Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

togelius.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–98 of 98 posts

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#91

Post by eli_gottlieb »

danielam wrote: post #87

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail... I'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…

>4. Therefore, the intellect is not material. QED.

That is face-palmingly bad logic. Can we pretend that famous ancient sages weren't so blindingly, obviously dumb as to believe one piece of stuff can't do multiple things?

>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).

I don't see how the acquisition of abstract knowledge has anything to do with qualia or the mind-body problem. Abstract knowledge is just hierarchical modeling.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#92

Post by maaku »

yequalsx wrote: post #56
maaku wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. Look at Pat Langley's BACON program back in the 80's. He didn't work on multiplication per se, but given nothing but "sensory input" it discovered laws of planetary motion, rules of physical chemistry, conservation laws, etc.

I looked at a summary of his work. I've never heard of him or of the BACON program so my knowledge is essentially zero in this. Looking at summary of his work it doesn't seem to me to qualify either. I'm not sure how to convey the idea in my head to English in such a way to make it clear why I think BACON doesn't qualify as discovering new ideas. I'll try though. From the write up, by Langely, of the program he wrote…

I'm not the one giving you downvotes. I believe you are incorrect, but you have taken the effort to explain your thinking and have the courage to admit that you could be wrong, so I wouldn't down-vote that.

In any case, let me flip the question around at you: how did Goedel come up with his incompleteness theorem? Surely it didn't just magically appear in his head? Most likely he followed some standard procedures of mathematical practice: manipulate symbols according to learned rules, look for 'surprising' features in the result, build a sample demonstration of a surprising result, and use intuition regarding its outcome to drive further thinking, etc.

You can look at any intellectual behavior and find processes underlying it, unless you want to argue that we don't live in a materialist universe and people have souls. Unless you go down that route, there must be mechanisms to thought, and indeed applied psychology agrees. So if there are mechanism to thought, why can't those run on a computer instead of biology?

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#93

Post by lmm »

drabiega wrote: post #67
lmm wrote: 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…

> 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 programming task.

Huh? I think the whole point is that that's a very difficult task.

> Fair comparisons would be say, an untrained program vs a baby, or a system trained with some general knowledge of vehicle control vs an average person. I'm not really sure that humans win out in either of those comparisons.

The human got very little direct training. They mostly got exposed to the environment and picked it up. You can give the computer program the same number of years and the same environment as the human got, and it won't do much good.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#94

Post by danielam »

beat wrote: post #77
simondedalus wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Calculation is not math per se.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#95

Post by danielam »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #89
yequalsx wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Can a computer be built to start only with sensory input and then discover the rules of set theory? Yes. Abstract knowledge is learnable, and the brain is an inference machine.

Non sequitur. In fact, what appears to be your stated premise actually argues against the conclusion, not for it. Besides, the mechanistic characterization of mind (you say brain, but for all intents and purposes here it makes no difference) is highly problematic.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#96

Post by danielam »

jhayward wrote: post #83
beat wrote: post #6

Multiplying 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…

In this thread we rediscover the truism that "AI is everything that hasn't been done yet." [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

It is no truism. It is merely dismissive and does not constitute a legitimate argument. There are numerous philosophers who have made arguments that challenge the notion of AI in the strong sense and who have no such interest in "preserving" feelings of human specialness that are allegedly being threatened. To lump all arguments against strong AI and computationalism in with "AI effect" is ignorant.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#97

Post by jcoffland »

pasquinelli wrote: post #71
jcoffland wrote: post #19

> 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…

This sounds more like a computer playing a proof game rather than a computer inventing a proof game.

Re: Human intelligence is overrated (2012)

#98

Post by jcoffland »

soared wrote: post #54
bryanlarsen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time you play a video game that uses generated levels, you are playing a game "invented" by a computer.

"Invented" by algorithms written by humans. It would maybe be invented if a neural net created maps.

That would just be another level of the same game.
Post reply on HN