Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

togelius.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#61

Post by ArkyBeagle »

tlb wrote: post #21
rtkwe wrote: post #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 pr…

That's partly because nobody has tried very hard to write one piece of software that's good at landing planes and being the president. Why not just write two pieces of software? What business model would a combined piece of software enable? Specialization of software is mostly a virtue.

But what we might want is a "code base" that has some percentage of those two activities lying latent in them so we can exploit them in less time. Then again, maybe not - it may be that from-scratch works better.

We can't really tell until we do it. And the hard part is the analysis of the business model, anyway.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#62

Post by ArkyBeagle »

shawabawa3 wrote: post #25
tlb wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's partly because nobody has tried very hard to write one piece of software that's good at landing planes and being the president. Why not just write two pieces of software? What business model would a combined piece of software enable? Specialization of software is mostly a virtue.

> Specialization of software is mostly a virtue And generalization of humans is mostly a virtue

Specialization of humans has its virtues as well. Interdependence and "networking" humans has huge multipliers.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#63

Post by cderwin »

ta_donk_gt wrote: post #22
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…

Small nit, but as hinted at by the other responses, humans didn't "invent" multiplication, they discovered it. In the same way we didn't "invent" the fact that the earth revolves around the sun, we discovered it.

I actually don't think this is true. Multiplication isn't some natural phenomenon that humans just stumbled upon, like gravity or nuclear energy, even if it does help to explain some observable phenomena. Multiplication is entirely a human idea -- it only exists in human brains. Multiplication was only "discovered" in the same way love, or music, or any of the liberal arts were "discovered" -- which is to say, not at all.

I guess the straightforward counterargument here is that if multiplication only exists in humans' minds how can computers do it, but computers have absolutely zero autonomy -- a computer can't compute a product, or even "discover" multiplication without receiving explicit intructions from a human to do so -- in my mind a computer can't be deemed the one discovering multiplication if that discovery relied 100% on the design of human beings.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#64

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#65

Post by vasilipupkin »

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…

stupidity is typically correlated with low ability. If hardware insured that ability is high, then we wouldn't get a lot of stupidity from emergent consciousness

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#66

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

Comments seem to have gone off on a tangent about multiplication.

What stands out for me is the irony, that ultimately the purpose of AI is not to be especially good at multiplication but rather to replicate the tenuous, fragile and indefinable properties of Human Intelligence that can only come about through some process more sophisticated than logical binary determinism.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#67

Post by drabiega »

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…

While your point is true, I'm not sure it is relevant to measuring intelligence. The human has two advantages in this situation: First off, all humans have agency: they can take action to do things. If you want the comparison to be remotely fair you need to compare a program that has agency to see the same stimuli as the human would and have access to the same range of actions. Not a particularly difficult programming task.

If you put an untrained system and an average person in the crashing plane situation, the average person is probably going to do better, but it's because your average person /has/ some training in what to do in this situation. They've been exposed to enough culture to know that the joystick is the main way of controlling the plane and that planes moving towards the ground at steep angles are likely to be bad, and probably know generally what action to take that might help the situation.

Fair comparisons would be say, an untrained program vs a baby, or a system trained with some general knowledge of vehicle control vs an average person. I'm not really sure that humans win out in either of those comparisons.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#69

Post by lyle_nel »

adamsea wrote: post #55
arethuza wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Write me program that could write Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician . ;) I think the OP's point was until humans invent true strong AI there is a qualitative difference between human and computer intelligence. And even if/when a true "thinking machine" is invented, the intelligence which was able to create said machine would be nothing to sneeze at!

Write me a programs that could write me a program that could write Doug Lenat's Automated Mathematician ... and so on and so forth.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#70

Post by throwanem »

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?"

You really can't mention that question without totally spoiling the book.
Post reply on HN