Human intelligence is overrated (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#41

Post by dota_fanatic » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:42 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #6

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…

How many people work jobs today that are akin in nature / level of fulfillment to inventing multiplication? How many people work jobs that are best done by a machine? How much energy does it take for a human intelligence to do these jobs vs a machine? How many people are furthermore stunted in their growth due to forced submission to their middle managers, a power differential that hardly need exist but feels great for the manager (king in their little castle)?

I'm pretty sure computers, as we currently understand them, are entirely capable of inventing multiplication, provided sufficient source code and input. Evolution is unique in being able to "create" a thing that can formalize multiplication? Human intelligence is not magic.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#42

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #6

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…

[deleted]

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#43

Post by SixSigma » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

mafribe wrote: post #10

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…

Or, as alluded to in the article but with the opposite conclusion :

Intelligence is knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#44

Post by gonehome » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #17

gonehome wrote: post #5

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 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 A…

Your first point is what I was trying to get at - basically the culture is the 'test data' and IQ would be the capability of the 'hardware' or genetic make up of an individual brain/person in this case.

I think your point about intelligence not existing in an individual is too narrow, but ultimately that comes down to how you decide to define intelligence.

Not sure I agree that AGI won't happen - in fact I suspect the computing power we have now is good enough to do it, but we're just missing some insight with how.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#45

Post by sevenless » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:46 PM UTC

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?"

I bet you'd like Missile Gap by Charles Stross

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#46

Post by beat » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:47 PM UTC

dota_fanatic wrote: post #41

beat wrote: post #6

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…

How many people work jobs today that are akin in nature / level of fulfillment to inventing multiplication? How many people work jobs that are best done by a machine? How much energy does it take for a human intelligence to do these jobs vs a machine? How many people are furthermore stunted in their growth due to forced submission to their middle managers, a power differential that hardly need exist but feels great f…

Human intelligence is not magic, but it is categorically different from machine intelligence.

What's amazing isn't that Deep Blue could beat Kasparov, given the depth of analysis it could do. What's amazing is that Kasparov could beat Deep Blue, despite not being able to analyze thousands of possible moves a second in his head.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#47

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

arethuza wrote: post #12

beat wrote: post #6

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…

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.

[deleted]

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#48

Post by wodenokoto » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:48 PM UTC

unit91 wrote: post #13

lmm wrote: post #9

> 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!

No, his point is that humans, just like computers, need to be programmed in order to do a task.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#49

Post by SixSigma » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:49 PM UTC

jcoffland wrote: post #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.

Indeed. I would also posit that novel and challenging are relatively easy. Games are not just a set of rules but also rewarding to the players.

Games exist that are variants of "click the arrow on the coloured pixel 100 times". And people pay to play them. Good luck finding one with a Deep Conv.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#50

Post by gonehome » Tue, Apr 26, 2016, 4:50 PM UTC

beat wrote: post #46

dota_fanatic wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people work jobs today that are akin in nature / level of fulfillment to inventing multiplication? How many people work jobs that are best done by a machine? How much energy does it take for a human intelligence to do these jobs vs a machine? How many people are furthermore stunted in their growth due to forced submission to their middle managers, a power differential that hardly need exist but feels great f…

Human intelligence is not magic, but it is categorically different from machine intelligence. What's amazing isn't that Deep Blue could beat Kasparov, given the depth of analysis it could do. What's amazing is that Kasparov could beat Deep Blue, despite not being able to analyze thousands of possible moves a second in his head.

I think Alpha Go is more in the category of human intelligence.

My probably oversimplified understanding is that the neural network training on a massive amount of games develops something like intuition. It can't explain why a certain move it makes is the best, but only that it is the most likely to win.

This seems similar to advanced human play.