Not sure I agree in this regard. We are after all, aiming to create a mental model which describes reproducible steps for creating general intelligence.
That is, the product is ultimately going to be some set of abstractions or another.
I am not sure what more scientific method you could propose. And we can, in this field produce actual reproducible experiments. Really, more so than any other field.
There's nothing to replicate. ML models are associative statistical models of historical data.
There are no experimental conditions, no causal properties, no modelled causal mechanisms, no theories at all. "Replication" means that you can reproduce an experiment designed to validate a causal hypothesis.
Fitting a function to data isnt an experiment, it's just a way of compressing the data into a more efficient representation. That's all ML is. There are no explanations here (of the data) to assess.
I do think there's an empirical study of ML models and that could be a science. Its output could include things like,
"the reason prompt Q generates A1..An is because documents D1..Dn were in the training data; these documents were created by people P1..Pn for reasons R1..Rn. The answer A1..An related to D1..Dn in so-and-so way. The quality of the answers is Q1..Qn, and derives from the properties of the documents generated by people with beliefs/knowledge/etc. K1..Kn"
This explains how the distribution of the weights produces useful output by giving the causal process that leads to training data distributions.
The relationship between the weights and the training data itself is *not* causal.
Eg., X = 0,1,2,3; Y = A,A,B,B; f(x; w) = A if x <= w else B
w = 1 because the rule x <= 1 partitions Y st. P(x|w) is maximised. These are statistical and logical relationships ("partitions", "maximises").
A causal relationship is between a causal property of an object (extended in space and time) to another causal property by a physical mechanism that reliably and necessarily brings about some effect.
So, "the heat of the boiling water cooked the carrot because heat is... the energetic motion of molecules ... and cooking is .... and so heating brings about cooking necessarily because..."
heating, water, cooking, carrot, motion, molecules, etc.. -- their relationships here are not abstract; they are concretely in space and time, causally effecting each other, etc. etc.
So what do you call the process of discovering those causal properties?
Was physics not actually a science until we uncovered quarks, since we weren’t sure what caused the differences in subatomic particles?
(I’m not a physicist, but I hope that illustrates my point)
Keep in mind most ML papers on arxiv are just describing phenomena we find with these large statistical models.
Also there’s more to CS than ML.
You're conflating the need to use physical devices to find relationships, with the character of those relationships.
I need to use my hand, a pen and paper to draw a mathematical formula. That formula (say, 2+2=4) expresses no causal relationships.
The whole field of computer science is largely concerned with abstract (typically logical) relationships between mathematics objects; or in the case of ML, statistical ones.
Computer science has no scientific methodology for producing scientific explanations -- it isnt science. It is science in the old german sense of just "a systematic study".
Scientists conduct experiments in which they hold fixed some causal variables (ie., causally efficiacious physical properties), and vary others, according to an explanatory framework. They do this in order to explore the space of possible explanations.
I can think of no case in the whole field of csci in which there are cases where causal variables are held fixed; since there is no study of them. Computer science does not study even voltage, or silicon, or anything as physical objects with causal properties (that is electrical egnineering, physics, etc.).
Computer science ought just be called "applied discrete mathematics"
I see where you’re coming from, but I think there’s more to it than that, specifically with non determinism.
So if I observe some phenomena in a bit of software that was built to translate language, say the ability to summarize text.
Then I dig into that software and decide to change a specific portion of it, keeping same all other aspects of the software and its runtime, then I notice it’s no longer able to summarize text.
In that case I’ve discovered a causal relationship between the portion I changed and the phenomenon of text summarization.
Even though the program was constructed, there are unknown aspects.
How is that not the process of science?
Sorry if this is just my question from earlier, rephrased, but I still don’t see how this isn’t a scientific method.
I am not sure what more scientific method you could propose. And we can, in this field produce actual reproducible experiments. Really, more so than any other field.