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