Stevan Harnad: AI's Symbol Grounding Problem

Stevan Harnad: AI's Symbol Grounding Problem

Author: Daniel Bashir August 31, 2023 Duration: 1:58:21

In episode 88 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Professor Stevan Harnad.

Stevan Harnad is professor of psychology and cognitive science at Université du Québec à Montréal, adjunct professor of cognitive science at McGill University, and professor emeritus of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. His research is on category learning, categorical perception, symbol grounding, the evolution of language, and animal and human sentience (otherwise known as “consciousness”). He is also an advocate for open access and an activist for animal rights.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (05:20) Professor Harnad’s background: interests in cognitive psychobiology, editing Behavioral and Brain Sciences

* (07:40) John Searle submits the Chinese Room article

* (09:20) Early reactions to Searle and Prof. Harnad’s role

* (13:38) The core of Searle’s argument and the generator of the Symbol Grounding Problem, “strong AI”

* (19:00) Ways to ground symbols

* (20:26) The acquisition of categories

* (25:00) Pantomiming, non-linguistic category formation

* (27:45) Mathematics, abstraction, and grounding

* (36:20) Symbol manipulation and interpretation language

* (40:40) On the Whorf Hypothesis

* (48:39) Defining “grounding” and introducing the “T3” Turing Test

* (53:22) Turing’s concerns, AI and reverse-engineering cognition

* (59:25) Other Minds, T4 and zombies

* (1:05:48) Degrees of freedom in solutions to the Turing Test, the easy and hard problems of cognition

* (1:14:33) Over-interepretation of AI systems’ behavior, sentience concerns, T3 and evidence sentience

* (1:24:35) Prof. Harnad’s commentary on claims in The Vector Grounding Problem

* (1:28:05) RLHF and grounding, LLMs’ (ungrounded) capabilities, syntactic structure and propositions

* (1:35:30) Multimodal AI systems (image-text and robotic) and grounding, compositionality

* (1:42:50) Chomsky’s Universal Grammar, LLMs and T2

* (1:50:55) T3 and cognitive simulation

* (1:57:34) Outro

Links:

* Professor Harnad’s webpage and skywritings

* Papers:

* Category Induction and Representation

* Categorical Perception

* From Sensorimotor Categories to Grounded Symbols

* Minds, machines and Searle 2

* The Latent Structure of Dictionaries



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Hosted by Daniel Bashir, The Gradient: Perspectives on AI moves beyond surface-level headlines to explore the intricate machinery and human ideas shaping artificial intelligence. Each episode is built on a foundation of deep research, leading to conversations that are both technically substantive and broadly accessible. You'll hear from researchers, engineers, and philosophers who are actively building and critiquing our technological future, discussing not just how AI systems work, but the larger implications of their integration into society. This isn't about speculative hype; it's a grounded examination of real progress, persistent challenges, and ethical considerations from those on the front lines. The discussions peel back layers on topics like model architecture, policy, and the fundamental science behind the algorithms becoming part of our daily lives. For anyone curious about the substance behind the buzz-whether you have a technical background or are simply keen to understand a defining technology of our age-this podcast offers a crucial and thoughtful resource. Tune in for a consistently detailed and nuanced take that treats artificial intelligence with the complexity it deserves.
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