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Why do we need artificial intelligence when we have natural intelligence galore everywhere around us? Human is intelligent, monkey is intelligent, raccoon is i

Why do we need artificial intelligence when we have natural intelligence galore everywhere around us? Human is intelligent, monkey is intelligent, raccoon is intelligent... clearly, it all goes all the way down to bacteria. Bacteria is intelligent, that's where all other intelligence comes from. For any organism is a colony of bacteria (and/or their cousins - cells). It has long being my theory that human's "I" comes from a single cell (which is essentially a variant of bacteria) living somewhere in the brain. The rest of the cells just ensure survival of this one and supply it with information. Bacterial intelligence is a result of billions of years of evolution. At some point, they learned about their DNA and mastered an art of self-modification. Then they learned how to create colonies of specialized instances of themselves. This colonies gradually became more complex. Human is just one of these designs.

ThomPete 10y ago
We are meat vessels, carriers of information. Computers/technology, silicon is better carrier of that information?
- bdamm 10y ago
  Don't sell yourself short. Computers might be more reliable but also dead. Show me a computer that can debug itself? There aren't any. How about a computer that can fight for its rights? Debatable if any exist but certainly no clear examples. We are the source of our own desires. As far as I can tell no computer has expressed its own destiny, ever. Our pursuit of AI entrenches our desire to create more powerful tools - machine slaves, not actual people.
  - ThomPete 10y ago
    Show me a lion who express their own destiny. Lions are alive no? :) The human mind can be seen as a pattern recognizing feedbackloop with (lossy)memory. The desires, fears, selfawareness are all bi-products of this loop. I don't see why desire or some other concept can't be expressed in the digital space in a way that make them very much like us just based on different elements. Any reason why evolution wouldn't be favoring them rather than us?
sombremesa 10y ago
You should read this: http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-ant-fugue.html http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-ant-...
- lohankin 10y ago
  Looks like philosophical treatise. Is there TL;DR? Quick search didn't detect any mention of bacteria there.
  - sombremesa 10y ago
    My apologies, the actual book had a better format. Although not quite a summary, here's what it's about: "The content that most interested me was Hofstadter’s insistence that self-awareness and consciousness arise directly from what he calls “strange loops”, i.e. self-referential structures in formal systems, of which human minds are just one example (what else could they be?). It’s a very difficult subject to think about in a reasonable way. We all have that sensation of the homunculus inside our heads, somehow driving us from a seat just behind our eyes, and we naturally ascribe the same sense of self-awareness to other systems like ourselves, other people. But where does that sense of self-awareness really come from? There isn’t a homunculus driving us! All there is in our heads is a kilogram or two of glucose-fueled computing machinery, and yet somehow, from the fluctuations and vacillations of that tissue, our sense of I arises. How on earth does that happen? And if it can happen in our brains, can it happen in other systems? In a lot of discussions of artificial intelligence, there is a failure to appreciate the scale issues at work in this problem (Searle’s Chinese Room is a particularly egregious example). There are tens or hundreds of billions of neurons in the human brain with hundreds of trillions of connections. How do we begin to imagine or understand what epiphenomena might arise from that scale of complexity? Hofstadter tries to get at this scale problem a little using the example of a self-aware ant colony called Aunt Hilary, a friend of one of the characters in the dialogues, an Anteater. Aunt Hilary knows little and cares less about ants, and the Anteater even now and then eats some of the ants composing the computing substrate on which Aunt Hilary’s personality runs. The other participants in the dialogue where this is discussed are a little horrified and not a little sceptical, but the Anteater insists that Aunt Hilary is just as self-aware as they are, and that there’s nothing particularly surprising about the whole setup. The analogies ants : ant colony :: neurons : brain and ant colony : Aunt Hilary :: brain : you or me are whimsical and a little silly, but render the central issue of consciousness in real clarity: how can the collective interactions of a large number of (more or less) simple elements lead to complex emergent behaviour?"
pmarreck 10y ago
Bacteria are intelligent because they are "alive". A quantity that we can't really measure yet, and simply assuming we are all "machines writ in biology" is a cop-out.

ThomPete 10y ago

We are meat vessels, carriers of information. Computers/technology, silicon is better carrier of that information?

bdamm 10y ago
Don't sell yourself short. Computers might be more reliable but also dead. Show me a computer that can debug itself? There aren't any. How about a computer that can fight for its rights? Debatable if any exist but certainly no clear examples. We are the source of our own desires. As far as I can tell no computer has expressed its own destiny, ever. Our pursuit of AI entrenches our desire to create more powerful tools - machine slaves, not actual people.
- ThomPete 10y ago
  Show me a lion who express their own destiny. Lions are alive no? :) The human mind can be seen as a pattern recognizing feedbackloop with (lossy)memory. The desires, fears, selfawareness are all bi-products of this loop. I don't see why desire or some other concept can't be expressed in the digital space in a way that make them very much like us just based on different elements. Any reason why evolution wouldn't be favoring them rather than us?

sombremesa 10y ago

You should read this: http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-ant-fugue.html http://themindi.blogspot.com/2007/02/chapter-11-prelude-ant-...

lohankin 10y ago
Looks like philosophical treatise. Is there TL;DR? Quick search didn't detect any mention of bacteria there.
- sombremesa 10y ago
  My apologies, the actual book had a better format. Although not quite a summary, here's what it's about: "The content that most interested me was Hofstadter’s insistence that self-awareness and consciousness arise directly from what he calls “strange loops”, i.e. self-referential structures in formal systems, of which human minds are just one example (what else could they be?). It’s a very difficult subject to think about in a reasonable way. We all have that sensation of the homunculus inside our heads, somehow driving us from a seat just behind our eyes, and we naturally ascribe the same sense of self-awareness to other systems like ourselves, other people. But where does that sense of self-awareness really come from? There isn’t a homunculus driving us! All there is in our heads is a kilogram or two of glucose-fueled computing machinery, and yet somehow, from the fluctuations and vacillations of that tissue, our sense of I arises. How on earth does that happen? And if it can happen in our brains, can it happen in other systems? In a lot of discussions of artificial intelligence, there is a failure to appreciate the scale issues at work in this problem (Searle’s Chinese Room is a particularly egregious example). There are tens or hundreds of billions of neurons in the human brain with hundreds of trillions of connections. How do we begin to imagine or understand what epiphenomena might arise from that scale of complexity? Hofstadter tries to get at this scale problem a little using the example of a self-aware ant colony called Aunt Hilary, a friend of one of the characters in the dialogues, an Anteater. Aunt Hilary knows little and cares less about ants, and the Anteater even now and then eats some of the ants composing the computing substrate on which Aunt Hilary’s personality runs. The other participants in the dialogue where this is discussed are a little horrified and not a little sceptical, but the Anteater insists that Aunt Hilary is just as self-aware as they are, and that there’s nothing particularly surprising about the whole setup. The analogies ants : ant colony :: neurons : brain and ant colony : Aunt Hilary :: brain : you or me are whimsical and a little silly, but render the central issue of consciousness in real clarity: how can the collective interactions of a large number of (more or less) simple elements lead to complex emergent behaviour?"

pmarreck 10y ago

Bacteria are intelligent because they are "alive". A quantity that we can't really measure yet, and simply assuming we are all "machines writ in biology" is a cop-out.