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Summary: This is a parody of various arguments about superintelligent AI. It opens by parodying the classic futurist parable of history as exponential growth i
by rntz 10y ago
Summary: This is a parody of various arguments about superintelligent AI.
It opens by parodying the classic futurist parable of history as exponential growth in intellect and technology, recasting history as a tale of growth in size (after all, the earliest organisms were tiny). It recasts fears about superintelligent AI as fears about super-large beings (wouldn't you be afraid of something that could step on you as easily as you step on an ant?).
Then it switches to parodying some arguments against the possibility of superintelligence, in order:
1. That intelligence is "irreducibly complex"; since we don't understand what makes people smart, we can't expect to make smarter machines. This, to me, is the weakest of the parodies in the article. We definitely understand size better than intelligence, and lack of fundamental understanding has absolutely impeded our ability to engineer things in the past. To get to the Moon, we had to understand gravitation at a much deeper level than "things fall down", or even than "things fall in parabolas". That said, total understanding of natural phenomena is not always necessary to replicate them: the Wright brothers didn't need to understood how exactly bird flight worked to build the first plane.
2. That intelligence is poorly defined ("human-level" AI is "meaningless"). "Largeness" is similarly vague, but an Airbus is still obviously bigger than a human. Vague goals can still be met.
3. That human intelligence is in some way "universal". I don't understand this argument enough to explain the parody. Can someone else chime in?
4. Psychological arguments against superintelligence, which says that the origin of belief-in and fear-of superintelligent machines is really evolutionary, not logical. This is a classic non-sequitur; if evolution predisposes humans to be afraid of wolves, it does not follow that humans have no reason to be afraid of wolves.
5. That the goal of AI research is to augment human intelligence, not supplant it. Another non-sequitur.
6. Arguments from the hard problem of consciousness, and philosophical questions like "can a machine ever be conscious?". Yet another non sequitur: even if you think a machine fundamentally can't be conscious, it doesn't follow that it can't be functionally superintelligent.
7. Bullshit arguments involving quantum mechanics, Godelian incompleteness, and other things with pop-cultural cachet that most people who invoke them don't have the technical chops to understand.
- myhf 10y ago> 3. That human intelligence is in some way "universal". I don't understand this argument enough to explain the parody. Can someone else chime in? This is a reference to the principle of computational equivalence. All Turing-complete systems are capable of emulating each other. A human can execute any program a machine can (only slower), and derive benefit from the results even if he doesn't fully understand the process. http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquivalence.html http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PrincipleofComputationalEquival...
- rntz 10y agoI'm familiar with Turing-equivalence, but the argument in that section didn't seem analogous to me. In the first place, it's about human universality, not computer universality; so an implicit premise of the "parodied argument" would have to be something like "human intelligence is Turing-complete" - I've seen no argument against machine superintelligence that starts from this premise (although not all arguments depend on rejecting it, either).
- johncolanduoni 10y agoRejecting human intelligence being Turing-complete in the same sense as a particular conventional computer (i.e as a linear bounded automaton) would be a pretty hard sell. It would be equivalent to claiming that there was a single-threaded C program that a human with unbounded time and scratch paper couldn't step through.
- scandox 10y agoWhy does the threading matter?
- johncolanduoni 10y agoIt doesn't, but I think it's an easier sell that humans can do that than a multithreaded case. Especially because it introduces a lot more undefined behavior.
- ythn 10y agoI would say we understand intelligence even less than the wright brothers understood flight. What is "intelligence" and how is it different from "algorithms". Where does first person consciousness come in? Can a superintelligence be written with software alone? If so what is the minimum number of bytes required? Does that mean you could make a mechanical superintelligence made purely of marbles and levers? I say the burden of proof here falls on those supporting artificial superintelligences. It's purely fictional at this point
- contravariant 10y ago>3. That human intelligence is in some way "universal". I don't understand this argument enough to explain the parody. Can someone else chime in? From what I understand it's basically how using tools to solve a problem is still considered 'intelligent', so to measure intelligence you should consider what problems you can solve, not how. In particular creating a device to solve a problem would still count as solving the problem. Hence if humans can create it, it can't be more intelligent than humans. The argument does make more sense for intelligence. Even if you don't agree with identifying 'problem solving skill' with 'intelligence' you still have the paradox that it is seemingly impossible to create something that can solve more problems than its creator.