English

Reward is not enough: can we liberate AI from the reinforcement learning paradigm?

Artificial Intelligence 2024-11-12 v3

Abstract

I present arguments against the hypothesis put forward by Silver, Singh, Precup, and Sutton ( https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370221000862 ) : reward maximization is not enough to explain many activities associated with natural and artificial intelligence including knowledge, learning, perception, social intelligence, evolution, language, generalisation and imitation. I show such reductio ad lucrum has its intellectual origins in the political economy of Homo economicus and substantially overlaps with the radical version of behaviourism. I show why the reinforcement learning paradigm, despite its demonstrable usefulness in some practical application, is an incomplete framework for intelligence -- natural and artificial. Complexities of intelligent behaviour are not simply second-order complications on top of reward maximisation. This fact has profound implications for the development of practically usable, smart, safe and robust artificially intelligent agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.03192,
  title  = {Reward is not enough: can we liberate AI from the reinforcement learning paradigm?},
  author = {Vacslav Glukhov},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.03192},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

27 pages, 1 figure