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Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

togelius.blogspot.com

71–80 of 98 posts

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#71

> 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.

i believe i've read about automatically --(i believe automatically, and it's a crucial distinction, but i'm not looking it up right now, so take it with a grain of salt)-- generated proofs so long they can't be reasonably understood by a human, but it "convinces" a computer. such a proof isn't a proof in the sense that it doesn't convince a human being, which is the point of the proof. but, since it checks out, maybe a better way to think of it is it's a mathematical proof but for an audience other than human beings.

i wonder if a game is much different from a proof. i mean, we can implement games as programs, so there is a connection at that level.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#72
> Ask a human to raise 3425 to the power of 542 and watch them sit there for hours trying to work it out.

You can't compare the speed of a computer to the speed of a human. Only because a human is slow doesn't mean that the human is stupid, nor computer are smarter. The electric current in a integrated circuit acts near the speed of light. Light itself is also very fast but not very intelligent.

> [...] the world Chess champion has been a computer.

Again, this is a matter of speed. If you give a human being the same amount of time in relation what a computer had taken to calculate the same steps of a chess game it would be a more true comparsion of intelligence.

> Humans have almost no memory

That's because the human brain isn't trained and not used. We use almost 10% of our brain. So this comparsion also hinks.

> The face recognition software that Facebook uses can tell the faces of millions of people apart.

And again, this is only a matter of training and not a matter of intelligence.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#73
No offense to OP or Mr. Togelius but this argument is terrible in almost every way imaginable and completely unconvincing at that. It makes its case entirely by subtly introducing straw men and double standards.

Leaving aside that its primary point is made by a redefinition of “intelligence” (itself being nebulous without providing two definitions), it completely ignores the fact that computers would be completely unable to do any of these things had smart people not told them how to. You may say the same of people as well, but people can learn things independent of knowledge. Even something as simple as space and time is understood a priori by people but most computers are oblivious to what these things actually mean.

The arguments about memory are terrible because one might as well say a library is smarter than a person if all that matters is the accuracy of recall and the amount of data stored. The computer itself does not know these things in the same way that we do, if you ask it to find them for you it will search them the same way you might but more quickly. Knowledge is contextual and intuitive, and computers currently are not great at context or intuition.

And that’s just knowledge! It’s so easy to demonstrate that human knowledge is more complex than computer “knowledge” that it’s barely even worth discussing.

I personally think one of the strongest indicators of intelligence in people is their intuition and the ease at which they adapt to new things, i.e. how many things come easily to them. Nothing comes easily to a computer. Everything must be specified clearly and carefully to the computer by a person who is better at intuition than the computer is. The computer has no way of knowing whether something is “right” or “wrong” in the sense that those words intersect with both morality and logic. They might understand that something is “incorrect,” but that does not carry the negative connotations that “wrong” does for a human being. Computers have not “computed how to play the game perfectly,” they were told how to do so through increasing levels of abstraction. Computers have not “computed how to play the game perfectly” just as pencils have not learned how to make marks on paper. That a computer does what you tell it to and by definition can’t do what you don’t tell it to is evidence enough of its utility as a tool and not a person.

This is, of course, in the current context of AI. I have no doubt that some day we will create software with the sort of intuition and ability to contextualize information that people have. But until then, there’s not sense deluding ourselves that we’re already there. If that were the case, we might as well have stopped doing computer science research with the Bombe 70 years ago.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#74
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 programmin…

[deleted]

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#75
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wonder how many people in this thread have read Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach?

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#76
Will a robot/AI crossing the street ever realize (without anyone explicitly telling it) that if it is stuck by a car then it will be incapable of moving?

Will an image recognizer ever "truly understand" what it means for something to be in a category?

If I set up a Go board such that the pieces on the board resemble a smiley face or some other pattern, will there ever be a version of AlphaGo that is able to recognize that? Will it be able to stop playing Go and start placing pieces on the board that fit into the pattern?

Will an AI be able to make an original joke that is not based off of any template?

To my knowledge we don't have an AI that can do any of the above, but any person would find those tasks easy.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

that's debatable, once you appreciate the point about having a reason to do something. calculation itself really only exists with purpose. it's a thing to do if you have a reason to do it. of course, these kinds of things too seem more "discovered" than "invented", but it's a very different kind of discovery than "the earth revolves around the sun". the earth revolves around the son, as far as we can figure these day…

Calculation can be done purely for pleasure. I have math nerd friends who sit and do math for fun. It's related to other challenging, creative pursuits, like playing music or writing poetry.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#78

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.

Let me know when humans invent something not governed by the rules the universe was programmed with ;-)

Literature, Art, Music, Philosophy, Religion...

Basically everything that isn't a science.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#79
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know when humans invent something not governed by the rules the universe was programmed with ;-)

Poetry.

I wouldn't go that far. Maybe, "witty", but I wouldn't call it Shakespeare.
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