Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve • Hacker News Board

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#51

Post by unabst » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 9:30 PM UTC

This essay upholds the gene-centric view of intelligence -- that IQ is physical and with higher IQ we all become geniuses. Except, sites like Quora is flooded with anecdotal evidence that high IQ is as much a burden as a gift, and many struggle just as everyone else to lead their normal lives [0]. Ergo, we have arguments for the genius myth [1][2], and for the importance of emotional intelligence, which would heavily weigh against the author.

We also need to be cautious assuming all performance vectors are better when enhanced. A computer beat us at Jeopardy, just to take the fun out of the game. Now computers are better at face recognition, but no one has ever complained about their lack of brainpower for this. And long ago computers have already had a better memory and have been better at math. Yet, we are finding forgetting is just as important as remembering [3], and that we hardly ever open the math app on our phones to do sophisticated calculations. Sometimes less is better, and more is redundant. Remembering less, forgetting often, and being idiots could be a feature not a bug. Evolution has already figured a lot of this out, and to second guess the equilibrium of our being has yet to prove fruitful.

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[0] https://www.quora.com/Genius-and-Geniuses/What-happens-to-ul...

[1] http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/the-media...

[2] http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2015/02/10/the-myth-of...

[3] snapchat, google delete requests

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#52

Post by jessriedel » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 9:31 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #48

jessriedel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? He's not arguing that "AI is beyond the capabilities of mere humans". (Where did you get that from?) He's arguing that it's a hard problem, that the presence of lots of brains can lead people to mistakenly conclude it's easy, and that it will be easier with smarter humans. His argument would have worked just as well concerning heavier-than-air-flight, meaning that just because we see birds everywhere doesn't mea…

Hmm. I very strongly got the opposite impression. "Today, we need geniuses like von Neumann and Turing more than ever before. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.... AI research also pushes even very bright humans to their limits.... The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human min…

Even if it's true that humans are too dumb to crack AI from first principles -- which as I said is certainly conceivable, and which Hsu alludes to in the quote you've selected -- he's not basing that on the infinite-dimensional space description in the second paragraph. The point of the second paragraph was just to caution against concluding it's an easy problem based on the abundance of intelligence around us.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#53

Post by misterbishop » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 9:38 PM UTC

The human brain will not 'evolve' in any meaningful sense in the next 100 years.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#54

Post by olalonde » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 9:46 PM UTC

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #41

giardini wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You might as well argue that since heavier-than-air-flight is a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible machines - and that since it took evolution billions of years to produce birds, we have little chance of stumbling upon a working design for a wing." Tired analogies between AI and flight are dead-ends. Until we have identified AI-side components of the analogy that corr…

Also, flight took very little to evolve - it happened separately for birds, mammals, lizards, insects. In less than billions of years.

Amazingly, the eye also evolved 50 to 100 times independently (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye).

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#55

Post by jameshart » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 10:05 PM UTC

jessriedel wrote: post #52

jameshart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I very strongly got the opposite impression. "Today, we need geniuses like von Neumann and Turing more than ever before. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.... AI research also pushes even very bright humans to their limits.... The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human min…

Even if it's true that humans are too dumb to crack AI from first principles -- which as I said is certainly conceivable, and which Hsu alludes to in the quote you've selected -- he's not basing that on the infinite-dimensional space description in the second paragraph. The point of the second paragraph was just to caution against concluding it's an easy problem based on the abundance of intelligence around us.

And my point is that that's not a very good argument. We don't have to use random walk algorithms to look for our solutions to the problem.

If someone shows you a list of sorted numbers and tells you they were sorted over a period of millions of years using bogosort, that may be true but it is not a good argument against the existence of efficient sorting algorithms.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#56

Post by jameshart » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 10:12 PM UTC

olalonde wrote: post #54

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, flight took very little to evolve - it happened separately for birds, mammals, lizards, insects. In less than billions of years.

Amazingly, the eye also evolved 50 to 100 times independently ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_eye ).

As for the subject of this discussion, you could have quite the debate about how many times intelligence has evolved independently.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#57

Post by Tenobrus » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 10:19 PM UTC

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #49

woodchuck64 wrote: post #26

> Cognitive engineering, via direct edits to embryonic human DNA, will eventually produce individuals who are well beyond all historical figures in cognitive ability. Now that would be truly foolhardy. Blindly augmenting intelligence before cognitive moral reasoning is completely understood would be a recipe for incredibly dangerous psychopaths. At least with AI, you don't have a system that has been fine-tuned by eo…

Are you assuming ethics and intelligence disparate? Intelligent humans aren't necessarily void of empathy, morality, and emotion.

They seem to be orthogonal at least. Smart people are not necessarily ethical and vice versa. I'm unsure as to whether the parent thinks that any increase in intelligence would correspond with a decrease in morality, which I disagree with. But there is a pretty clear issue, being that if we manage to augment intelligence without first understanding ethics there's a not-insignifianct chance of creating a sociopath who's smarter than any previous human. That wouldn't exactly be world ending, but it could certainly be seriously damaging.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#58

Post by giardini » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 10:21 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #43

giardini wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"You might as well argue that since heavier-than-air-flight is a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible machines - and that since it took evolution billions of years to produce birds, we have little chance of stumbling upon a working design for a wing." Tired analogies between AI and flight are dead-ends. Until we have identified AI-side components of the analogy that corr…

I'm not making an analogy between AI and flight, I'm refuting an analogy between 'evolving' and 'inventing' solutions using flight as a counterexample.

Whatever.

Unfortunately, in doing so you have used the "AI is analogous to heavier-than-air-flight" meme. Please discard it, it's an albatross to discussion. Or to be more precise, it is a lead balloon - it never gets off the ground; it's a red herring. IOW you've chosen a poor and annoyingly wrongheaded counterexample. Now try and digest that.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#59

Post by giardini » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 10:38 PM UTC

idlewords wrote: post #4

danharaj wrote: post #2

> It is easy to forget that the computer revolution was led by a handful of geniuses: individuals with truly unusual cognitive ability. Great man theory needs to be strangled and put to rest.

It will take a visionary with rare courage and skill to put the Great Man theory to rest.

I see what you did there!8-))

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#60

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 10:48 PM UTC

jameshart wrote: post #48

jessriedel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? He's not arguing that "AI is beyond the capabilities of mere humans". (Where did you get that from?) He's arguing that it's a hard problem, that the presence of lots of brains can lead people to mistakenly conclude it's easy, and that it will be easier with smarter humans. His argument would have worked just as well concerning heavier-than-air-flight, meaning that just because we see birds everywhere doesn't mea…

Hmm. I very strongly got the opposite impression. "Today, we need geniuses like von Neumann and Turing more than ever before. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.... AI research also pushes even very bright humans to their limits.... The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human min…

>The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—or at least the human minds of today".

Did he really say that?

I probably should avoid talking right now.

Ahaha. Ahahahahaaaa. Oh boy.

I mean, the mind isn't that hard to crack once you start conceiving of exactly what problems it was designed to solve, what functions it was designed to perform. We don't have complete theories yet, but generative causal inference in Turing-complete domains gets us into replicating "psychological" behavior and explaining cognitive-psychology experiments, so hey.

And then we've got solid overviews of how you'd go about combining concepts into theories into worldviews, and such.

There are a bunch of open problems remaining, but not nearly as many as people think.