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While one individual might not be have "general purpose intelligence" to the satisfaction of this author (being able to excel at different fields/activities), a

While one individual might not be have "general purpose intelligence" to the satisfaction of this author (being able to excel at different fields/activities), at the population level, it is fair to say human intelligence is general purpose. Then, there are aspects that are greatly overlooked in all these narratives: Human geniuses occur very rarely and take literally decades to learn, while the AI equivalent could be consistently "instanced" multiple times, live forever, evolve after birth and work 24/7 without sleep. Then, humans have crappy I/O. AI is not bounded by the shortcomings of writing/reading/typing/talking at low rates of words per minute... Generally speaking, AI has theoretically a substantial advantage over humans. Even if AI remains dumber for a time, these advantages are enough to make them prevail.

tlb 9y ago
If I gave an example of something machines can easily do today, but no human could ever do, does that show that human intelligence is not general-purpose? If not, what do you mean by general-purpose?
- partycoder 9y ago
  The human brain has the ability to create models to solve problems in an unsupervised way. Be it problems around survival, reproduction, and things that rank higher in the hierarchy of needs that can be very abstract in nature. Some people might then argue that the human experience is also about creativity, entertainment, learning, social interaction, spirituality, fitness and a long list of things. Part of it is because the brain is not only raw problem solving power... it is embodied in a human body, with bodily needs and hardwired behaviors coming from older brain structures. Like having an intuition for what may look like a predator or threat (and therefore evokes fear), what may be fine to eat, etc... and other stuff correlated with survival that guided our evolution, but not necessarily has to do with survival. But AI can be embodied into anything, and the equivalent to its primitive mind can be played with. While we have many learned behaviors, there are aspects that are not learned. AI will be different. What AI ends up developing into will greatly depend on how that is done.

tlb 9y ago

If I gave an example of something machines can easily do today, but no human could ever do, does that show that human intelligence is not general-purpose? If not, what do you mean by general-purpose?

partycoder 9y ago
The human brain has the ability to create models to solve problems in an unsupervised way. Be it problems around survival, reproduction, and things that rank higher in the hierarchy of needs that can be very abstract in nature. Some people might then argue that the human experience is also about creativity, entertainment, learning, social interaction, spirituality, fitness and a long list of things. Part of it is because the brain is not only raw problem solving power... it is embodied in a human body, with bodily needs and hardwired behaviors coming from older brain structures. Like having an intuition for what may look like a predator or threat (and therefore evokes fear), what may be fine to eat, etc... and other stuff correlated with survival that guided our evolution, but not necessarily has to do with survival. But AI can be embodied into anything, and the equivalent to its primitive mind can be played with. While we have many learned behaviors, there are aspects that are not learned. AI will be different. What AI ends up developing into will greatly depend on how that is done.