10 ms·

IA or AI?

103 points by rudenoise 11y ago

MaysonL 11y ago
When considering intelligence amplification, the book that comes to mind is Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury. Computer-to-brain interfaces may go a long way in the next few thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistorical_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistorical_Crisis
- arethuza 11y ago
  Also Vernon Vinge's Rainbows End which has both IA and AI in a fairly plausible near future scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
musha68k 11y ago
Nothing is more high-tech than culture, it's everything even if we tend to work over the seemingly faceless Internet these days - it's people all the way down.
yang140 11y ago
John Markoff's new book "Machines of Loving Grace" is a great one about this AI vs IA topic. http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/dp/0062266683 http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/d...
otoburb 11y ago
"[...] good notation is worth a whopping increment in IQ points. Except that the really good ones allow one to have thoughts that are impossible without." I posit this post tangentially explains the nagging feeling that many parents[1] experience when their children struggle with mathematics. The benefits of basic language literacy are clear, but follow-on analogies such as the above emphasize a point of view concluding that an inability to attain mathematical fluency excludes the next generation from any implied augmented intelligence benefits. The extrapolated message would be that mathematically disinclined adults will then be completely unable to comprehend certain important thoughts in [insert arcane, highly-specialized technical field]. Regarding the question posed by the title and last sentence in the blog post, I'm not sure why the thrust is framed as an XOR, and not as an AND. It's not like we can't focus on both IA and AI at the same time. [1] Anecdata warning: I am a parent. I have this nagging feeling.
- rntz 11y ago
  > an inability to attain mathematical fluency excludes the next generation from any implied augmented intelligence benefits. Well, only in some ways. I don't have to understand how a refrigerator works in order to use it. Improvements in quality of life produced by use of augmented intelligence ought to be accessible even to those without it.
  - smegger001 11y ago
    The problem only happens when no one bothers to learn how something works. Look at all of those big iron systems out there that few people know how to program, there is reason Cobol and Fortran programmers still make good money. Oh and refrigeration is simple, it is just an application of the ideal gas law PV=nRT, and a pump. Refrigerant is compressed then cooled through use of a heat-sink then pumped into the refrigerator and allowed to expand where the refrigerant absorbs thermal energy and is pumped out and repeated.
    - TrevorJ 11y ago
      I'm not sure it's a problem. It's encapsulaiton. Systems should be designed so that there is a difference between the knowledge required to operate the device and the knowledge required to design/service it.
- jhanschoo 11y ago
  i believe that the false dichotomy was used in order to attract clicks and to provide context for the relevance of IA. The article hardly talks about AI at all except that it was the AI agenda which IA was born from.
- amirouche 11y ago
  > It's not like we can't focus on both IA and AI at the same time. I think OP want to say that AI is a mean, whereas IA is an end. The real goal of AI is IA. Also I think that aiming for IA will provide small benefits in the short term but a lot of benefit in the long term taking into consideration the slow pace of IA's innovations emergence like it's the case of GUIs (as explained in the article). Whereas AI doesn't provide benefits in the short term at all if not applied to IA. From my AI enthusiast understanding, what happens is that instead of applying the discoveries of narrow AI, researcher are jumping into AGI which doesn't help to spread IA innovations and lower the chance of emergence of new discoveries not necessarily related to the field of IA or AI. That's how I understand that aiming for IA provides more overall benefits.
bytesandbots 11y ago
That enforces my belief that the influx of new programming languages will continue for some more years and it will only get better.
Practicality 11y ago
It seems obvious to me that IA is where the tremendous benefits to society occur. Imagine a world where everyone has the equivalent of a genius IQ today. A lot of problems suddenly disappear. AI, on the other hand, while very useful, doesn't change people. And frankly, most problems we have are because people lack understanding. I don't know about you, but I don't actually want to replace mankind with something else, I just want us all better. Of course, what "better" is--is highly debatable, so that definitely gives pause as well.
- mziel 11y ago
  > A lot of problems suddenly disappear. Not to be negative but citation needed. Also (I guess we'll cross "isolation" of the list): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Social_and_emotional_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Social...
  - logicchains 11y ago
    >Isolation is one of the main challenges faced by gifted individuals, especially those with no social network of gifted peers. In order to gain popularity, gifted children will often try to hide their abilities to win social approval. That seems to suggest the cause of the problem is a lack of high IQ individuals. If the majority had a high IQ due to IA, nobody would feel isolated by their high IQ (although then the low IQ minority might feel isolated).
  - Practicality 11y ago
    An interesting point. I think your citation adds to the point though. In observing my "normal" peers, honestly, they do a lot of very strange things just to be considered normal. I mean, it's pretty expensive just to keep up with current trend of sunglasses size or sock length, just to be seen as normal. Not to mention that you have to hold your hands a certain way and talk incoherently. There is a lot of "normalizing" behavior that becomes unnecessary when everyone has the capacity to see how inane and impractical such behavior really is.
    - deleted 11y ago
dsr_ 11y ago
The IA advance which is most obvious to me (yet somehow not yet a reality) is the nomenclator. In Rome, a nomenclator was a slave who remembered people's names for you, and as they approached would whisper to you that this is Gaius Tullius Castor, his wife is Flaminia, his eldest boy is Marcus, and he owns beanfields. A Google Glass camera on your eyeglasses and a speaker in your ear, hooked up to Facebook's face recognition and social web, can tell you a quick precis of who you see across the room before they get to you. Add a touch sensor in your pocket or on a ring for unobtrusive control, and a mic to pick up your annotations or commands, and you've got a product that should be a major hit by the second generation.
- lnanek2 11y ago
  Google famously banned face recognition on Glass after I and some other developers made demo apps and APIs for using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1aeMJY1AO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1aeMJY1AO0 Even now that Glass has been canceled for all but commercial use, it's still in the guidelines that you aren't allowed to use face recognition: > https://developers.google.com/glass/policies?hl=en https://developers.google.com/glass/policies?hl=en " Don't use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Glassware that do this will not be approved at this time. " Amusingly, my nursing notes demo was me trying to be politically correct. People were more interested in things like cross referencing most wanted lists and sexual offender lists.
  - protomyth 11y ago
    That ban made me uninterested in Glass. Face recognition would have been such a help to elderly folks. Add object recognition and GPS and you could have had an assistant to help the elderly through their day.
  - nickpsecurity 11y ago
    I can't see why. The tech just needs to be designed to handle malicious input a bit better and isolate certain aspects on a per-user basis. That people could pollute the recognition system's data set should've been assumed. Especially if marketing to the Internet crowd. ;)
akkartik 11y ago
The EWD by Dijkstra now actually mentions Engelbart by name: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD387.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD387.PDF.
- tlb 11y ago
  Props to Dijkstra for choosing the right topics to have strong opinions about, which is the hardest part in making an intellectual contribution -- far harder than being right or wrong about a given topic. The writeup is like code that's correct but for a sign error.
maxander 11y ago
The idea of "notation as intelligence augmentation" is the reason (or one of them) that Haskell programmers are so enthusiastic about things like functors and monads; type theory is its own branch of mathematics that could be appended in the list of things like calculus and vector analysis [1], and might bring in the same kind of new levels of thought and abstraction. [1] Disclaimer; I am not a mathematician.
hyperpallium 11y ago
oblig. https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/903/ We already have amplified memory (see also: books, mnemonics). and google amplifies retrieval. But what is "intelligence", that we might amplify it? For me, limited short-term working memory is an obstacle (EWD's "limited size of skull"). As complexity is added, earlier parts drop out. There is the "technology" of hierarchical decomposition and the pyschological instinct of chunking, but every problem has irreducible complexity... if this is greater than my working memory, I cannot grasp it. Artificially enhanced working memory may help here, but I suspect the limit is due not so much short-term memory itself, but it having associations throughout all long-term memory. That is, it's less a cache limit than a bandwidth limit, interconnecting with the entire mind. We aren't Von Neumann architectured. PS: there's an argument that we might not be able to grasp intelligence itself, if its and its components' irreducible complexity is greater than any person's working memory - even if we formalize a correct model, we mightn't grasp it ourselves. Thus, IA may be essential for AI. Or, AI is essential for AI.
ATLobotomy 11y ago
EDW387 [0] (which doesn't have NN0 or NN1 pseudonyms either) seems to be pretty clear about what the "anti-intellectualism" comment was about. >The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous. Wish the author went into more detail on why now may be different than during Kay/Engelbart's time. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD387.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  There is this "Tim van Gelder on Douglas Engelbart, Intelligence Amplification and Argument Mapping" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P77FvUy-NGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P77FvUy-NGA
delish 11y ago
> The point I am making here is that Engelbart and Kay were unrealistic in expecting that their technologies would give quick results in the way of Tools for Thought. They had no appreciation for the vast and rich culture that produced the tools for thought enabled by the traditional technologies of writing and printing. They did not realize that a similar culture needs to arise around a new technology with augmentation potential. I am guilty of deifying Englebart and Kay, and castigating "our society" for failing them. After my honeymoon period with the "tool of thought" people, I've calmed down. Here's my radical belief: portability is for people who can't write their own programs. (copped from a Torvalds witticism) Consider writing and literacy: If you really grow up in a literate culture, you can start with a blank page and end with a bespoke document that suits your needs. If you don't grow up in that, you have to modify others' documents. This limits you. Hallmark cards are for people who can't write poetically (no judgment intended). So too for programming. Today we rely on hundreds of millions of lines of code of others we can't even realistically modify. But I think the future resembles Forth: in less than a hundred lines of code, you write something that suits your needs[0]. You can't do this yet because computers suck. I'm talking loosely and at a high-level. [0] I think Forth is a powerful vision for the future: no operating system, no types, no compatibility, no syntax. An executable english language.
bradneuberg 11y ago
Great piece. I got a chance to work with Douglas Engelbart several years ago and wrote up some responses in reply to Maarten's IA or AI post: http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html

103 points by rudenoise 11y ago

When considering intelligence amplification, the book that comes to mind is Psychohistorical Crisis, by Donald Kingsbury. Computer-to-brain interfaces may go a long way in the next few thousand years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistorical_Crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychohistorical_Crisis

arethuza 11y ago
Also Vernon Vinge's Rainbows End which has both IA and AI in a fairly plausible near future scenario: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

musha68k 11y ago

Nothing is more high-tech than culture, it's everything even if we tend to work over the seemingly faceless Internet these days - it's people all the way down.

yang140 11y ago

John Markoff's new book "Machines of Loving Grace" is a great one about this AI vs IA topic. http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/dp/0062266683 http://www.amazon.com/Machines-Loving-Grace-Common-Between/d...

otoburb 11y ago

"[...] good notation is worth a whopping increment in IQ points. Except that the really good ones allow one to have thoughts that are impossible without." I posit this post tangentially explains the nagging feeling that many parents[1] experience when their children struggle with mathematics. The benefits of basic language literacy are clear, but follow-on analogies such as the above emphasize a point of view concluding that an inability to attain mathematical fluency excludes the next generation from any implied augmented intelligence benefits. The extrapolated message would be that mathematically disinclined adults will then be completely unable to comprehend certain important thoughts in [insert arcane, highly-specialized technical field]. Regarding the question posed by the title and last sentence in the blog post, I'm not sure why the thrust is framed as an XOR, and not as an AND. It's not like we can't focus on both IA and AI at the same time. [1] Anecdata warning: I am a parent. I have this nagging feeling.

rntz 11y ago
> an inability to attain mathematical fluency excludes the next generation from any implied augmented intelligence benefits. Well, only in some ways. I don't have to understand how a refrigerator works in order to use it. Improvements in quality of life produced by use of augmented intelligence ought to be accessible even to those without it.
- smegger001 11y ago
  The problem only happens when no one bothers to learn how something works. Look at all of those big iron systems out there that few people know how to program, there is reason Cobol and Fortran programmers still make good money. Oh and refrigeration is simple, it is just an application of the ideal gas law PV=nRT, and a pump. Refrigerant is compressed then cooled through use of a heat-sink then pumped into the refrigerator and allowed to expand where the refrigerant absorbs thermal energy and is pumped out and repeated.
  - TrevorJ 11y ago
    I'm not sure it's a problem. It's encapsulaiton. Systems should be designed so that there is a difference between the knowledge required to operate the device and the knowledge required to design/service it.
jhanschoo 11y ago
i believe that the false dichotomy was used in order to attract clicks and to provide context for the relevance of IA. The article hardly talks about AI at all except that it was the AI agenda which IA was born from.
amirouche 11y ago
> It's not like we can't focus on both IA and AI at the same time. I think OP want to say that AI is a mean, whereas IA is an end. The real goal of AI is IA. Also I think that aiming for IA will provide small benefits in the short term but a lot of benefit in the long term taking into consideration the slow pace of IA's innovations emergence like it's the case of GUIs (as explained in the article). Whereas AI doesn't provide benefits in the short term at all if not applied to IA. From my AI enthusiast understanding, what happens is that instead of applying the discoveries of narrow AI, researcher are jumping into AGI which doesn't help to spread IA innovations and lower the chance of emergence of new discoveries not necessarily related to the field of IA or AI. That's how I understand that aiming for IA provides more overall benefits.

bytesandbots 11y ago

That enforces my belief that the influx of new programming languages will continue for some more years and it will only get better.

Practicality 11y ago

It seems obvious to me that IA is where the tremendous benefits to society occur. Imagine a world where everyone has the equivalent of a genius IQ today. A lot of problems suddenly disappear. AI, on the other hand, while very useful, doesn't change people. And frankly, most problems we have are because people lack understanding. I don't know about you, but I don't actually want to replace mankind with something else, I just want us all better. Of course, what "better" is--is highly debatable, so that definitely gives pause as well.

mziel 11y ago
> A lot of problems suddenly disappear. Not to be negative but citation needed. Also (I guess we'll cross "isolation" of the list): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Social_and_emotional_issues https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_giftedness#Social...
- logicchains 11y ago
  >Isolation is one of the main challenges faced by gifted individuals, especially those with no social network of gifted peers. In order to gain popularity, gifted children will often try to hide their abilities to win social approval. That seems to suggest the cause of the problem is a lack of high IQ individuals. If the majority had a high IQ due to IA, nobody would feel isolated by their high IQ (although then the low IQ minority might feel isolated).
- Practicality 11y ago
  An interesting point. I think your citation adds to the point though. In observing my "normal" peers, honestly, they do a lot of very strange things just to be considered normal. I mean, it's pretty expensive just to keep up with current trend of sunglasses size or sock length, just to be seen as normal. Not to mention that you have to hold your hands a certain way and talk incoherently. There is a lot of "normalizing" behavior that becomes unnecessary when everyone has the capacity to see how inane and impractical such behavior really is.
  - deleted 11y ago

dsr_ 11y ago

The IA advance which is most obvious to me (yet somehow not yet a reality) is the nomenclator. In Rome, a nomenclator was a slave who remembered people's names for you, and as they approached would whisper to you that this is Gaius Tullius Castor, his wife is Flaminia, his eldest boy is Marcus, and he owns beanfields. A Google Glass camera on your eyeglasses and a speaker in your ear, hooked up to Facebook's face recognition and social web, can tell you a quick precis of who you see across the room before they get to you. Add a touch sensor in your pocket or on a ring for unobtrusive control, and a mic to pick up your annotations or commands, and you've got a product that should be a major hit by the second generation.

lnanek2 11y ago
Google famously banned face recognition on Glass after I and some other developers made demo apps and APIs for using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1aeMJY1AO0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1aeMJY1AO0 Even now that Glass has been canceled for all but commercial use, it's still in the guidelines that you aren't allowed to use face recognition: > https://developers.google.com/glass/policies?hl=en https://developers.google.com/glass/policies?hl=en " Don't use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Glassware that do this will not be approved at this time. " Amusingly, my nursing notes demo was me trying to be politically correct. People were more interested in things like cross referencing most wanted lists and sexual offender lists.
- protomyth 11y ago
  That ban made me uninterested in Glass. Face recognition would have been such a help to elderly folks. Add object recognition and GPS and you could have had an assistant to help the elderly through their day.
- nickpsecurity 11y ago
  I can't see why. The tech just needs to be designed to handle malicious input a bit better and isolate certain aspects on a per-user basis. That people could pollute the recognition system's data set should've been assumed. Especially if marketing to the Internet crowd. ;)

akkartik 11y ago

The EWD by Dijkstra now actually mentions Engelbart by name: https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD387.PDF https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd03xx/EWD387.PDF.

tlb 11y ago
Props to Dijkstra for choosing the right topics to have strong opinions about, which is the hardest part in making an intellectual contribution -- far harder than being right or wrong about a given topic. The writeup is like code that's correct but for a sign error.

maxander 11y ago

The idea of "notation as intelligence augmentation" is the reason (or one of them) that Haskell programmers are so enthusiastic about things like functors and monads; type theory is its own branch of mathematics that could be appended in the list of things like calculus and vector analysis [1], and might bring in the same kind of new levels of thought and abstraction. [1] Disclaimer; I am not a mathematician.

hyperpallium 11y ago

oblig. https://xkcd.com/903/ https://xkcd.com/903/ We already have amplified memory (see also: books, mnemonics). and google amplifies retrieval. But what is "intelligence", that we might amplify it? For me, limited short-term working memory is an obstacle (EWD's "limited size of skull"). As complexity is added, earlier parts drop out. There is the "technology" of hierarchical decomposition and the pyschological instinct of chunking, but every problem has irreducible complexity... if this is greater than my working memory, I cannot grasp it. Artificially enhanced working memory may help here, but I suspect the limit is due not so much short-term memory itself, but it having associations throughout all long-term memory. That is, it's less a cache limit than a bandwidth limit, interconnecting with the entire mind. We aren't Von Neumann architectured. PS: there's an argument that we might not be able to grasp intelligence itself, if its and its components' irreducible complexity is greater than any person's working memory - even if we formalize a correct model, we mightn't grasp it ourselves. Thus, IA may be essential for AI. Or, AI is essential for AI.

ATLobotomy 11y ago

EDW387 [0] (which doesn't have NN0 or NN1 pseudonyms either) seems to be pretty clear about what the "anti-intellectualism" comment was about. >The undisguised appeal to anti-intellectualism and anti-individualism was frightening. He was talking about his "augmented knowledge workshop" and I was constantly reminded of Manny Lehman's vigorous complaint about the American educational system that is extremely "knowledge oriented", failing to do justice to the fact that one of the main objects of education is the insight that makes quite a lot of knowledge superfluous. Wish the author went into more detail on why now may be different than during Kay/Engelbart's time. [0] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/EWD387.html https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD03xx/E...

rasz_pl 11y ago
There is this "Tim van Gelder on Douglas Engelbart, Intelligence Amplification and Argument Mapping" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P77FvUy-NGA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P77FvUy-NGA

delish 11y ago

> The point I am making here is that Engelbart and Kay were unrealistic in expecting that their technologies would give quick results in the way of Tools for Thought. They had no appreciation for the vast and rich culture that produced the tools for thought enabled by the traditional technologies of writing and printing. They did not realize that a similar culture needs to arise around a new technology with augmentation potential. I am guilty of deifying Englebart and Kay, and castigating "our society" for failing them. After my honeymoon period with the "tool of thought" people, I've calmed down. Here's my radical belief: portability is for people who can't write their own programs. (copped from a Torvalds witticism) Consider writing and literacy: If you really grow up in a literate culture, you can start with a blank page and end with a bespoke document that suits your needs. If you don't grow up in that, you have to modify others' documents. This limits you. Hallmark cards are for people who can't write poetically (no judgment intended). So too for programming. Today we rely on hundreds of millions of lines of code of others we can't even realistically modify. But I think the future resembles Forth: in less than a hundred lines of code, you write something that suits your needs[0]. You can't do this yet because computers suck. I'm talking loosely and at a high-level. [0] I think Forth is a powerful vision for the future: no operating system, no types, no compatibility, no syntax. An executable english language.

bradneuberg 11y ago

Great piece. I got a chance to work with Douglas Engelbart several years ago and wrote up some responses in reply to Maarten's IA or AI post: http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html http://codinginparadise.org/ebooks/html/blog/ia_vs__ai.html