Tech Imitates Life
DeepMind’s argument essentially boils down to this: reward-seeking behavior was enough to drive the evolution of natural life, so why shouldn’t it do the same for artificial life?
The researchers wrote that “the generic objective of maximizing reward is enough to drive behavior that exhibits most if not all abilities that are studied in natural and artificial intelligence.”
Of course, this argument has several assumptions baked in, like that a reinforcement learning algorithm will be able to develop its way to true intelligence within whatever hardware architecture it was granted. But it’s still an interesting thought experiment that will be interesting to watch play out.
See the full story here: https://futurism.com/the-byte/google-deepmind-tech-general-ai