#72 Prof. KEN STANLEY 2.0 - On Art and Subjectivity [UNPLUGGED]

Patreon: / mlst
Discord: / discord
Pod version: anchor.fm/machinelearningstre...
Prof. Ken Stanley argued in his book that our world has become saturated with objectives. The process of setting an objective, attempting to achieve it, and measuring progress along the way has become the primary route to achievement in our culture. He’s not saying that objectives are bad per se, especially if they’re modest, but he thinks that when goals are ambitious then the search space becomes deceptive.
Is the key to artificial intelligence really related to intelligence? Does taking a job with a higher salary really bring you closer to being a millionaire? The problem is that the stepping stones which lead to ambitious objectives tend to be pretty strange, they don't resemble the final end state at all. Vaccum tubes led to computers for example and KZbin started as a dating website.
What fascinated us about this conversation with Ken is that we got a much deeper understanding of his philosophy. He lead by saying that he thought it's worth questioning whether artificial intelligence is even a science or not. Ken thinks that the secret to future progress is for us to embrace more subjectivity.
[00:00:00] Tim Intro
[00:12:54] Intro
[00:17:08] Seeing ideas everywhere - AI and art are highly connected
[00:28:40] Creativity in Mathematics
[00:30:14] Where is the intelligence in art?
[00:38:49] Is AI disappointingly simple to mechanise?
[00:42:48] Slightly conscious
[00:46:27] Do we have subjective experience?
[00:50:23] Fear of the unknown
[00:51:48] Free Will
[00:54:22] Chalmers
[00:55:08] What's happening now in open-endedness
[00:58:31] Generalisation
[01:06:34] Representation primitives and what it means to understand
[01:12:37] Appeal to definitions, knowledge itself blocks discovery
Make sure you buy Kenneth's book!
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective [Stanley, Lehman]
www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Greatnes...
Abandoning Objectives: Evolution through the
Search for Novelty Alone [Lehman, Stanley]
www.cs.swarthmore.edu/~meeden...
Twitter
/ kenneth0stanley

[@AliMoeeny]

Man, these talks are beyond machine learning, cannot thank you enough for the hard work

[@naeron02]

Nothing is beyond it, that is the point of the talk.

[@swayson5208]

John Vervaeke's work using the practice of dialogos to elevate conversations around mysterious concepts is a fascinating approach which is worth exploring for topics like discussed in this episode.

[@marynewby9974]

I'm going to second that observation. Please, please bring Vervaeke on! I'm going through Vervaeke's After Socrates series right now and keep thinking about flow and the processes of curiosity, relevance realization and how we might apply them to NNs.

[@blueberrymooon]

HE'S BACK! So hyped for more Ken Stanley content!

[@MachineLearningStreetTalk]

I know right! The man is a hero!

[@janosneumann1987]

Great episode ! The first one with Kenneth Stanley was epic my, so happy to see more of Kenneth, thank you MLST team!

[@ZachDoty0]

This conversation was beautiful. This connects to an insight that I had recently, that much of AGI will be solved by introspection. As we watch the patterns in our own minds, and notice the shape of ideas, the mechanisms of cognition, we will see simple fundamental algorithms of intelligence that we can copy and codify.

[@stalinsampras]

The first podcast with Prof Ken Stanley was one of my favourite, Exicted and intrigued for this one.

[@thomasrutledge5941]

"Can you coax your mind from its wandering and keep to the original oneness? Can you let your body become supple as a newborn child's? Can you cleanse your inner vision until you see nothing but the light? Can you love people and lead them without imposing your will? Can you deal with the most vital matters by letting events take their course? Can you step back from you own mind and thus understand all things? Giving birth and nourishing, having without possessing, acting with no expectations, leading and not trying to control: this is the supreme virtue." -Tao Te Ching, chapter 10, Stephen Mitchell Interpretation

[@rahulranjan9013]

Bro your channel must blew up! The effort you put in your videos & the passion inside you just show up! It appears to me that you want to keep this channel very AI / machine learning centric.. but I want to consider this channel as a stepping stone which might help your channel to a next stepping stone. I can see your passion in the way you present your interview & your inclination to philosophy as well.. would love to see your tentacles spread as vast as possible to different topics as well! Your first 12 minutes was the greatest summation of life advice ! Reading Why greatness can't be planned was a blessing from above!

[@MachineLearningStreetTalk]

Thanks!

[@obsideonyx7604]

Fear of subjectivity is similar to teleophobia

[@zakkamarachi8081]

This channel is amazing, ❤👍

[@KathySierraVideo]

A group (over 1,000 people) of us are applying the “stepping stones” concepts from “Why Greatness Can’t Be Planned” to horse rehab and performance. Given that horses are still euthanized for so many difficulties, I am not exaggerating to say Ken Stanley and Joel Lehman have literally saved some furry, four-legged lives. 🙏

[@dinoscheidt]

16:35 I don’t know but this is really cute. It doesn’t matter if you’re a CTO or an intern. So relatable and so wholesome 💕

[@bingbongtoysKY]

Definitely look into Jason Rhoades' work!- 🙏 please it is super relevant for these conversations!

[@gren287]

Amazing!

[@isadorastrokes]

There's a time skip at 42:49 that cuts out the context of what they are discussing. Does anyone know what/who the tweet they are discussing was concerning?

[@drhilm]

We often associate good science with beauty. Many scientific works that stood over time has a deeply novel ideas and a nice artistic nature. Like with art, we can recognize good science when we see it. But it is hard to define it. Thus, novelty and aesthetic is engrained in science more than goals, plans and measurments. Engineering and mathematical tools are a mean for scientific exploration, but not the science itself.

[@oncedidactic]

gdi it’s OP how exciting 7 starting seconds of MLST vid is

[@markhampton3614]

Great episode, thanks! The distinction between the natural sciences and human sciences is perhaps useful for classifying the study of human level AI, which seems to be in the later camp.

[@ruodingtian8046]

definitely good legacy for the kids

[@paxdriver]

Luvs it ✌️

[@gabiroach6627]

At least one artist listening!

[@MachineLearningStreetTalk]

Amazing!

[@machinelearningdojowithtim2898]

First! Ken is my hero in AI research!

[@soccerplayer922]

Never clicked so fast

[@siarez]

I wish you have asked him about the work happening at OpenAI's open-ended team. I was very excited to see what they come up with when they started (~2 years ago), but I'm not aware of any work that they have put out.

[@TimScarfe]

They are not allowed to talk about it

[@siarez]

@@TimScarfe great interview nonetheless. Thanks for doing these :)

[@davidpulcifer3792]

1:07:13 I would argue that there is a difference between "could a human do it" and "could a human do it easily". Being difficult to do is not the same as being impossible to do. Given that we haven't really tried to teach humans to intuit over multidimensional phenomenon, I think there is not enough evidence to say that it would be impossible for a human to understand these things, even at our current evolutionary standpoint.

[@alexijohansen]

I am a huge fan of this show but somehow missed this one. I suspect it’s the thumbnail. The logo is too subtle! Fantastic discussion btw.

[@johnkijkt2713]

We also have to agree that art is in a big crisis.

[@SydneyApplebaum]

Join the Postrats

[@rajeevma6870]

I have been watching your videos in the recent times. Wrote a LinkedIn article titled "Why AI is harder than we think - Human intelligence vs machine intelligence". My previous comment got deleted because I referred a link to the article. I think these systems are so dumb that they remove any comments with an article link.

[@xDMrGarrison]

A bit weird that Yannic was there only for the teaser of the intro.

[@MachineLearningStreetTalk]

It was a clip from episode 38, the previous interview with Ken

[@eddieswords5561]

Epiphany serendipity. Theres talk of nuking England.

[@johnkijkt2713]

The greek word techne has to do with the art of doing things. Now technology is not science but they are nontheless intertwined in certain area's of science. The discussion has to do with the dualism of the continues and the discrete. In wait of formalisations with a higher resolution if posdible than us humans i say. Thou shall not be formalised! The purpose of art is knowledge, not pastime, diversion or transfiguration. (Max Beckman)

[@tom86ggg]

What about nature and the beauty in that. Thats art thats true beauty not maths and machines and ai lol

[@luke2642]

Great video. But, you've gone too far down the anti-free will rabbit hole. There are two good pro-free will perspectives: First, claiming we don't have free will is an over extension. The process inside us universally generates an undeniable _feeling_ of free choice in humans. Can you imagine or describe any machine or system that would be more free? If not, then any anti-free will claim is unfalsifiable: not only do you think freedom is an illusion, you are in practice asserting it is impossible! Secondly thinking of irreducible complexity, computational bounds. The only way to figure out the outcome of the "free will" process is to execute it, to run the code on the real universe, with all its beautiful complexity. Therefore, nothing is predictable, nothing is "mapped out", in any sense. Nothing can be. You just can't capture all the quantum data. Everything is done for the first time, the only time, for real!

[@marilysedevoyault465]

Oh no! Mr Stanley stir my artistic fiber tonight… The head as a materialised Plasma ball Every impulse from the outside Creates a pattern in the grey matter, chronologically impregnated. Monday 7 o’clock in the morning, I see my pineapple on the counter. This creates a pattern looking like a Dryopteris in my visual cortex. Monday 7 o’clock at night, I taste some new basswood herbal tea. This creates a pattern looking like an Osmunda in my gustatory cortex. Tuesday 7 o’clock in the morning, I see my pineapple on the counter. It isn’t ripe. This creates another pattern looking just like a Dryopteris with a slightly different shape in my visual cortex, This pattern is infinitely close to the Monday 7 o’clock am pattern of a Dryopteris, but absolutely not the same. It is impregnated almost at the same place in my grey matter, but infinitely slightly more inside. The discrepancy is infinitely small. Tuesday night the taste of my basswood herbal tea and its Osmunda pattern will slip right next to my Monday night slightly different Osmunda pattern. More inside. I am grasping the taste of basswood herbal tea. Could it be how everything is chronologically impregnated by electric impulse? Trillion of trillion of microscopic layers? Could it be how we can make predictions? Since everything is chronological in my materialised plasma ball? Could it be how we generalise with infinitely small layers (chronological layers) of tiny hair of patterns that are alike and almost merge, straw inside a straw inside a straw inside a straw, but when this grey matter area is visited by an impulse, flows the general concept of a pineapple or basswood herbal tea? GFlowNet, will you learn to consider time? Will you make chronological layers of flows? Will you learn the chronology of your encounters so that you may imagine the future? Will you use the flows with numerous layers to grasp the Platon Idea and it’s relation to time, in other words, its probabilities to exist following the happening of a previous Platon idea? Between two dense areas of layers of straws, are most of the straws of one area pretty much from the same impregnated impulse jet of the other area of dense layers of straws? Yes ? Then we have a dialectic!