4 ms·
Not sure just how important the humans being different from other animals thing is. We've got a billion years of evolution of multicellular life, working up to
by rsaarelm 15y ago
Not sure just how important the humans being different from other animals thing is. We've got a billion years of evolution of multicellular life, working up to the brain of the not-quite-human primates, and something like two million years in which humans developed their unique traits. Wouldn't be my first guess that all the heavy lifting happened in the last couple million years instead of the other 998 million.
- lincolnq 15y agoHere, read this: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power I agree with you for the most part. But somehow, what makes us different from apes was some kind of keystone. Whatever evolved in the last two million years in our brains made a HUGE difference in our effectiveness. Perhaps if we understand it we'll understand something fundamental about intelligence.
- rsaarelm 15y agoMy take on that is that mammalian intelligence was already a massively powerful thing, and just needed to stumble into some sort of trick to make it more, I don't know, recursive? to start the emerging human dominance. I'd bet money that going from a genuinely wolf-level AI we understand from first principles to a human-level AI is much easier than going from AIBO to the level of an actual wolf. The problem with intuiting about this is that assessing animal intelligence is a lot harder for us than assessing human intelligence. It's Moravec's paradox all over again, the thing that seems so simple to us we used to think of it as an absence of skill rather than a skill, behaving like an animal, might be the hardest thing in making an AI.