. Take a robot and put an untrained neural net in its brain,
then send it out into the world and wait to see what it learned. Do you think
it will learn anything? It won&#x27;t- because it will observe most events a single
time. And neural nets don&#x27;t learn that way. They must be trained,
painstakingly, at great length, cost and effort, only &quot;in the lab&quot;, on vast
amounts of data and compute. And once they&#x27;re trained, they&#x27;re trained. They
cannot learn anymore. They cannot change their model. Unless they are
retrained. From scratch. Painstakingly, at great cost, on vast amounts of data
and compute. Again. And again. And again.<p>Contrast that with the intelligence of -oh, I don&#x27;t know, a squirrel? A
squirrel is born with a tiny brain, smaller than the nuts it will subsist on
throughout its life. When it&#x27;s born, it has never seen a person, never seen a
crow, never seen a cat. When it dies, it has often not only seen, but learned
how to survive all of that.<p>A squirrel. Even a cockroach can learn more than it is born with. The smartest
neural nets today are no smarter than a simple beetle.<p>I have no idea how Hinton has managed to convince himself that a machine that
is incapable of learning once trained will take over the world. A machine that
is less capable intellectually than a roach, or a squirrel. That just makes no
sense.