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Why spend billions of dollars on armies of PhDs when you can create a better organic intelligence in 9 months at a fraction of the cost? Why try to beat nature

Why spend billions of dollars on armies of PhDs when you can create a better organic intelligence in 9 months at a fraction of the cost? Why try to beat nature? I'm being only semi sarcastic here.

mistrial9 5y ago
deep, real-time scans of digital media streams, subscription behavior, market responses.. things like that, where the inputs are digital already
LesZedCB 5y ago
because the kind of work we want the machines to do is degrading and monotonous oscar wilde's the soul of man under socialism probably better describes the idea.
- AnEro 5y ago
  I wish that's why we all are doing this
AnEro 5y ago
Nature's $7 an hour general compute nodes are still too expensive to not burn money to try to make an equivalent at the cost of electricity and initial purchase.
nootropicat 5y ago
1. Because technology to clone an existing human (not just the body) doesn't exist, especially into a more durable substrate 2. Because ai doesn't have biological scaling limits. There's nothing particularly special about human level of intelligence.
- rowanG077 5y ago
  > There's nothing particularly special about human level of intelligence. Big claim since nothing in the known universe has human level intelligence besides humans. It's like holding the original declaration of independence and saying that there is nothing particularly special about this piece of paper.
  - nefitty 5y ago
    This analogy breaks down easily. What do you propose is special about human-level intelligence? If anything, it is in constant struggle with biological and emotional needs. Yes, of course, human brains are amazing, the declaration of independence is great, but the entire human project is the push for progress.
    - rowanG077 5y ago
      I can't say what is special about human-level intelligence. Most importantly because the scientific community(and by extension me) can't define what human-level intelligence means. It's just too illusive at this point. That something is undefined by humans doesn't mean you can simply say it's not special.
      - PeterisP 5y ago
        There certainly has been a lot of work on defining and measuring intelligence. An example summarizing some of that work is Legg&Hutter https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/15009/1/Legg%20and%20Hutter%20A%20Collection%20of%20Definitions%20of%20Intelligence%202007.pdf https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/15... IMHO in the community there aren't any significant objections to the Legg & Hutter definition proposed in that document "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments." - perhaps you can tweak the wording some more, but that's the direction implied by people talking about building general intelligence and (at some future point) human-comparable general intelligence; in essence it's about 'wide-coverage' intelligence of being efficient at different purposes and figuring out what is required to be successful for these purposes, as opposed to narrow single-task specific effectiveness; but it's essentially a metric on which one quite reasonably can imagine something being equivalent to or better than the average (or x-th percentile) human.
        rowanG077 5y ago
        With that definition you can argue humans aren't intelligent at all. The environments we operate in are very limited compared to for example extremophiles. I doubt anyone would argue extremophiles are of genius level intellect compared to humans. That definition can be falsified in dozens of ways. That doesn't mean it can't be useful of course.
throwawaynay 5y ago
AI is already more (cost)efficient at some tasks than humans
cossatot 5y ago
Plus 20 years of intensive training after that 9 months... Or maybe your newborn is more capable than mine!
spyder 5y ago
Because it's software and once you created it you can duplicate it, customize it with the fraction of the cost and time. "Why try to beat nature?" If we wouldn't try "beat nature" we would be still in caves or would be extinct. Nature is "beating" itself with evolution and we are part of that.
anonymouse008 5y ago
I honestly thought you meant waiting for the next iteration doubling of ML model performance/training… which I thought was brilliant, ha!
jacquesm 5y ago
Because a newborn needs another 18 years or so of nurturing and education to become useful, this costs so much that quite a few countries see no qualms in saddling these new humans with the debt of their education.
ska 5y ago
> Why spend billions of dollars on armies ... The vast majority of AI research (over all time) has not been seriously intended or expected to arrive at a general intelligence. Sure there are some true believers there in some sort of handwavy construction argument ("and then a miracle occurs") and there have been serious research attempts to understand intelligence, of limited scope an resources. But to be clear, whether this wave or previous ones, the money washes in and the army of PhD's happens when there is a sniff of practical, usable algorithmic results from machine learning. It's not the same thing. Parallel application of even relatively stupid algorithms targeted at the right tasks will rapidly outproduce any reasonable number of organic intelligences of the type you describe :)
faangiq 5y ago
The other way is more fun too.
qualudeheart 5y ago
Those “organic intelligences” need to grow up for 18 years and might not like you.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
abecedarius 5y ago
The organic intelligence needed help on protein folding, for one.

Why spend billions of dollars on armies of PhDs when you can create a better organic intelligence in 9 months at a fraction of the cost? Why try to beat nature? I'm being only semi sarcastic here.

mistrial9 5y ago

deep, real-time scans of digital media streams, subscription behavior, market responses.. things like that, where the inputs are digital already

LesZedCB 5y ago

because the kind of work we want the machines to do is degrading and monotonous oscar wilde's the soul of man under socialism probably better describes the idea.

AnEro 5y ago
I wish that's why we all are doing this

AnEro 5y ago

Nature's $7 an hour general compute nodes are still too expensive to not burn money to try to make an equivalent at the cost of electricity and initial purchase.

nootropicat 5y ago

1. Because technology to clone an existing human (not just the body) doesn't exist, especially into a more durable substrate 2. Because ai doesn't have biological scaling limits. There's nothing particularly special about human level of intelligence.

rowanG077 5y ago
> There's nothing particularly special about human level of intelligence. Big claim since nothing in the known universe has human level intelligence besides humans. It's like holding the original declaration of independence and saying that there is nothing particularly special about this piece of paper.
- nefitty 5y ago
  This analogy breaks down easily. What do you propose is special about human-level intelligence? If anything, it is in constant struggle with biological and emotional needs. Yes, of course, human brains are amazing, the declaration of independence is great, but the entire human project is the push for progress.
  - rowanG077 5y ago
    I can't say what is special about human-level intelligence. Most importantly because the scientific community(and by extension me) can't define what human-level intelligence means. It's just too illusive at this point. That something is undefined by humans doesn't mean you can simply say it's not special.
    - PeterisP 5y ago
      There certainly has been a lot of work on defining and measuring intelligence. An example summarizing some of that work is Legg&Hutter https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/15009/1/Legg%20and%20Hutter%20A%20Collection%20of%20Definitions%20of%20Intelligence%202007.pdf https://openresearch-repository.anu.edu.au/bitstream/1885/15... IMHO in the community there aren't any significant objections to the Legg & Hutter definition proposed in that document "Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments." - perhaps you can tweak the wording some more, but that's the direction implied by people talking about building general intelligence and (at some future point) human-comparable general intelligence; in essence it's about 'wide-coverage' intelligence of being efficient at different purposes and figuring out what is required to be successful for these purposes, as opposed to narrow single-task specific effectiveness; but it's essentially a metric on which one quite reasonably can imagine something being equivalent to or better than the average (or x-th percentile) human.
      - rowanG077 5y ago
        With that definition you can argue humans aren't intelligent at all. The environments we operate in are very limited compared to for example extremophiles. I doubt anyone would argue extremophiles are of genius level intellect compared to humans. That definition can be falsified in dozens of ways. That doesn't mean it can't be useful of course.

throwawaynay 5y ago

AI is already more (cost)efficient at some tasks than humans

cossatot 5y ago

Plus 20 years of intensive training after that 9 months... Or maybe your newborn is more capable than mine!

spyder 5y ago

Because it's software and once you created it you can duplicate it, customize it with the fraction of the cost and time. "Why try to beat nature?" If we wouldn't try "beat nature" we would be still in caves or would be extinct. Nature is "beating" itself with evolution and we are part of that.

anonymouse008 5y ago

I honestly thought you meant waiting for the next iteration doubling of ML model performance/training… which I thought was brilliant, ha!

jacquesm 5y ago

Because a newborn needs another 18 years or so of nurturing and education to become useful, this costs so much that quite a few countries see no qualms in saddling these new humans with the debt of their education.

ska 5y ago

> Why spend billions of dollars on armies ... The vast majority of AI research (over all time) has not been seriously intended or expected to arrive at a general intelligence. Sure there are some true believers there in some sort of handwavy construction argument ("and then a miracle occurs") and there have been serious research attempts to understand intelligence, of limited scope an resources. But to be clear, whether this wave or previous ones, the money washes in and the army of PhD's happens when there is a sniff of practical, usable algorithmic results from machine learning. It's not the same thing. Parallel application of even relatively stupid algorithms targeted at the right tasks will rapidly outproduce any reasonable number of organic intelligences of the type you describe :)

faangiq 5y ago

The other way is more fun too.

qualudeheart 5y ago

Those “organic intelligences” need to grow up for 18 years and might not like you.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

abecedarius 5y ago

The organic intelligence needed help on protein folding, for one.