2 ms·

The sci-fi trope that aliens or superintelligent AIs will have thought processes completely different and incomprehensible to humans is probably not true. If t

The sci-fi trope that aliens or superintelligent AIs will have thought processes completely different and incomprehensible to humans is probably not true. If the aliens live in our universe, evolved on a planet with limited resources, need food, breathe, etc., then they'll likely have a lot in common with Earth animals psychologically. If the AI is tasked with doing something that humans also do, then its tactics will be at least recognizable to an expert in that field. Moreso in well-understood systems such as chess. Is it really plausible that an advanced chess AI's tactics would have no concept of threats or king safety? The same tactics apply to it as do to us.

rtpg 5y ago
I don't want to be too dismissive of the work going into this, but Chess isn't that huge of a search space. Games can quickly end in many scenarios from certain points. Does having an evaluation system that takes into account king safety only as a consequence of having taken the entire game state into account, mean that it understands king safety? Can you extract these tactics from the AI? Can it explain the moves? I would be interested in seeing work here that can provide some comprehensibility to the correlations, as that's how we can get to actual novel intuition. "The computer is good with this neural network due to pattern matching" is less actionable than "the computer is good and found this kind of pattern, and we think it relates to this". EDIT: I think that if anything Chess is an interesting example of humans emulating computers. People sitting around thinking about variations, trying to snuff out what is good/bad. Granted, the fact that you're playing against other humans is pretty important at a higher level, but it's centuries of people sitting down and running through the search space, using our approximations for what are good and bad.
csee 5y ago
I don't share this view. They would have had a lot in common at a point in time in their history, but who's to say the consequences of millions of years of additional evolution post-energy abundance, let alone the consequences of embryo selection and genetic engineering? We've had a few tens of thousand years of evolution with relative (but still not really) caloric abundance and look how much bigger our brains got. Add nuclear fusion and an extra 50 million years to that nascent process. I think chess strategy is a flawed way to be thinking about this because we designed the rules and the solution space to be comprehensible to us. It's not surprising that we can understand AI strategy. That simply follows from the solution space itself being small and comprehensible.
TheRealNGenius 5y ago
When a fly makes first contact, do you care to reason with it in terms it can understand, as to why you are now swatting it out of existence?
- posterboy 5y ago
  Yes, I wave and take a few sloppy shots before I get up in arms. Some take flight (ha!) but some of the more agressive beasts seem to send the message that I should take what's coming for me. Swarms of agressive insects are also known to be quite defensive and alert the troops. Take the human out of the loop and consider mating rituals. It amazes me to no end how simple bugs manage to procreate ... This does of course not meat the common definition of communication, if it involves pheromones and such like. Nevertheless, when another philosopher says that Pain is impossible tondefine, I will show them pain right there.
- plutonorm 5y ago
  "Sugar good. Planet is sugar. Sorry bye". But translated into firing of neurons within the fly brain. Of course there is that concept of other and self that the fly does not have. But this might be more successful with monkeys. Your other point about motivation to describe their purpose still stands - but the point about there being too limited similarity between conceptions of the world to convey meaning between species - that doesn't work for me. They are situated in the same universe, and it's very likely that there isn't a qualitative difference between their intelligence and our own. Intelligence must be a universal law, something that falls out of the correct interpretation of thermodynamics in open systems. Interdimensional aliens might have a more varied purpose I suppose, but then their actions wouldn't be intelligible to us at all. They might decide to convert half all life on earth into the opposite chiral form, because reasons. Or rather because there is some unknown mapping between chirality in this plane to the goals within another plain. The chirality of these biological forms within these dimensions being but the lower part of higher dimensional things which are subject to the motivating forces of higher dimensions. Although it's much more likely that any changes would not be coherent at all in our perspective of reality. The purposeful actions of other beings within other perspective frames of totality would more likely look like random thermal/quantum fluctuations within our perspective. There I solved quantum randomness for you.
astrobe_ 5y ago
> then they'll likely have a lot in common with Earth animals psychologically The term "psychologically" here is interesting because it skips the "biologically" part. What if they don't have neurons like us or AZ? Could one even talk about psychology?
- a_shovel 5y ago
  Well, that's kind of the point. Sci-fi authors will talk about how Super-AIs or aliens might think completely differently from us, but then impose lots of implicit similarities that would make that implausible. Sure, non-sapient fungus-like extraterrestrial life-forms will definitely not think like us, even if they have neurons. But "aliens" in most stories implicitly refers to mobile intelligent beings capable of cooperation, communication, developing technology to a level more advanced than our own, and are animal-like and thus need to breathe, eat, drink, maintain homeostasis, etc. Often they'll even have the same body plan as us. Also, things like the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, and that lying may be beneficial in some circumstances aren't mere artifacts of human psychology, but are straightforward results of game theory. If a creature is that similar to a human physically, can it really be totally incomprehensible psychologically?
V-2 5y ago
Chess is a closed system. Alien beings could be "playing checkers", so to speak. A biology completely different to anything existing on Earth (say, inteligent life living in the astmophere of a hot gas giant planet) would likely lead an utterly incompatible psychology. It's kind of like in the famous Wittgenstein quote: "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Well, lion is an Earth animal, but you see the point.

rtpg 5y ago

I don't want to be too dismissive of the work going into this, but Chess isn't that huge of a search space. Games can quickly end in many scenarios from certain points. Does having an evaluation system that takes into account king safety only as a consequence of having taken the entire game state into account, mean that it understands king safety? Can you extract these tactics from the AI? Can it explain the moves? I would be interested in seeing work here that can provide some comprehensibility to the correlations, as that's how we can get to actual novel intuition. "The computer is good with this neural network due to pattern matching" is less actionable than "the computer is good and found this kind of pattern, and we think it relates to this". EDIT: I think that if anything Chess is an interesting example of humans emulating computers. People sitting around thinking about variations, trying to snuff out what is good/bad. Granted, the fact that you're playing against other humans is pretty important at a higher level, but it's centuries of people sitting down and running through the search space, using our approximations for what are good and bad.

csee 5y ago

I don't share this view. They would have had a lot in common at a point in time in their history, but who's to say the consequences of millions of years of additional evolution post-energy abundance, let alone the consequences of embryo selection and genetic engineering? We've had a few tens of thousand years of evolution with relative (but still not really) caloric abundance and look how much bigger our brains got. Add nuclear fusion and an extra 50 million years to that nascent process. I think chess strategy is a flawed way to be thinking about this because we designed the rules and the solution space to be comprehensible to us. It's not surprising that we can understand AI strategy. That simply follows from the solution space itself being small and comprehensible.

TheRealNGenius 5y ago

When a fly makes first contact, do you care to reason with it in terms it can understand, as to why you are now swatting it out of existence?

posterboy 5y ago
Yes, I wave and take a few sloppy shots before I get up in arms. Some take flight (ha!) but some of the more agressive beasts seem to send the message that I should take what's coming for me. Swarms of agressive insects are also known to be quite defensive and alert the troops. Take the human out of the loop and consider mating rituals. It amazes me to no end how simple bugs manage to procreate ... This does of course not meat the common definition of communication, if it involves pheromones and such like. Nevertheless, when another philosopher says that Pain is impossible tondefine, I will show them pain right there.
plutonorm 5y ago
"Sugar good. Planet is sugar. Sorry bye". But translated into firing of neurons within the fly brain. Of course there is that concept of other and self that the fly does not have. But this might be more successful with monkeys. Your other point about motivation to describe their purpose still stands - but the point about there being too limited similarity between conceptions of the world to convey meaning between species - that doesn't work for me. They are situated in the same universe, and it's very likely that there isn't a qualitative difference between their intelligence and our own. Intelligence must be a universal law, something that falls out of the correct interpretation of thermodynamics in open systems. Interdimensional aliens might have a more varied purpose I suppose, but then their actions wouldn't be intelligible to us at all. They might decide to convert half all life on earth into the opposite chiral form, because reasons. Or rather because there is some unknown mapping between chirality in this plane to the goals within another plain. The chirality of these biological forms within these dimensions being but the lower part of higher dimensional things which are subject to the motivating forces of higher dimensions. Although it's much more likely that any changes would not be coherent at all in our perspective of reality. The purposeful actions of other beings within other perspective frames of totality would more likely look like random thermal/quantum fluctuations within our perspective. There I solved quantum randomness for you.

astrobe_ 5y ago

> then they'll likely have a lot in common with Earth animals psychologically The term "psychologically" here is interesting because it skips the "biologically" part. What if they don't have neurons like us or AZ? Could one even talk about psychology?

a_shovel 5y ago
Well, that's kind of the point. Sci-fi authors will talk about how Super-AIs or aliens might think completely differently from us, but then impose lots of implicit similarities that would make that implausible. Sure, non-sapient fungus-like extraterrestrial life-forms will definitely not think like us, even if they have neurons. But "aliens" in most stories implicitly refers to mobile intelligent beings capable of cooperation, communication, developing technology to a level more advanced than our own, and are animal-like and thus need to breathe, eat, drink, maintain homeostasis, etc. Often they'll even have the same body plan as us. Also, things like the prisoner's dilemma, the tragedy of the commons, and that lying may be beneficial in some circumstances aren't mere artifacts of human psychology, but are straightforward results of game theory. If a creature is that similar to a human physically, can it really be totally incomprehensible psychologically?

V-2 5y ago

Chess is a closed system. Alien beings could be "playing checkers", so to speak. A biology completely different to anything existing on Earth (say, inteligent life living in the astmophere of a hot gas giant planet) would likely lead an utterly incompatible psychology. It's kind of like in the famous Wittgenstein quote: "if a lion could speak, we could not understand him". Well, lion is an Earth animal, but you see the point.