12 ms·

> Temperature is not infinite [...] There is finite space and time. Finite speed. Just want to point out this is true, however these things go astronomically h

> Temperature is not infinite [...] There is finite space and time. Finite speed. Just want to point out this is true, however these things go astronomically high. > what evidence do we have that the limit is not us? We can measure the speed impulses travel through neurons, and compare that to, say, the speed of electrical impulses through silicon or light through fiber. We can find the maximum head-size that fits through a vaginal canal, or the maximum metabolic rate a human body could support, and try to determine if these factors imposed any limitations on intelligence during human evolution. We can look at other evolved/biological capabilities, like swimming or flying, and compare them to state-of-the-art artificial analogs, and see if a pattern emerges where the artificial analogs tend to have similar limitations as their biological counterparts.

DubiousPusher 9y ago
I think a compelling argument is the variance in intelligence among humans themselves. A cabal of AIs 2x as intelligent as your average "genius" could be quite formidable were they to decide to act against the favor of humankind.
- epx 9y ago
  Yes, but it is noteworthy that most geniuses are shortsighted in other respects. They probably would not survive in prehistory.
  - wand3r 9y ago
    Obviously some did.
    - jacquesm 9y ago
      At least long enough to reproduce.
  - pacaro 9y ago
    It's not clear to me how true this is. There are definitely individuals that exhibit savant skills in one area and mediocre to poor skills in other areas. But there are also true polymaths who can turn their hands to just about anything, I suspect that those people would do well on aggregate in any period of human history
  - obstinate 9y ago
    Depends on the style of genius. Napoleon, Genghis Kahn, Alexander the Great . . . they seem to have done pretty well for themselves.
- Retra 9y ago
  But anyone half that smart would know not to give an unproven system absolute, unchecked control over their critical infrastructure, which would basically be a requirement to causing problems humans can't easily overcome.
  - manicdee 9y ago
    The Machines will come to control our infrastructure through a series of small decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time. Computer control of farming decisions such as watering and fertilising. Link that in with insolation and wind prediction to minimise waste or maximise productivity. This happens in the cloud thanks to insolation prediction being tied into wide-area networks of solar farms. More such networks evolve independently, then one day some bright spark realises that prediction and control in domain X can be combined with control and prediction in domain Y to produce greater efficiencies. Linking reproductive health and food production to maximise water savings, for example. Next thing you know the computers decide that human population is best maintained in the order of hundreds of millions rather than billions. And then we find out that Terminator was actually propaganda from the human rebels who didn't like the computers telling them not to breed, and the nuclear war was Skynet protecting its desired humans from the rebels, not protecting itself.
    - nradov 9y ago
      The limiting factor in farm productivity is not decision making by human farmers. Anyone who has been farming for years already makes pretty close to optimal decisions based on the available data about crop prices, weather, soil status, labor rates, etc. The ones who make bad decisions end up bankrupt, and leave farming or work as hired farmhands. And there are so few decision-making farmers left anyway that automating the decision making part of their jobs won't achieve any meaningful cost savings.
      - kpil 9y ago
        Maybe Amazon will own 90% of the farms because the have the cheapest robots and best algorithms and statistics.
- adamlett 9y ago
  Yes, this is why the nerds rule over the jocks in high school. Oh, wait…
  - Qwertious 9y ago
    That's different, because there are specific rules against arms races in schools, that people typically adhere to. If there was a battle scheduled in advance, I'd bet on the nerds. But what's more, if they both have guns then everything's about even. Strength doesn't really help if you've been shot, and most high-schoolers don't have much experience shooting guns.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      >most high-schoolers don't have much experience shooting guns Actually a lot do but probably not so much in the places that readers/commenters here live.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    They don't win in high school. But later in life, jocks find themselves employed by nerds.
andrepd 9y ago
> Temperature is not infinite [...] There is finite space and time. Finite speed. There's no theoretical limit for temperature, and we believe spacetime could be infinite even though the observable universe is not. Nevertheless this is a very silly argument. If it's finite but absurdly high it's good enough for the purpose.
- thomasahle 9y ago
  > There's no theoretical limit for temperature I suppose when the particles reach lightspeed?
  - killjoywashere 9y ago
    The archtype of temperature is a black body radiator. Classically, you make a block of metal (ceramic, whatever), with a spherical cavity and drill a small hole into the cavity. Then you draw a vacuum and heat the cavity, point a scope at the hole, and measure the spectrum of ligh tcoming out. In this circumstance, there is no mass that limits the energy: you are measuring the temperature of a black, empty vacuum; thus there is no upper limit.
    - jahnu 9y ago
      > Then you draw a vacuum and heat the cavity What are you heating if it's a vacuum? How can you heat nothing?
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        You're measuring radiative heat, which indeed exists for most of its time in nothing. I guess that the idea of GP is that you could make the heating block arbitrarily big (say, size of the universe) and have it dump all its radiative heat into that cavity.
        jahnu 9y ago
        I see. Thanks. The difficulty here is people don't often specify if they mean heat in the form of kinetic energy or radiation. Much like how people say things like "releasing energy" without specifying the form of energy.
babyrainbow 9y ago
>We can measure the speed impulses travel through neurons, and compare that to, say, the speed of electrical impulses through silicon or light through fiber. This assumes that all the processing that human brain does is by sending signals across the neurons. Which we really don't know. Right? >We can look at other evolved/biological capabilities, like swimming or flying, and compare them to state-of-the-art artificial analogs.. Do we yet have an airplane yet that can come close to the efficiency of the most clumsiest of the birds?
- hughes 9y ago
  > Do we yet have an airplane yet that can come close to the efficiency of the most clumsiest of the birds? Regardless of efficiency, we have certainly exceeded the range, cargo capacity, top speed, and passenger space of most birds. Similarly, even if signal propagation in the brain is not understood, we could conceivably beat the brain in other metrics.
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    > Regardless of efficiency, we have certainly exceeded the range, cargo capacity, top speed, and passenger space of most birds. This is the core point. Our technology may still suck compared to nature, but we've been beating nature consistently since before humans learned to write, because we don't have the same set of constraints that natural biological systems have. So just like we can make inefficient flying machines that beat nature on most other conceivable metrics, we could presumably build an energy-inefficient but smarter mind at some point.
    - type0 9y ago
      I would say the progress that humans have achieved by now was by hacking the Nature, we were able to do this because we are part of the Nature. so in order to produce the AI that would be capable of progress that humans are to do it needs to be a part of Nature. Such wet-ware computers already exist, look up DNA based computers, but those are highly constrained (and their io is terrible). The sort of intelligence we can get to the wet-ware based AI is probably will be better spend on improving our own intelligence by hacking own our brains. > we could presumably build an energy-inefficient but smarter mind at some point. So this smarter mind will probably be our own, but that would also be achieved by some sort of artificial means.
martin-adams 9y ago
Looks like the vaginal canal is no longer a limiting factor. C-Sections are having a measurable impact on this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38210837 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38210837
scythe 9y ago
>We can find the maximum head-size that fits through a vaginal canal, or the maximum metabolic rate a human body could support, and try to determine if these factors imposed any limitations on intelligence during human evolution. Head sizes have been larger in human history and some human relatives with larger brains died out. Energy consumption on the other hand is a limiting factor for every computational device and energy efficiency tends to be a key category where Nature still wins. In particular, the liver and enzymes of various plants and microbes can perform chemical reactions in water at ambient temperature that we can't do at all; resilin is still a more efficient elastic material than any synthetic elastomer; artificial piezoelectric muscles have less than a tenth the energy efficiency of real ones, and of course lots of animals are able to run around in polar and desert regions we still can't traverse because of the fuel and material costs etc. One particularly revealing example is to calculate the ratio between: * the performance per watt of the most efficient supercomputer (7 GFlops/watt) vs the human brain (38 petaflops / 20 watts = 1.9 petaflops per watt) * the performance per watt of the human brain vs the Landauer limit at body temperature (don't remember)
- FeepingCreature 9y ago
  Yeah but ... human beings are fuelled via stomachs. Computers are fuelled via turbines built into gigantic dams. Or nuclear reactors. Or wind turbines. Or...
  - TeMPOraL 9y ago
    It's a general principle of contemporary technology that we lose with nature on efficiency, but compensate for that with sheer scale of our solutions. Birds are much more energy-efficient than planes, but then again, birds can't fly supersonic and don't move around tons of cargo.
- moultano 9y ago
  >* the performance per watt of the most efficient supercomputer (7 GFlops/watt) vs the human brain (38 petaflops / 20 watts = 1.9 petaflops per watt) Encouraging, but AI wouldn't be constrained to an energy budget similar to a human. At the rates you describe, beating a human would take the output of only a single wind turbine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)
sullyj3 9y ago
>> what evidence do we have that the limit is not us? This is just such manifestly wrongheaded reasoning as to be almost laughable. I think there's a substantially better argument against this notion than to actually try to find evidence against the claim. I prefer it because it reveals the total wrong-headedness of this style of reasoning. The argument is to turn it around and say "what evidence do we have that the limit is us?" A human level of intelligence seems like an incredibly and oddly specific level to be the maximum permissible by physics. And oddly specific claims need to be treated with extreme skepticism, because they carry high entropy, in violation of Occam's razor. If you want to know what x equals, you don't pick a number, say, 2, assume x=2, and ask people to provide you with reasons why it shouldn't be 2. There's an infinity of numbers, and the odds are just overwhelmingly against x happening to be 2. You start with the assumption that x could be literally any of the infinity of numbers, and start looking for evidence which narrows it down. More concretely, if you want to know the physical limit to intelligence, you start with the assumption that it could be anything, constrained by the evidence that's currently available. In this case, the evidence is that human intelligence provides a lower bound for the maximum physically allowable intelligence. Positing that our intelligence is the maximum possible becomes even more suspect when you consider the process by which our intelligence came about - evolution. Firstly, evolution is a process which tends towards reproductive fitness, not necessarily towards intelligence. Intelligence is selected for to the extent that it makes something more likely to reproduce, and no more, and it probably isn't the case that more smarts universally leads to more reproduction. In fact, most modern research suggests the opposite, with people with higher IQs having less sex. Secondly, we know that natural selection gets stuck in local optima. If your species is on top of a 10 smart-points hill, and in order to get to get to the 1000 smart-points hill over there your species has to mutate in a direction that makes it stupider before it gets smarter, your species is going to stay on the 10 smart-points hill. This is because individuals that mutate stupider in the direction of the 1000-point hill will be selected against. Thirdly, natural selection just isn't a very powerful optimization process. It works by random mutation, and it takes a lifetime to make a minuscule change which may or may not be in the right direction. Even if natural selection was solely optimizing for intelligence, and it could somehow avoid local optima, there would be no particular reason to believe that the world had existed long enough for the smartest possible organism to evolve. Fourthly, as _greim_ touches upon, evolution has a very limited medium to work with. All it can do is change the sequence of DNA base pairs, and produce inefficient meat machines that run on respiration. There are all sorts of complex arrangements of matter which might be intelligent, and biological ones are only a tiny subset of those possible arrangements. The odds of the smartest system physically possible residing in that little biological subset are tiny to begin with, and only get smaller as you consider the more direct arguments against biological systems mentioned above, like sluggish neural transmissions, etc.

DubiousPusher 9y ago

I think a compelling argument is the variance in intelligence among humans themselves. A cabal of AIs 2x as intelligent as your average "genius" could be quite formidable were they to decide to act against the favor of humankind.

epx 9y ago
Yes, but it is noteworthy that most geniuses are shortsighted in other respects. They probably would not survive in prehistory.
- wand3r 9y ago
  Obviously some did.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    At least long enough to reproduce.
- pacaro 9y ago
  It's not clear to me how true this is. There are definitely individuals that exhibit savant skills in one area and mediocre to poor skills in other areas. But there are also true polymaths who can turn their hands to just about anything, I suspect that those people would do well on aggregate in any period of human history
- obstinate 9y ago
  Depends on the style of genius. Napoleon, Genghis Kahn, Alexander the Great . . . they seem to have done pretty well for themselves.
Retra 9y ago
But anyone half that smart would know not to give an unproven system absolute, unchecked control over their critical infrastructure, which would basically be a requirement to causing problems humans can't easily overcome.
- manicdee 9y ago
  The Machines will come to control our infrastructure through a series of small decisions that seemed like a good idea at the time. Computer control of farming decisions such as watering and fertilising. Link that in with insolation and wind prediction to minimise waste or maximise productivity. This happens in the cloud thanks to insolation prediction being tied into wide-area networks of solar farms. More such networks evolve independently, then one day some bright spark realises that prediction and control in domain X can be combined with control and prediction in domain Y to produce greater efficiencies. Linking reproductive health and food production to maximise water savings, for example. Next thing you know the computers decide that human population is best maintained in the order of hundreds of millions rather than billions. And then we find out that Terminator was actually propaganda from the human rebels who didn't like the computers telling them not to breed, and the nuclear war was Skynet protecting its desired humans from the rebels, not protecting itself.
  - nradov 9y ago
    The limiting factor in farm productivity is not decision making by human farmers. Anyone who has been farming for years already makes pretty close to optimal decisions based on the available data about crop prices, weather, soil status, labor rates, etc. The ones who make bad decisions end up bankrupt, and leave farming or work as hired farmhands. And there are so few decision-making farmers left anyway that automating the decision making part of their jobs won't achieve any meaningful cost savings.
    - kpil 9y ago
      Maybe Amazon will own 90% of the farms because the have the cheapest robots and best algorithms and statistics.
adamlett 9y ago
Yes, this is why the nerds rule over the jocks in high school. Oh, wait…
- Qwertious 9y ago
  That's different, because there are specific rules against arms races in schools, that people typically adhere to. If there was a battle scheduled in advance, I'd bet on the nerds. But what's more, if they both have guns then everything's about even. Strength doesn't really help if you've been shot, and most high-schoolers don't have much experience shooting guns.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    >most high-schoolers don't have much experience shooting guns Actually a lot do but probably not so much in the places that readers/commenters here live.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  They don't win in high school. But later in life, jocks find themselves employed by nerds.

andrepd 9y ago

> Temperature is not infinite [...] There is finite space and time. Finite speed. There's no theoretical limit for temperature, and we believe spacetime could be infinite even though the observable universe is not. Nevertheless this is a very silly argument. If it's finite but absurdly high it's good enough for the purpose.

thomasahle 9y ago
> There's no theoretical limit for temperature I suppose when the particles reach lightspeed?
- killjoywashere 9y ago
  The archtype of temperature is a black body radiator. Classically, you make a block of metal (ceramic, whatever), with a spherical cavity and drill a small hole into the cavity. Then you draw a vacuum and heat the cavity, point a scope at the hole, and measure the spectrum of ligh tcoming out. In this circumstance, there is no mass that limits the energy: you are measuring the temperature of a black, empty vacuum; thus there is no upper limit.
  - jahnu 9y ago
    > Then you draw a vacuum and heat the cavity What are you heating if it's a vacuum? How can you heat nothing?
    - TeMPOraL 9y ago
      You're measuring radiative heat, which indeed exists for most of its time in nothing. I guess that the idea of GP is that you could make the heating block arbitrarily big (say, size of the universe) and have it dump all its radiative heat into that cavity.
      - jahnu 9y ago
        I see. Thanks. The difficulty here is people don't often specify if they mean heat in the form of kinetic energy or radiation. Much like how people say things like "releasing energy" without specifying the form of energy.

babyrainbow 9y ago

>We can measure the speed impulses travel through neurons, and compare that to, say, the speed of electrical impulses through silicon or light through fiber. This assumes that all the processing that human brain does is by sending signals across the neurons. Which we really don't know. Right? >We can look at other evolved/biological capabilities, like swimming or flying, and compare them to state-of-the-art artificial analogs.. Do we yet have an airplane yet that can come close to the efficiency of the most clumsiest of the birds?

hughes 9y ago
> Do we yet have an airplane yet that can come close to the efficiency of the most clumsiest of the birds? Regardless of efficiency, we have certainly exceeded the range, cargo capacity, top speed, and passenger space of most birds. Similarly, even if signal propagation in the brain is not understood, we could conceivably beat the brain in other metrics.
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  > Regardless of efficiency, we have certainly exceeded the range, cargo capacity, top speed, and passenger space of most birds. This is the core point. Our technology may still suck compared to nature, but we've been beating nature consistently since before humans learned to write, because we don't have the same set of constraints that natural biological systems have. So just like we can make inefficient flying machines that beat nature on most other conceivable metrics, we could presumably build an energy-inefficient but smarter mind at some point.
  - type0 9y ago
    I would say the progress that humans have achieved by now was by hacking the Nature, we were able to do this because we are part of the Nature. so in order to produce the AI that would be capable of progress that humans are to do it needs to be a part of Nature. Such wet-ware computers already exist, look up DNA based computers, but those are highly constrained (and their io is terrible). The sort of intelligence we can get to the wet-ware based AI is probably will be better spend on improving our own intelligence by hacking own our brains. > we could presumably build an energy-inefficient but smarter mind at some point. So this smarter mind will probably be our own, but that would also be achieved by some sort of artificial means.

martin-adams 9y ago

Looks like the vaginal canal is no longer a limiting factor. C-Sections are having a measurable impact on this. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38210837 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-38210837

scythe 9y ago

>We can find the maximum head-size that fits through a vaginal canal, or the maximum metabolic rate a human body could support, and try to determine if these factors imposed any limitations on intelligence during human evolution. Head sizes have been larger in human history and some human relatives with larger brains died out. Energy consumption on the other hand is a limiting factor for every computational device and energy efficiency tends to be a key category where Nature still wins. In particular, the liver and enzymes of various plants and microbes can perform chemical reactions in water at ambient temperature that we can't do at all; resilin is still a more efficient elastic material than any synthetic elastomer; artificial piezoelectric muscles have less than a tenth the energy efficiency of real ones, and of course lots of animals are able to run around in polar and desert regions we still can't traverse because of the fuel and material costs etc. One particularly revealing example is to calculate the ratio between: * the performance per watt of the most efficient supercomputer (7 GFlops/watt) vs the human brain (38 petaflops / 20 watts = 1.9 petaflops per watt) * the performance per watt of the human brain vs the Landauer limit at body temperature (don't remember)

FeepingCreature 9y ago
Yeah but ... human beings are fuelled via stomachs. Computers are fuelled via turbines built into gigantic dams. Or nuclear reactors. Or wind turbines. Or...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It's a general principle of contemporary technology that we lose with nature on efficiency, but compensate for that with sheer scale of our solutions. Birds are much more energy-efficient than planes, but then again, birds can't fly supersonic and don't move around tons of cargo.
moultano 9y ago
>* the performance per watt of the most efficient supercomputer (7 GFlops/watt) vs the human brain (38 petaflops / 20 watts = 1.9 petaflops per watt) Encouraging, but AI wouldn't be constrained to an energy budget similar to a human. At the rates you describe, beating a human would take the output of only a single wind turbine. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orders_of_magnitude_(power)

sullyj3 9y ago

>> what evidence do we have that the limit is not us? This is just such manifestly wrongheaded reasoning as to be almost laughable. I think there's a substantially better argument against this notion than to actually try to find evidence against the claim. I prefer it because it reveals the total wrong-headedness of this style of reasoning. The argument is to turn it around and say "what evidence do we have that the limit is us?" A human level of intelligence seems like an incredibly and oddly specific level to be the maximum permissible by physics. And oddly specific claims need to be treated with extreme skepticism, because they carry high entropy, in violation of Occam's razor. If you want to know what x equals, you don't pick a number, say, 2, assume x=2, and ask people to provide you with reasons why it shouldn't be 2. There's an infinity of numbers, and the odds are just overwhelmingly against x happening to be 2. You start with the assumption that x could be literally any of the infinity of numbers, and start looking for evidence which narrows it down. More concretely, if you want to know the physical limit to intelligence, you start with the assumption that it could be anything, constrained by the evidence that's currently available. In this case, the evidence is that human intelligence provides a lower bound for the maximum physically allowable intelligence. Positing that our intelligence is the maximum possible becomes even more suspect when you consider the process by which our intelligence came about - evolution. Firstly, evolution is a process which tends towards reproductive fitness, not necessarily towards intelligence. Intelligence is selected for to the extent that it makes something more likely to reproduce, and no more, and it probably isn't the case that more smarts universally leads to more reproduction. In fact, most modern research suggests the opposite, with people with higher IQs having less sex. Secondly, we know that natural selection gets stuck in local optima. If your species is on top of a 10 smart-points hill, and in order to get to get to the 1000 smart-points hill over there your species has to mutate in a direction that makes it stupider before it gets smarter, your species is going to stay on the 10 smart-points hill. This is because individuals that mutate stupider in the direction of the 1000-point hill will be selected against. Thirdly, natural selection just isn't a very powerful optimization process. It works by random mutation, and it takes a lifetime to make a minuscule change which may or may not be in the right direction. Even if natural selection was solely optimizing for intelligence, and it could somehow avoid local optima, there would be no particular reason to believe that the world had existed long enough for the smartest possible organism to evolve. Fourthly, as _greim_ touches upon, evolution has a very limited medium to work with. All it can do is change the sequence of DNA base pairs, and produce inefficient meat machines that run on respiration. There are all sorts of complex arrangements of matter which might be intelligent, and biological ones are only a tiny subset of those possible arrangements. The odds of the smartest system physically possible residing in that little biological subset are tiny to begin with, and only get smaller as you consider the more direct arguments against biological systems mentioned above, like sluggish neural transmissions, etc.