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Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

togelius.blogspot.com

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Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#2

Post by Rhapso »

It is an existential horror SciFi novel, but BlindSight by Peter Watts is the only book I've seen talk about this idea.

Avoiding totally spoiling the book, it asks the question: "Is consciousness really a survival trait in the long term?"

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#5

Post by gonehome »

All this talk of 'intelligence' gets confusing - it seems like the core distinction people are talking about most of the time with 'general' or 'strong' AI is really something more like Artificial Consciousness.

This has issues too - if consciousness is an emergent property of a neural net with the right feedback mechanisms and training material then even if you have the right feedback mechanisms you could still create an artificial consciousness that's stupid.

You see this problems in humans - depending on a lifetime of 'test data' exposure (parents, peers, environment) and the underlying brain neural net 'hardware' you can get people that believe a lot of stupid things.

Maybe consciousness doesn't have to work that way and we're just dealing with a local maxima of evolution (or some reproduction/sex drive constraint), but we might end up stumbling on the ability to create a neural net with the ability to emerge a consciousness before we can craft the type of consciousness we'd want.

Actually understanding how the system works is harder.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#6

Post by beat »

Multiplying 3842 by 543 is very hard for humans. They're slow and inaccurate. Computers do it perfectly at incredible speeds.

Inventing multiplication is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do.

For another analogy, moving ten tons of rock a thousand feet is something humans can do, and have done for millennia. It's very slow and difficult. A bulldozer can do the same thing in minutes. But a bulldozer would never, ever have a reason to move ten tons of rock.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#7

Post by beat »

Rhapso wrote: post #2

It is an existential horror SciFi novel, but BlindSight by Peter Watts is the only book I've seen talk about this idea. Avoiding totally spoiling the book, it asks the question: "Is consciousness really a survival trait in the long term?"

That's a great novel. Vampires!

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#9

Post by lmm »

> the argument goes both ways here as well: take an arbitrary human (such as yourself, if you happen to be human) and try placing this human in the cockpit of a landing jet plane, in a semiconductor factory, in the oval office of the White House, in the kitchen of a gourmet restaurant, on a horseback in Siberia, or equipped with only a spear in the middle of the Amazonas jungle. There are humans that have been programmed to do well in each of these situations, but it is very unlikely that the human you were thinking of (perhaps yourself) would know what to do in more than at most one of these situations.

This part seems wrong. I think most humans would make a decent go of most of those situations. Not as good as an expert by any means, but they'd be capable of doing something, unlike a computer program.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#10

Post by mafribe »

The article is informal about intelligence and then comes up with a couple of ad-hoc examples where computers beat humans. It's unclear that they have much to do with intelligence. The following definition of the term has been proposed:

   Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to 
   achieve goals in a wide range of environments.
Togelius even addresses this a little by pointing out that humans have to be trained to be a pilot of a president. But it is unclear at this point to what extent computers can be intelligent in this sense. Alpha-Go's reinforcement learner, probably the most astonishing part of Alpha-Go, was not (to the best of my knowledge) Go-specific, instead, it was a general-purpose reinforcement learner. I doubt it can learn much more complicated forms of interaction without a simple reward function (such as games).

Nevertheless, I'm quite optimistic, but it's far from the foregone conclusion that the author implies it it.

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