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Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

smithsonianmag.com

21–30 of 76 posts

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#21

The answer is yes. Ever is a very long time.

That's possible, but it's also why the question is useless - if we want to draw out a line long enough where it's inevitable, it's also entirely possible that for whatever reason human advancement stops before then.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#22
post #19
post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

I agree with your points on AI being better at certain tasks, except of course regarding translation. There are definitely bilingual 4-year-olds who translate better than the state of the art machine translator. You could maybe say a machine translator can poorly translate a greater set of strings, including highly-technical strings. But a 4-year-old easily can translate a greater proportion of strings correctly or a…

Really? Because I continue to be more and more amazed by Google Translate everyday. It gets subtleties and strange things right that I never thought a computer translation system could get right. I'm an ESL-speaker, and I think certainly the translation I can do to/from English to my mother language is going to be inferior to Google Translate any day of the week, ignoring completely the fact that I take a _LONG_ time to do translation and Google Translate does it in a second

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#24
post #22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your points on AI being better at certain tasks, except of course regarding translation. There are definitely bilingual 4-year-olds who translate better than the state of the art machine translator. You could maybe say a machine translator can poorly translate a greater set of strings, including highly-technical strings. But a 4-year-old easily can translate a greater proportion of strings correctly or a…

Really? Because I continue to be more and more amazed by Google Translate everyday. It gets subtleties and strange things right that I never thought a computer translation system could get right. I'm an ESL-speaker, and I think certainly the translation I can do to/from English to my mother language is going to be inferior to Google Translate any day of the week, ignoring completely the fact that I take a _LONG_ time…

Learning a language as an adult is a different story.

This isn't a no-true-scotsman, either, because I posit that there are quite a lot of 4-year-olds who match my description.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#25
post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

Obviously a trained translation system is better than a four year old that doesn't speak a different language, but a four year old is probably better at translating language she does speak.

It's actually quite amazing how bad computers are at language considering the more than half century of research in the area. I tried to set a reminder in Siri: "Pull the briefs." Garbage. After several tries, I tried "download the briefs." Garbage. Siri couldn't even recognize the words I was saying, much less actually do the thing I asked.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#26
post #22
post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your points on AI being better at certain tasks, except of course regarding translation. There are definitely bilingual 4-year-olds who translate better than the state of the art machine translator. You could maybe say a machine translator can poorly translate a greater set of strings, including highly-technical strings. But a 4-year-old easily can translate a greater proportion of strings correctly or a…

Really? Because I continue to be more and more amazed by Google Translate everyday. It gets subtleties and strange things right that I never thought a computer translation system could get right. I'm an ESL-speaker, and I think certainly the translation I can do to/from English to my mother language is going to be inferior to Google Translate any day of the week, ignoring completely the fact that I take a _LONG_ time…

If you need to translate what you are going to say, e.g. your thoughts are not in your targeted language, then you are not exactly a speaker. And I can assure you, Google translate is fairly awful. Sometimes my wife is showing me the translation from English to French, and it would take me a while to understand the French meaning. I won't even start on Chinese/Japanese to English (and to French ) or the reverse.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#27
post #19
post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

I agree with your points on AI being better at certain tasks, except of course regarding translation. There are definitely bilingual 4-year-olds who translate better than the state of the art machine translator. You could maybe say a machine translator can poorly translate a greater set of strings, including highly-technical strings. But a 4-year-old easily can translate a greater proportion of strings correctly or a…

I don't think any 4 year old can do better at FrenchEnglish translation than what Google Translate does. It's a no contest here. Even at 9 year old kids tend to make huge mistakes when it comes to their maternal tongue, fudging up words or creative spelling.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#28
post #19
post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

I agree with your points on AI being better at certain tasks, except of course regarding translation. There are definitely bilingual 4-year-olds who translate better than the state of the art machine translator. You could maybe say a machine translator can poorly translate a greater set of strings, including highly-technical strings. But a 4-year-old easily can translate a greater proportion of strings correctly or a…

I'm willing to believe that 4 year olds can be better at understanding texts in two different languages[0], but I've yet to see a 4 year old translate a piece of text from one language to another.

[0] Though I have no idea how you'd measure 'understanding'.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#29
post #25
post #14

Depends on what you consider "smarter" of course. At the moment, the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old. AI is also better at translating text to different languages. It's better at driving cars. But there are still many things a 4 year old can do that no AI can do. Sometimes I feel like our AI research is leading us to consider ourselves increasingly unintelligent rather than our computers more int…

Obviously a trained translation system is better than a four year old that doesn't speak a different language, but a four year old is probably better at translating language she does speak. It's actually quite amazing how bad computers are at language considering the more than half century of research in the area. I tried to set a reminder in Siri: "Pull the briefs." Garbage. After several tries, I tried "download th…

> a four year old is probably better at translating language she does speak.

> "Pull the briefs." Garbage. After several tries, I tried "download the briefs.”

I have no idea what you mean by the first sentence, and would never guess that it was the same meaning as the second sentence if you hadn’t told me.

English is my native language, and my first assumption was the first sentence meant “remove the underwear from sale”.

Language is hard. So hard that I suspect current AI has a comparable understanding of natural language to a six year old (sure, if the six year old spoke 26 languages to the level of a normal six year old, but that’s an easy difference for a computer).

Comparably, I have moved to Berlin, and on paper my German vocabulary is about the size of a child’s vocabulary. I have difficulty parsing word boundaries and correctly recognising even those words which I do know when they’re spoken outside lesson environments.

Re: Will A.I. Ever Be Smarter Than a Four-Year-Old?

#30

Don't underestimate how intelligent 4 year olds are.

Don't overestimate how logical and structured 4-year-olds are. (I have one right now, and I would trust an AI I trained for a day over the child I trained for a day -- for just about any task.)

A 7-year-old, on the other hand, is a tall order for AI, especially once you introduce the complex combination of skills with optical image recognition, haptic feedback and physical principles that need broader context and/or creativity...

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