> 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…
> Detecting and ignoring spurious inputs and extreme edge cases are one of the main reasons that I feel better if there's a person alert and at the controls of a plane But what is more likely: a human pilot detecting and resolving problems with the computer systems, or the human accidentally crashing the plane?
Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
81–90 of 98 posts
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#82Earlier 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 ;-)
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#83Multiplying 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…
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#84All 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
Smart people in the past (and currently) have believed stupid things because of what they were exposed to and what they were optimizing on.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#85I hope this guy is just trolling, but in case he is not, this is a tired argument that should be debunked once and for all.
The brain in the course of seemingly mundane activities (interpreting what we see, for instance) effectively performs a stupendous amount of complex calculations per second [1]
What people confuse is conscious calculations vs effective calculations.[2] The brain does not need to output intermediate results of basic operations because that is not it's computational objective.
I was actually a bit disappointed at the shallowness of the article; from the title I was expecting maybe a discussion of how complex even the very concept of intelligence is, and how speed of calculations does not necessarily equate to intelligence.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/an-83-000-processor-supercomputer-only-ma...
[2] http://chrisfwestbury.blogspot.com/2014/06/on-processing-spe...
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Detecting and ignoring spurious inputs and extreme edge cases are one of the main reasons that I feel better if there's a person alert and at the controls of a plane But what is more likely: a human pilot detecting and resolving problems with the computer systems, or the human accidentally crashing the plane?
I think a human has a better chance of determining which inputs are false and which are reliable. I'm also not talking about a random person there. A random person off the street would be more likely to crash but that's true even if the plan is doing just fine judging from what I've seen of youtubers in flight sims.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#87I'm not familiar with Togelius' other writings so I don't know how fast and loose the man is with his words, but in isolation, these "arguments" are like a compilation of youtube comments. Normally I ignore them, but some days I take the bait.
The question at issue is made out to be "who's more intelligent, computers or human beings?" when the real question is "what is intelligence in the first place?". To merely assume some definition because it suites the author's position is nothing short of question begging.
There also do exist powerful arguments against strong AI and computationalism. Searle's Chinese room argument is perhaps the best known, but by all appearances, often unappreciated or misunderstood. The essential point he makes is that computers are syntactic machines, i.e., machines that transform strings of symbols (which are intrinsically meaningless) according to syntactic rules. However, human minds contain semantics (concepts). Because computers are syntactic machines only, they necessarily do not and cannot possess semantics. They can simulate semantics when a human being formalizes semantics by producing syntactic rules for the simulation, but no amount of syntax ever results in semantics any more than skillfully adding clay to a sculpture can ever produce a human being. Remember, a computer is anything that implements anything equivalent to the Turing machine (a formalization of effective method).
Aristotle, on the other hand, makes a much deeper argument about the nature of the intellect that can reinforce a restricted form of Searle's argument, viz., his arguments can be used to explain why computers lack semantics by showing that matter per se cannot possess "concepts" as such and apart from particular instances. This argument is difficult to appreciate without an understanding of Aristotle's broader metaphysics. However, the outline of the argument is as follows:
1. Matter is particular/concrete (e.g., "this tree/that rose").
2. Concepts are abstract (e.g., "Tree as a class/Redness as such").
3. The intellect, the organ of abstracting concepts from particular instances, holds concepts.
4. Therefore, the intellect is not material. QED.
...adding own minor premise and conclusion...
5. Computers are purely material.
6. Therefore, computers cannot be intelligent.
Note that "intellect" is not a synonym for "mind". Aristotle distinguishes such things as imagination (phantasm) from the intellect, the former of which he argues is material. To better see how concepts are immaterial, consider the word "tree". You may imagine a tree, or even a number of trees, but the image is always particular, it is always an image of a particular tree whether real or not. However, none of these is the concept "tree" which is not particular (if it were particular, then there could only be one particular tree). You can repeat the same reflection with anything: every triangle you imagine will be isosceles, scalene or right-angle and of some particular color, and indeed something triangular and not a triangle as such.
The general problem here can be related to the problem of qualia (and intensionality) and thus the mind-body problem introduced by Descartes' metaphysics and haunting much of philosophical discourse since (even when the mind is dropped and the body endowed with the powers attributed to the mind). Note that Aristotle's immaterial intellect is NOT Descartes' mind.
Others who have argued against computationalist or materialist conceptions of the mind include Kripke and Popper, but there are many in-depth treatments of the subject that address many of the claims and objections raised by the computationalists. That being said, I find "AI" (arguably a misnomer) to be a very interesting field.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I'm not sure that's exclusively the case. Smart people in the past (and currently) have believed stupid things because of what they were exposed to and what they were optimizing on.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Inventing multiplication is something no computer (as we currently understand them) would ever be able to do. AM, the discovery learning program developed by Doug Lenat, discovered multiplication, beginning with a few basic facts about set theory, and using about 200 heuristics.
I don't consider this an example of discovering multiplication. The set theory rules were given to the computer. Can a computer be built to start only with sensory input and then discover the rules of set theory? Would it ever be able recognize why the patterns and rules for operating with sets are important and worth further study? I'm skeptical. Would a program flag the discovery of multiplication as important beca…
Yes. Abstract knowledge is learnable, and the brain is an inference machine.
Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)
#90> 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…