Innateness, AlphaZero, and Artificial Intelligence

Understand

The concept of innateness is rarely discussed in the context of artificial intelligence.

• When it is discussed, or hinted at, it is often the context of trying to reduce the amount of innate machinery in a given system.
• In this paper, I consider as a test case a recent series of papers by Silver et al (Silver et al., 2017a) on AlphaGo and its successors that have been presented as an argument that a "even in the most challenging of domains: it is possible to train to superhuman level, without human examples or guidance", "starting tabula rasa." I argue that these claims are overstated, for multiple reasons.
• I close by arguing that artificial intelligence needs greater attention to innateness, and I point to some proposals about what that innateness might look like.