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1. I don’t think we can use examples from nature to make any predictions about the growth rate of computing power. 2. I didn’t say that we are close to human l

1. I don’t think we can use examples from nature to make any predictions about the growth rate of computing power. 2. I didn’t say that we are close to human level intelligence, just that if generalised Moore’s law holds then we will not get much warning - we will move the 1% level to human level in 10 years. How long it will take to get to the 1% level is currently unknown. 3. I was talking about generalised Moore’s law (a doubling of processing power ever 18 month), not the mechanism of how we do this. Just increasing transistors counts does not have much future (it appears), but there are many other ways of increasing computational power that I am sure will be used over the coming decades.

erikpukinskis 11y ago
> if generalize Moore's law holds then we will move the 1% level to human level in 10 years It's quite likely that human intelligence is actually highly optimized to solve specific classes of problems, such that increasing performance in one respect decreases performance in another. If you want to see this in play, look at human variability. There are plenty of examples of humans with extreme intelligence, but those people don't dominate other humans in every regard. They are brilliant on certain subjects while other subjects don't even register. The most brilliant physicist in the world might say the wrong thing to the wrong person and get shot. And software has no intrinsic way to integrate the two systems that might be able to perform well at those two tasks respectively. The very computational structures which lead to physics breakthroughs might be involved in the social mistake. The integration of conflicting models is solved by human beings through society. We empathize, coordinate, fight, and kill until some consensus emerges. People seem to assume that AIs will just be able to automatically integrate their knowledge with one another, but that doesn't make sense. If that's true you haven't gotten to the "conflicting models" scenario yet. The whole notion of "general" intelligence is highly suspect. Intelligence is really a certain kind of adaptability to your environment. But there's no such thing as general adaptability. Features that let you adapt to the sea will be liabilities if you find yourself on land. Some combinations of adaptation may be compatible, but many will be are antagonistic. The realistic scenario is that AIs will just join our society, occupying their own place on the spectrum of specialization.
- danieltillett 11y ago
  This seems to come up in every discussion of intelligence here on HN. General intelligence isn't a thing, it is a statistical measurement of the correlations between specific intelligences (11 from memory). It is rather useful as it allows you to make quite good predictions about many areas of human behaviour.

erikpukinskis 11y ago

> if generalize Moore's law holds then we will move the 1% level to human level in 10 years It's quite likely that human intelligence is actually highly optimized to solve specific classes of problems, such that increasing performance in one respect decreases performance in another. If you want to see this in play, look at human variability. There are plenty of examples of humans with extreme intelligence, but those people don't dominate other humans in every regard. They are brilliant on certain subjects while other subjects don't even register. The most brilliant physicist in the world might say the wrong thing to the wrong person and get shot. And software has no intrinsic way to integrate the two systems that might be able to perform well at those two tasks respectively. The very computational structures which lead to physics breakthroughs might be involved in the social mistake. The integration of conflicting models is solved by human beings through society. We empathize, coordinate, fight, and kill until some consensus emerges. People seem to assume that AIs will just be able to automatically integrate their knowledge with one another, but that doesn't make sense. If that's true you haven't gotten to the "conflicting models" scenario yet. The whole notion of "general" intelligence is highly suspect. Intelligence is really a certain kind of adaptability to your environment. But there's no such thing as general adaptability. Features that let you adapt to the sea will be liabilities if you find yourself on land. Some combinations of adaptation may be compatible, but many will be are antagonistic. The realistic scenario is that AIs will just join our society, occupying their own place on the spectrum of specialization.

danieltillett 11y ago
This seems to come up in every discussion of intelligence here on HN. General intelligence isn't a thing, it is a statistical measurement of the correlations between specific intelligences (11 from memory). It is rather useful as it allows you to make quite good predictions about many areas of human behaviour.