I feel like this article is being disingenuous in order to get discussion going.
Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#12Multiplying 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…
Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician (AM) apparently did "discover" multiplication by itself:
http://web.onetel.net.uk/~hibou/ai-course/lenat.txt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Mathematician
Of course, you could argue that multiplication was implicitly there in the rules and facts it was programmed with.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#13> 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 progra…
Agreed. He also subtly introduces a double-standard here, in that a person with no training or experience might fail in these situations, thus we're inferior to machines...but without the right algorithms and training data a computer would fail worse!
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#14How did this article made it on hackernews? Someone take it down please.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#15Multiplying 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…
> Inventing multiplication is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do.
AM, the discovery learning program developed by Doug Lenat, discovered multiplication, beginning with a few basic facts about set theory, and using about 200 heuristics.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#16It 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)
#17All 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 crea…
Intelligence exists in human culture, not in individual humans. A high IQ has limited usefulness without a culture it can learn from and operate in. (Ask any octopus.)
Human culture persists outside of individuals, so the occasional genius can change culture and culture stays changed because collective memory is altered. This doesn't happen with individual animal intelligence.
So I don't think we'll ever see a true AGI. What will happen instead is that collective cultural memory will improve, and connections between human brains will become faster and deeper - just as they have done for millennia.
If there's ever a singularity it will be created by human brains operating together in a new and vastly accelerated shared state, not by silicon brains that have been programmed to appear sentient.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#18> But 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.
At least the random human will have a chance at doing something and if the situation isn't life or death like the landing plane or the Amazon jungle could with time actually learn to operate in the new environment even without interacting with other people who could teach them. That's what's missing from AI the flexibility to operate in a chaotic environment. Until relatively recently the slightest thing going wrong in even moving through an area or performing a simple task like moving a box would completely break.
> (It's hard to understand why anyone would want to be in a plane flown by a human, now that there are alternatives.)
Detecting and ignoring spurious inputs and extreme edge cases are one of the main reasons that I feel better if there's a person alert and at the controls of a plane. Extreme cases like Quantas 32 where a huge number of systems are absolutely destroyed would be a huge challenge for modern autopilots which are great but aren't tested or designed for emergencies. [1]
[1] http://lifehacker.com/the-power-of-mental-models-how-flight-...
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#19> It would be very easy to invent games that were so complicated that only computers could play them; computers could even invent such games automatically.
Of the many errors in this article this is one of the most flagrant. Computers have yet to invent any novel and challenging games. That would take ingenuity, something computers have failed to demonstrate. However, I suspect the author is trolling a bit.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#20My suspicion is that Chomsky's "language instinct" is actually a derangement of our ability to reason about probabilities that leads us to make the same mistakes consistently, thus understand each other.