5 ms·

> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple q

> Yet cars are much more intelligent today than they were in the 1970s Therein lies the problem. Your definition of intelligence presumes that it is a simple quantitative scale, measuring I guess, something like "system complexity". The relevant sense here, in which no progress has been made, is qualitative -- ie., it is a distinct property. And this property has not been acquired. What is the property? It is dynamical, not formal. It is more like gravity (, pregnancy) than it is like addition. It is the ability many animals have of adaption in the shifting and challenging environments in which they are embedded. That type of adaption is not formal: it is not adaption in the sense of "updating a weight parameter". Rather, of the cells of their bodies coordinating themselves differently, and thus of their tissues, and thus of their organs, and thus of their whole brain-body system. Both from a top-down command ("I want to run now, and so my cells...") and from a bottom-up ("my cells... so I ..."). What enables animals to be fully embedded in their physical environment, to cope and adapt to its radical shifts, is this capacity. The type of "crossword puzzle" "intelligence" we obsess with is entirely derivative of this more basic --and vastly more powerful -- intelligence. Cognition is just a semi-formal process, parasitical on the body's intelligence; whose role is simply to notice when it fails and problem-solve it. We have, at best, merely the architecture of this formal reasoning. But there is still nothing for it to reason about. And in this sense, computer science has made no progress -- and indeed, cannot. It is not a formal problem.

soco 5y ago
You have a valid point here. But it might be that for practical reasons the progress in that direction won't be needed. Like, brute forcing it might be enough to reach a level higher than we can grasp. And if we can't grasp it, it's all Greek to us anyway...
- mjburgess 5y ago
  The problem with brute forcing is it requires data from the future. Physics can be solved with statistics, but only from God's POV. The future, absent information about it, is too open to solve by merely constraining models by past example cases.
Jabbles 5y ago
Are you suggesting that there is a binary property "intelligent or not"? In which case, what would progress even look like?
- mjburgess 5y ago
  Indeed, a bit like, "made of metal, or not". And I think it looks more or less like, "organic-in-relevant-way or not". "Relevant" here means a type of organic-physiological adaptability which is able to operate on incredibly short time scales: ie., you're able to physically adapt your body as your environment changes at the second, minute, hour, day, ... decade, timescales. Typing is a type of organic adaption which takes years to complete. As are essentially all of our skills. With digital machines and robots we're maybe able to emulate our cognitive processes as they consider our body-environment relationship. But we have not emulated, at all, our ability to have this type of body-environment relationship.
  - ithkuil 5y ago
    A dog is not.made of metal but I have yet to see a dog that drives better than a waymo self-driving car.
    - corford 5y ago
      A waymo self-driving car is not made of flesh and bones but I have yet to see a waymo self-driving car that performs better than a dog at: rescuing humans, detecting cancers and disease, shepherding and playing with other animals, protecting family from threats...
      - ithkuil 5y ago
        my point was just a crude attempt to dispel the myth that flesh has anything to do with efficiency at some task. What matters is design, and the immense research powers that nature has through eons of natural selection does an impressive job and doing things for which it has been "trained for" (hence your example).
klmadfejno 5y ago
And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical debate, but in practice I think it falls flat.
- mjburgess 5y ago
  I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved. Can a computer play chess? No. They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. And likewise everything else. A rock beats a child at finding the path to the bottom of a hill. A rock "outperforms" the child. The challenge was never, literally, getting to the bottom of the hill: that's dumb. The challenge was matching the child's ability to do that anywhere via exploration, curiosity, planning, coordination, and everything else. If you reduce intelligence to merely completing a highly specific task then there is always a shortcut, which uses no intelligence, to solving that task. The ability to build tools which use these shortcuts was never in doubt: we have done that for millenia.
  - klmadfejno 5y ago
    > They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. > That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Also, Alpha Zero, with its ability to do a tree search entirely removed, achieves an ELO score of greater than 3,000 in chess, which isn't even the intended design of the algorithm. A rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums vs. global minimums. A child will too sometimes.
    - mjburgess 5y ago

soco 5y ago

You have a valid point here. But it might be that for practical reasons the progress in that direction won't be needed. Like, brute forcing it might be enough to reach a level higher than we can grasp. And if we can't grasp it, it's all Greek to us anyway...

mjburgess 5y ago
The problem with brute forcing is it requires data from the future. Physics can be solved with statistics, but only from God's POV. The future, absent information about it, is too open to solve by merely constraining models by past example cases.

Jabbles 5y ago

Are you suggesting that there is a binary property "intelligent or not"? In which case, what would progress even look like?

mjburgess 5y ago
Indeed, a bit like, "made of metal, or not". And I think it looks more or less like, "organic-in-relevant-way or not". "Relevant" here means a type of organic-physiological adaptability which is able to operate on incredibly short time scales: ie., you're able to physically adapt your body as your environment changes at the second, minute, hour, day, ... decade, timescales. Typing is a type of organic adaption which takes years to complete. As are essentially all of our skills. With digital machines and robots we're maybe able to emulate our cognitive processes as they consider our body-environment relationship. But we have not emulated, at all, our ability to have this type of body-environment relationship.
- ithkuil 5y ago
  A dog is not.made of metal but I have yet to see a dog that drives better than a waymo self-driving car.
  - corford 5y ago
    A waymo self-driving car is not made of flesh and bones but I have yet to see a waymo self-driving car that performs better than a dog at: rescuing humans, detecting cancers and disease, shepherding and playing with other animals, protecting family from threats...
    - ithkuil 5y ago
      my point was just a crude attempt to dispel the myth that flesh has anything to do with efficiency at some task. What matters is design, and the immense research powers that nature has through eons of natural selection does an impressive job and doing things for which it has been "trained for" (hence your example).

klmadfejno 5y ago

And yet computers continue to perform tasks that were talked about for years as something uniquely human / intelligence driven. This is a nice philosophical debate, but in practice I think it falls flat.

mjburgess 5y ago
I dont see any single case of that. Rather in every case the goal posts were moved. Can a computer play chess? No. They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. And likewise everything else. A rock beats a child at finding the path to the bottom of a hill. A rock "outperforms" the child. The challenge was never, literally, getting to the bottom of the hill: that's dumb. The challenge was matching the child's ability to do that anywhere via exploration, curiosity, planning, coordination, and everything else. If you reduce intelligence to merely completing a highly specific task then there is always a shortcut, which uses no intelligence, to solving that task. The ability to build tools which use these shortcuts was never in doubt: we have done that for millenia.
- klmadfejno 5y ago
  > They search through many permutation of board states and in a very dumb way merely select the decision path that leads to a winning one. > That was never the challenge. The challenge was having them play chess; ie., no tricks, no shortcuts. Really evaluate the present board state, and actually choose a move. Uh-huh. And how exactly do you play chess? Do you not, perhaps, think about future states resultant from your next move? Also, Alpha Zero, with its ability to do a tree search entirely removed, achieves an ELO score of greater than 3,000 in chess, which isn't even the intended design of the algorithm. A rock will frequently fail to get the to bottom of a hill due to local minimums vs. global minimums. A child will too sometimes.
  - mjburgess 5y ago