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> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks. Rodents? Try insects [1]. In the late 40s and early 50s, when neural networks were firs
by pron 7y ago
> even rodents can outperform state of the art models at general tasks.
Rodents? Try insects [1]. In the late 40s and early 50s, when neural networks were first explored with great enthusiasm, some of the leading minds of that generation believed (were convinced, in fact) that artificial intelligence (or AGI in today's terms) is five/ten years away; the skeptics, like Alan Turing, thought it was fifty years away. Seventy years later and we've not achieved insect-level intelligence, we don't know what path would lead us to insect-level intelligence, and we don't know how long it would take to get there.
[1]: To those saying that insects or rodents can't play Go or chess -- they can't sort numbers, either, and even early computers did it better than humans.
- jcims 7y agoThis jumping spider has ~600k neurons in its brain - https://youtu.be/UDtlvZGmHYk https://youtu.be/UDtlvZGmHYk They are creepy smart.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoJust wanted to say holy crap that video was amazing - exciting and suspenseful!
- jcims 7y agoHere's another one for ya if you get stuck with a case of the nosleeps - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wKu13wmHog https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wKu13wmHog Something about predatory nature of both insects seems to tune up their intelligence. Of course it never hurts having the BBC tell your story either.
- shrimp_emoji 7y ago>Something about predatory nature of both insects seems to tune up their intelligence. Yep. To be a predator, you need to outwit your prey and think fast, so it's thought to be a natural INT grinder. `w´ Presumably, this could drive up the INT of prey too, but maybe it's cheaper to just be faster/harder to see? But you can't be THAT hard to see, and the speed only saves you in failed ambushes, so planning successful ambushes continues to reward the INT of predators (unless they just enter the speed arms race, like cheetahs or tiger beetles).
- TeMPOraL 7y agoSpeaking of Portias and smarts, I'm just going to recommend "Children of Time" here (and its recently released sequel, "Children of Ruin"). It's a story of a future where humans accidentally uplifted jumping spiders instead of monkeys, and goes deeply into how the minds, societies and technology of such spiders would be fundamentally different from our own.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago> [1]: To those saying that insects or rodents can't play Go or chess -- they can't sort numbers, either, and even early computers did it better than humans. They probably can, internally; they just can't operate on tokens we recognize as numbers explicitly. For a computer analogy, take Windows Notepad - there's probably plenty of sorting, computing square roots and linear interpolation being done under the hood in the GUI rendering code - but none of that is exposed in the interface you use to observe and communicate with the application.
- pron 7y agoComputers still do that much better -- there's no way an insect, or a mammal, brain internally sorts ten million numbers -- and even much better (at least faster) than humans. My point is only that the fact computers can do some tasks better than insects or humans is irrelevant, in itself, to the question of intelligence.