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I have a similar philosophical question: My dog doesn't know what I do for a living, and he has no concept of how intelligent I am. So if we're limited by our own intelligence, how would we ever recognise or measure the intelligence of an AI that's more advanced than us? If an AI surpasses us, not just in memory or calculation but in reasoning, self-reflection, and abstraction, how would we even know?
Wittgenstein's lion
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We could test it. We know with certainty that computers play far better chess than we do. How do we know? Play a game with the computer, and see who wins. There's no reason why we can't apply the same logic elsewhere. Set up a testable scenario, see who wins.
Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too. The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
With dogs it’s less a question of intelligence but communication something more intelligent AI is unlikely to have a problem with.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have a similar philosophical question: My dog doesn't know what I do for a living, and he has no concept of how intelligent I am. So if we're limited by our own intelligence, how would we ever recognise or measure the intelligence of an AI that's more advanced than us? If an AI surpasses us, not just in memory or calculation but in reasoning, self-reflection, and abstraction, how would we even know?
Wittgenstein's lion
It's strange today to remember that playing chess well was seen as a great marker of AI, but today we consider it much less so. I thought Turing's Test would be a good barometer of AI, but in today's World of mountains of AI slop fooling more and more people, and ironically there being software that is better at solving CAPTCHAs than humans, I'm not so sure. Add into the mix that there are reports of people developin…
I’d argue we have AGI, at the level of a child; now we’re debating further steps, such as adult AGI and super intelligence. But because AI is not like us, we have different results at different stages — eg, they’ve been better at arithmetic for a hundred years, games for twenty, and slowly are climbing up other domains.
What we have now matches what many of the popular texts would call "Narrow AI", which is limited to specific tasks like speech recognition or playing chess, or mixtures of those.
Traditionally AGI represents a more aspirational goal, machines that could theoretically perform any intellectual task a human can do.
Under that definition we aren't close, and we will actually need new math to even hope to reach that goal.
Obviously individuals concepts of what 'AGI' differ, as well as their motivations for choosing one.
But the traditional hopeful mnomics concept of AGI is known to be unreachable without discoveries that upend what we think are hard limits today.
Machines being better at arithmetic, the ties from to the limits of algorithms is actually the source of the limits.
The work of Turing, Gödel, Tarski, Markov, Rice etc... is where that claim is coming from IMHO
Fortunately there is a lot of practical utility without AGI, but our industries use of aspirational mnomics is almost guaranteed to disappoint the rest of the world.
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We could test it. We know with certainty that computers play far better chess than we do. How do we know? Play a game with the computer, and see who wins. There's no reason why we can't apply the same logic elsewhere. Set up a testable scenario, see who wins.
Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too. The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
Our perceptions are shaped by our cognitive limitations. A dog doesn't know what the Internet is, and completely lacks the cognitive capacity to understand it.
An ASI would almost certainly develop some analogous technology or ability, and it would be completely beyond us.
That does NOT mean we would notice we were being affected by that technology.
Advertising and manufactured addictions make people believe external manipulations are personal choices. An ASI would probably find similar manipulations trivial.
But it might well be capable of more complex covert manipulations we literally can't imagine.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We could test it. We know with certainty that computers play far better chess than we do. How do we know? Play a game with the computer, and see who wins. There's no reason why we can't apply the same logic elsewhere. Set up a testable scenario, see who wins.
Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too. The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too. The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
Some dogs can respond to “bring me my slippers” and go get them in another room, a concrete task that’s still difficult for robots today. With dogs it’s less a question of intelligence but communication something more intelligent AI is unlikely to have a problem with.
What would our being baffled by a super-intelligence look like? Maybe some effect like dark matter. It would make less sense the more we found out about it, and because it's on a level beyond our comprehension, it would never add up. And the lack of apparent relevance to a super-intelligence's doings would be expected, because it's beyond our comprehension.
But this is silly and resembles apologies for God based on his being ineffable. So there's a way to avoid difficult questions like "what is his motivation" and "does he feel like he needs praise" because you can't eff him, not even a little. Then anything incomprehensible becomes evidence for God, or super-intelligence. We'd have to be pretty damn frustrated with things we don't understand before this looks true.
But that still doesn't work, because we're not supposed to be able to even suspect it exists. So even that much interaction with us is too much. In fact this "what if" question undermines itself from the start, because it represents the start of comprehension of the incomprehensible thing it posits.
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Either the alleged super-intelligence affects us in some way, directly or indirectly by altering things we can detect about the world/universe, in which case we can ultimately detect it, or else it doesn't, in which case it might as well belong to a separate universe, not only in terms of our perception but objectively too. The error here is thinking that dogs understand anything.
Dogs certainly do understand things. Dogs and cats have a theory of mind and can successfully manipulate and trick their owners - and each other. Our perceptions are shaped by our cognitive limitations. A dog doesn't know what the Internet is, and completely lacks the cognitive capacity to understand it. An ASI would almost certainly develop some analogous technology or ability, and it would be completely beyond us.…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some dogs can respond to “bring me my slippers” and go get them in another room, a concrete task that’s still difficult for robots today. With dogs it’s less a question of intelligence but communication something more intelligent AI is unlikely to have a problem with.
OK, it might be a cultural thing. Do dogs probe the secrets of the world around them, with all that barking, even a little? Is it that they're in an early phase and will eventually advance to do more with stones than lick them sometimes? What would our being baffled by a super-intelligence look like? Maybe some effect like dark matter. It would make less sense the more we found out about it, and because it's on a lev…
It’s a form of communication. You can learn to distinguish different kinds of barking a healthy dog is making, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to care nearly as much about a large animal showing up.
If you look at the stuff Turing was writing in the 1950s its fascinating because he really saw the potential of what computation was going to be able to do. There was a paradigm shift in thinking about possibilities here that he grasped in the very early days. https://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/activities/ieg/e-library/sources/t_a... It would be amazing to go and fetch Turing with a time machine and bring him to our time. Show…