4 ms·

Can someone explain the title? It doesn't make sense to me.

by Fnoord 7y ago

visarga 7y ago
I think an even stronger version applies. Humans are not general intelligences. We are just good at keeping ourselves alive and making more of us on this planet (and in this ecosystem). All the rest - language, science, culture, economy - are just our current solution to solving the constraints of life. In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to be effective in all situations. Humans only perceive the world through our five limited senses and then filters it through the coloured glass of our concepts. We can't escape the limitations of our senses and mental models taken together. Humans can't even keep in the working memory more than 7 objects at once, some people can handle a few more but not on the order of hundreds or thousands. What if the real ultimate theory of physics required a working memory of 1000 objects? We'd be forever blocked from grasping it like an ant vs. the stock-market. Programmers live at the edge of this grasping power and know the horror of not being able to take it all in at once, and it's so easy to get into such a situation. It is possible that there is no general intelligence anywhere. It's always an intelligence of a specific environment, solving specific types of problems. A general intelligence would need a much more varied and challenging environment in order to reach that level of intelligence. The more complex the environment, the higher the intelligence of its agents. So there is always going to be an upper limit to intelligence, and the environment has a lot to do with it. No intelligence is truly general.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- partyboat1586 7y ago
  A true general intelligence would need to handle any environment. The only such intelligence would be universal intelligence which has experienced every possible environment. Unfortunately this kind of intelligence is cheating because it's not really an agent and since it encapsulates everything there are no problems for it to solve.
- underscoremark 7y ago
  Reminds me of one of Isaac Arthur's recent videos, "The Paperclip Maximizer": https://youtu.be/3mk7NVFz_88 https://youtu.be/3mk7NVFz_88
- coldtea 7y ago
  >In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to be effective in all situations. So, basically, the author made a contrived definition of their own, and hand-waved about how humans don't meet it...
  - dingo_bat 7y ago
    It's literally in the name. What do you think "general" stands for in "general intelligence"?
- nmca 7y ago
  No realalizable intelligence perhaps, but AIXI is pretty bloody general and pretty damn smart.
- helen___keller 7y ago
  > Humans can't even keep in the working memory more than 7 objects at once, some people can handle a few more but not on the order of hundreds or thousands. What if the real ultimate theory of physics required a working memory of 1000 objects? This seems like a weak argument unless you are restricting humans to have no tools (in particular some kind of pen/paper or other storage mechanism). Even a 3 register machine is turing complete. Any reasonable formalization of the human brain's computation with 7 objects in working memory can simulate a human brain with N objects in working memory if we have access to external storage. How to do this, and whether it's effective and worth doing, that is a separate question. It may certainly be the case that we will never truly "grok" the mysteries of the universe in the way that one may grok an elegant algorithm. But we can discover the mysteries and convince ourselves they are true, even if perhaps in a slow and roundabout way. For an example of what this may look like, take a gander at how we proved the four-color theorem using computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_co... : > Using mathematical rules and procedures based on properties of reducible configurations, Appel and Haken found an unavoidable set of reducible configurations, thus proving that a minimal counterexample to the four-color conjecture could not exist. Their proof reduced the infinitude of possible maps to 1,936 reducible configurations (later reduced to 1,476) which had to be checked one by one by computer and took over a thousand hours It's not as beautiful as other mathematical theorems, but any human with enough pen and paper and time could write or verify this proof themselves. After all, a computer did so, and we can step by step simulate a turing machine so that means we can do so too.

Can someone explain the title? It doesn't make sense to me.

by Fnoord 7y ago

Can someone explain the title? It doesn't make sense to me.

I think an even stronger version applies. Humans are not general intelligences. We are just good at keeping ourselves alive and making more of us on this planet (and in this ecosystem). All the rest - language, science, culture, economy - are just our current solution to solving the constraints of life. In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to be effective in all situations. Humans only perceive the world through our five limited senses and then filters it through the coloured glass of our concepts. We can't escape the limitations of our senses and mental models taken together. Humans can't even keep in the working memory more than 7 objects at once, some people can handle a few more but not on the order of hundreds or thousands. What if the real ultimate theory of physics required a working memory of 1000 objects? We'd be forever blocked from grasping it like an ant vs. the stock-market. Programmers live at the edge of this grasping power and know the horror of not being able to take it all in at once, and it's so easy to get into such a situation. It is possible that there is no general intelligence anywhere. It's always an intelligence of a specific environment, solving specific types of problems. A general intelligence would need a much more varied and challenging environment in order to reach that level of intelligence. The more complex the environment, the higher the intelligence of its agents. So there is always going to be an upper limit to intelligence, and the environment has a lot to do with it. No intelligence is truly general.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
partyboat1586 7y ago
A true general intelligence would need to handle any environment. The only such intelligence would be universal intelligence which has experienced every possible environment. Unfortunately this kind of intelligence is cheating because it's not really an agent and since it encapsulates everything there are no problems for it to solve.
underscoremark 7y ago
Reminds me of one of Isaac Arthur's recent videos, "The Paperclip Maximizer": https://youtu.be/3mk7NVFz_88 https://youtu.be/3mk7NVFz_88
coldtea 7y ago
>In order for an intelligence to be called general it would be necessary to be effective in all situations. So, basically, the author made a contrived definition of their own, and hand-waved about how humans don't meet it...
- dingo_bat 7y ago
  It's literally in the name. What do you think "general" stands for in "general intelligence"?
nmca 7y ago
No realalizable intelligence perhaps, but AIXI is pretty bloody general and pretty damn smart.
helen___keller 7y ago
> Humans can't even keep in the working memory more than 7 objects at once, some people can handle a few more but not on the order of hundreds or thousands. What if the real ultimate theory of physics required a working memory of 1000 objects? This seems like a weak argument unless you are restricting humans to have no tools (in particular some kind of pen/paper or other storage mechanism). Even a 3 register machine is turing complete. Any reasonable formalization of the human brain's computation with 7 objects in working memory can simulate a human brain with N objects in working memory if we have access to external storage. How to do this, and whether it's effective and worth doing, that is a separate question. It may certainly be the case that we will never truly "grok" the mysteries of the universe in the way that one may grok an elegant algorithm. But we can discover the mysteries and convince ourselves they are true, even if perhaps in a slow and roundabout way. For an example of what this may look like, take a gander at how we proved the four-color theorem using computers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_computer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem#Proof_by_co... : > Using mathematical rules and procedures based on properties of reducible configurations, Appel and Haken found an unavoidable set of reducible configurations, thus proving that a minimal counterexample to the four-color conjecture could not exist. Their proof reduced the infinitude of possible maps to 1,936 reducible configurations (later reduced to 1,476) which had to be checked one by one by computer and took over a thousand hours It's not as beautiful as other mathematical theorems, but any human with enough pen and paper and time could write or verify this proof themselves. After all, a computer did so, and we can step by step simulate a turing machine so that means we can do so too.