Ask A Genius 972: Analytic Systems and Integration of Cognition
Author(s): Rick Rosner and Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2024/06/26
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: All right, so today I saw the term integrated cognition pop up. I looked it up, and I don’t know how common a term it is, but it refers to AI, and it’s what we call multimodal. It’s kind of the way we think, which is we have inputs from a number of different senses.
Rick Rosner: Right, we have inputs from a number of different analytic subsystems, the ways of looking at and analyzing the sensory information we have, for instance, perspective and color, light and shadow. All those things get thrown into the conscious arena, the central hopper.
Jacobsen: That’s what I guess some people working with AI are trying to do, which is what they should be doing if they’re trying to make AI more like human thought. I’m guessing that if anybody gets any good at it, that’s like 80% of the way towards consciousness.
Rosner: What is it, scary consciousness? You know, like Skynet? Not really. Is it creative consciousness? Where AI can really start coming up with ideas and associations on its own instead of just vomiting back what it’s been trained on? Yeah, probably to some extent.
Jacobsen: Maybe to a great extent. But just because AI becomes multimodal or integrated, it still doesn’t have much agency.
Rosner: Okay, let’s talk about the problem of agency. Giving it agency is a problem. And then it getting agency, of course, is the scary problem. It’s when AI is able to take over systems. In a way, the richness of the subjective experience of any processing system determines its range of action and choice.
Jacobsen: Yes, also an AI that has integrated systems is more likely to fool itself into thinking that it has consciousness because, as we’ve said, AI will behave as if it has consciousness before it actually has consciousness.
Rosner: I don’t know what more we need to talk about under this header except that it’s coming. The integrated thought stuff. There will be two stages of development. The first stage will probably look like when they first started developing chess programs, where they were developing systems individually, and then linking those up as if they were developing lots and lots of lines of code to then integrate these different individual cognitions into a single system and pass that.
Jacobsen: Hold on, hold on. Are you saying that’s how AIs get really good at chess, that they took every chess analytic engine and just kind of threw them into a hopper together and then it became a super analytic engine?
Rosner: Almost. They simply had to write pretty much every line of code. Now they can give them a code in such a way that it learns on its own, the principles of efficiency of that system. Similarly, I think the second stage of development for integrating cognition in AI systems will involve subroutines that have something akin to a second stage in chess. They’ll have integration to find efficiencies to get certain effects that are requested of them. As we see now, we can give text prompts and the computer will more or less figure out something that is a relevant solution for a human operator. Similarly, you could give a prompt, and the code will be generated. It’ll find a way to not only develop those subroutines but also to integrate all those subroutines for an actual integrated cognition.
Jacobsen: All right, that’s a good place to stop and then move on to the next thing.
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