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

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

#31

Post by TaupeRanger »

mcv wrote: 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…

the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old

An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can beat a 4 year old at the game of chess is unsurprising and not particularly meaningful.

We have no idea what it takes to get general intelligence and/or understanding. Until we do, comparing computational statistics programs to 4 year old children is rather a meaningless exercise, just as Turing and Djikstra told us decades ago:

"The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim."

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

#32

Post by ben_w »

Spooky23 wrote: post #23

I doubt it. End of the day human consciousness is incredibly powerful. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Transistors are faster than synapses to the same degree that wolves are faster than hills.

And synergy is just as relevant for digital minds as organic ones.

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

#33

Post by rayiner »

ben_w wrote: post #29
rayiner wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

> 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.

But I’m sure you could’ve written down the literal phrase, which is all I asked Siri to do (Siri doesn’t do anything with a reminder other than parse it for dates and times). (Incidentally, my six year old would understand what I mean by brief—my wife and I are both lawyers and even a child is better at context than a computer.)

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

#34

Post by wj »

TaupeRanger wrote: post #31
mcv wrote: 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…

the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can…

I feel like that with that line of reasoning you could also say that a 34-year-old isn't smarter than a 4-year-old. The 34-year-old just has a bigger dataset.

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

#35

Post by goatlover »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #10

I'm okay if it takes 100 or 200 years. That's like going from the year 1800 to the year 2000. It's not a long time at all. I think it's completely doable and a reasonable upper bound. Everyone just needs to relax a bit and let progress run its course.

The longer the better, as it gives society time to adapt/prepare for such a potentially powerful technology.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

xutopia wrote: post #27
jkholm wrote: 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…

I don't think any 4 year old can do better at French English 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.

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by close04 »

wj wrote: post #34
TaupeRanger wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the best AI is much smarter at chess than any 4 year old An AI is not "smarter at chess" than a 4 year old any more than a calculator is "smarter at arithmetic" than a 4 year old or a car is "smarter at moving fast" than a 4 year old. A modern AI program is simply a computational statistics program crunching some numbers. It has no "smarts" or "understanding" of the game in any meaningful sense. The fact that it can…

I feel like that with that line of reasoning you could also say that a 34-year-old isn't smarter than a 4-year-old. The 34-year-old just has a bigger dataset.

A 4 year old has "general purpose intelligence". It's an "algorithm" that can learn (from) anything. Can the translating AI solve a simple puzzle? No, because it is only trained for a specific and narrow activity. The same for most other specialized AIs. Alpha Zero can beat anyone at chess. But ask it to identify LEGO toys and it will fail.

Most devices we use are far better at doing their job than a human, which is why we use them. But even if they learn and improve what they're doing they are still only able to do that one single thing.

Also I noticed above that the misconception still persists that autonomous driving today is safer than human driving although it has been proven wrong [0]. It will come at some point but we're not there yet.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/02/in-2017-the-feds-said-t...

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

#38

Post by eof »

b_tterc_p wrote: post #11
flavor8 wrote: post #9

"Ever" is not a useful word here. It's like saying "Will four year olds ever be grown in pods?" A better headline might be "Can AI learn as flexibly as a four year old with today's known techniques?", to which the answer is of course "No".

Those sound like different questions. The original is asking if it is theoretically plausible. I don’t think that’s out of line.

To be fair, the article did little to nothing to address if it's theoretically plausible. Just that we are far away at the moment.

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

#39

Post by short_sells_poo »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #26
pen2l wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is also absolutely atrocious at English -> German. Deepl.com translator is considerably better, but still very far from perfect.

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

#40

Post by Spooky23 »

ben_w wrote: post #32
Spooky23 wrote: post #23

I doubt it. End of the day human consciousness is incredibly powerful. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Transistors are faster than synapses to the same degree that wolves are faster than hills. And synergy is just as relevant for digital minds as organic ones.

Think about how much a gorilla has in common with a human. We’re close, but only one species is in a zoo.

Every human gets smarter as our tools like AI get better.

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