7 ms·

The Problem with Intelligence

65 points by BerislavLopac 4y ago

mannykannot 4y ago
The problem of not having a definition is over-emphasized. There is a widespread consensus that there is something that is an important part of human behavior and being human (and exhibited to some degree by many other species, not to mention extinct hominids), and that concept is well-enough constrained that we can study it. Defining it is something we will work towards as we come to understand it better. I suspect the idea that we need definitions first comes from education, where much of what we know is presented in this manner. This is rarely, however, the way our initial understanding was achieved - just consider how our concepts and definitions of 'energy' and 'matter' have changed over time.
- 3pt14159 4y ago
  We have perfectly fine definitions for intelligence amongst creatures that are not closely related to humans, and it mostly centres around problem solving, even when introduced to problems that the creature and its ancestors had never grappled with. In these situations does the creature try the eager solution despite it obviously not working near the end? For example, does it take the close bridge that gets it 99% of the way across the river or does it not even bother and travel to the farther one that actually gets it across. If it uses small sticks in nature will it employ artificially introduced tools to solve artificially introduced problems? Etc. The key here is to apply the test without breeding for it first. That is how you tell the individual is intelligent rather than the breeding mechanism. For example, I don't think the individuals are at all intelligent in OpenAI's[0] Hide and Seek. It's basically burned in instincts since the introduction of a button that would, say, swap positions with the farthest enemy agent wouldn't be utilized for hundreds of rounds of play. The learning is the brain and replication together. Reminds me of a story about aliens on LessWrong[1] about baby eating aliens. [0] https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/ https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/ [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
- PurpleRamen 4y ago
  The definition marks the goal. We can reach the goal without definition, but would we recognize it? And how much time and effort will be wasted by blindly tinkering around in the dark? The definition is a light beacon. Having it, will speed up progress significantly.
  - coldtea 4y ago
    >We can reach the goal without definition, but would we recognize it? You can very easily shoot a porn, even without being able to define what is pornographic and what is not (a proverbially notoriously difficult to define thing, often times debated legally in various countries, for example "movie where sex acts are performed" or "movie meant to arouse the viewer sexually" both don't cut it).
    - PurpleRamen 4y ago
      Because people know how sex works and how filming works. The debate is about organizing the space, how to divide the already revealed map.
      - coldtea 4y ago
        >Because people know how sex works and how filming works. Not exactly, because both sex and filming could be done in a non-porn setting - including those two together (e.g. a sexual art film). And the question mentioned wasn't what is a "film that has sex", but what is porn - and even more so, what is it's definition (the same thing you asked for in the original comment, as necessary to "marks the goal"). The answer here (but how do we know we made a porn if we can't give a strict definition of what porn is) is that we can tell intuitively. Well, the same holds for intelligence. That's perhaps the case for many things. Famously, we don't need to know what quadratic equations are to catch a baseball. Even though formally predicting its trajectory means solving one.
vouaobrasil 4y ago
Interesting article. I personally don't think we'll ever have a definition of intelligence because it is an emergent behaviour. We'll just keep working on it, all the while believing that what we create is not intelligent, until one day it is and kills us all.
jononomo 4y ago
"For example, we often say that dogs are intelligent. But what do we mean by that? Some dogs, like sheep dogs, are very good at performing certain tasks. Most dogs can be trained to sit, fetch, and do other things. And they can disobey. The same is true of children, though we’d never compare a child’s intelligence to a dog’s. And cats won’t do any of those things, though we never refer to cats as unintelligent." I, for one, definitely think of cats as unintelligent. A cat is like a potted plant compared to the companionship and relationship a dog offers.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  Having grown up with both, I strongly disagree. You can build very strong bonds with cats, but you have to earn their trust first. Just because they don't feel that the purpose of their existence is to please their owner doesn't mean they're not intelligent.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    The inability of a cat to communicate with a human being is what makes cats unintelligent. People like to think that cats are above communicating with humans when the fact is that they're just too stupid. It's not like cats could follow instructions if they wanted to but they just don't want to -- it's that cat are dumb and they can't follow instructions.
    - czx4f4bd 4y ago
      This is just flat-out incorrect. Scientists have found cats are plenty intelligent and simply don't cooperate with testing. https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-rival-dogs-many-tests-social-smarts-anyone-brave-enough-study-them https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-rival-dogs-many...
      - jononomo 4y ago
        Apparently dogs have been objectively measured to be twice as intelligent as cats: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-cat-brains-neurons-intelligence-study-spd https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-cat-b...
jononomo 4y ago
"some research shows that elephants communicate with each other using low frequency rumbles that can be heard for miles (if you’re an elephant)." Apparently whales can hear each other over distances of several thousand miles -- entirely across oceans.
jononomo 4y ago
"We have “intelligence tests” to measure intelligence–or do they just measure test-taking ability?" Life is just a series of different kinds of tests, one after the other, every single day.
- wtetzner 4y ago
  That's just playing on words though. Not every kind of "test" requires the same skills and abilities.
  - jononomo 4y ago
    That's true -- there are tests of brute strength, for instance, and there are also vocabulary tests. But the kinds of tests life throws at you aren't often so narrow -- they're more general tests. Once in a while you'll be faced with an immediate test of whether you can lift a heavy car off a human being in the next five minutes because there has been an accident and someone is pinned under a car, but the generalized form is "can you move a heavy object", for which the answer is something along the lines of "invent a crane".
  - bena 4y ago
    People do get weird about intelligence though. A bench press is simply a test of how much you can lift. But no one will say that it doesn't measure how strong your arms are. A foot race is simply a test of how fast your legs can move. But no one will say that it doesn't measure how fast you are. I think the thing that trips people up is that they often confuse knowledge tests with intelligence tests. Reciting the periodic table is not a sign of intelligence, it is a sign of knowledge. As is knowing geography, languages, etc. If it requires a recitation of knowledge, it's most likely a knowledge test. Like most of those Facebook quizzes "Only the smartest can answer all these questions!!!". And you go to the test and it's just trivia. Trivia tests knowledge. Knowledge tests can be biased, they can be 'gamed' (except the best way to game them is to memorize the knowledge), etc. Intelligence tests are something different. They test our ability to reason. Which is harder to measure. Because often there is a baseline of knowledge required. People like to dump on the old "brain teaser" and less old "leetcode" style interview questions. But they're probably better than quizzing people on esoteric language features. Language features are trivia. Questions with no real answer or no known answer are better proxies for intelligence. Not great and if you stick with the same questions, you'll eventually turn them into trivia as the answers become codified. But, you know, proxies are never the real thing. I also happen to agree with the article. We do not have a clear definition of intelligence. Or consciousness. Or sentience. So unclear, we kind of use all three interchangeably. We have a fuzzy feeling. We don't think Lamda is intelligent/sentient because we don't feel it is. We feel that each other is intelligent/sentient because of course we are. We can't prove that to each other. And we can't come up with a definition that both includes everything our fuzzy feeling says is intelligent/sentient and excludes everything we think is not.
mushufasa 4y ago
> these discussions tend not to go anywhere, largely because we don’t really know what intelligence is. 40 years of academic cognitive science would beg to differ.... This sounds like it suffers the common tech dunning-kruger approach to pre-existing literature
motohagiography 4y ago
The simplest definition of intelligence I use is one's capcity for abstraction. Is a mind capable of generalizing accurately and then refining it with some good tools for feedback? Pattern recognition is close, as it's abstracting things into symbols and then comparing the symbols, but it's not sufficient. "Smart" I define as the ability to effect intentions, or to get what you want. In this sense, a lot of intelligent people are not very smart, and a lot of very smart people are unhindered by intelligence. Animals are perfectly smart for their environment without needing much intelligence. Humans are poorly adapted to our physical environment, and require a great deal more intelligence to have survived. Language is useful for many things, but the things it isn't good for are anti-smart (e.g. I think our ego as a refining filter for experience is an artifact of language) Anyway, the Turing Test as a thought experiment isn't really a measure of intelligence so much as it is an economics model of an indifference curve, which is how much the observer cares (or not) about whether they are dealing with a machine. I'm actually more bullish on the possibility of AGI for some admittedly very strange reasons, even though I am harsh about people who anthropomorphisze code and fall for animism. My view reduces to a kind of theistic argument where if we can create conscious life from rude materials, it is logical evidence that we ourselves may also have been the expression of some similar intention. If AGI is demonstrably impossible within our physics (like incompleteness theorem level proof), then we exist within a hard ontological boundary, and the best we can do is infer what that boundary is made of (probably time/gravity). The reason I think AGI is plausible is because I have theistic axioms that create a kind of circular reference where if we can Create life, then we could also have been Created with the intent to discover and appreciate the meaning of that, and if we cannot Create, we were not meant to experience that Creation. Maybe even if there is something on the other side of death, we may still just be programs or epiphenomena that aren't intended to reflect or apprehend our substrate, sort of like the one-way directional relationship between an instrument and a song played on it. An AGI would make the leap from song, to software, to operating on its environment using abstraction, generalization and feedback. It wouldn't be "us," but I think it could certainly become a them that could eventually exist independently of us.
AndrewDucker 4y ago
Intelligence doesn't seem that complex a thing to define, to me. Oxford Dictionary says "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". I generally go for a slightly wider "The ability to create models of the world around them, and make predictions based on those models" - where "knowledge" would be "models" and "making predictions based on those models" is a sort of proto-skill. Sure, the kinds of things that different people find easy to model vary. One person might find it easy to model mathematical theorems, others the internal working of car engines. But in both cases there's an underlying ability to make a mental model of the thing you're learning about, and use that to predict how it will function, and work out what you can do with it.
- visarga 4y ago
  We're only as intelligent as the models we learn. Where we don't have models we tend to learn by simple correlation. Discoveries are rare, even researchers only grind at that 0.01% beyond the known modelling space. A human in a primitive society, even with the same IQ with a modern man, would be much less intelligent about solving a variety of tasks because they lack the mental "furniture". Most of our intelligence does not come from the brain, it comes from the culture, which is an evolutionary process.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- TheBigSalad 4y ago
  Does memory count as intelligence? I've seen people with great memories and people think they are very intelligent. They people I'm thinking about were actually intelligent, but their great memories really set them apart. For example, the guy at work who remembers every project, every shortcoming, and the reasoning behind every technical decision.
  - AndrewDucker 4y ago
    I certainly think more memory allows you to build more complex models and to build them from more information at once.
thallukrish 4y ago
Humans seem to do a million different things. And all of them were kids growing into adults and do by learning to do things. Isn't that good enough if a machine did just that - ready to learn if taught, to be classified as being generally intelligent ?
- WJW 4y ago
  > Isn't that good enough ... I think approximately nobody is studying AI with the end goal of making a machine that is (say) as smart as a dog. It is a good intermediate goal but the hope has always been to surpass humans. If we want more doglike intelligences we can just breed more dogs. Generally intelligent is only the start, and not a very interesting part. Animals can obviously learn things and they are "generally intelligent", but most are not all that bright. We are not all that clear on why either. Elephants have larger brains than us, so clearly it's not raw size but rather the complexity of the brain that makes us so much smarter. Which parts of brain complexity matter and which are accidents of evolution is almost entirely unknown.
Xcelerate 4y ago
Much as how Kolmogorov solved the problem of defining randomness, I feel like Legg and Hutter solved (or at least mostly solved) the problem of defining universal intelligence. Loosely put, it is an agent that makes the best possible decision about the future with the information that it has available. “Best” can be defined however you want; it’s less about the particular cost function and more about achieving optimality. And no, the oft-cited yet frequently misunderstood NFL doesn’t rule this out.
- visarga 4y ago
  > makes the best possible decision about the future with the information that it has available So would a good thermostat be considered intelligent, assuming it takes great decisions? Intelligence needs to be defined with respect to a range of tasks and a range of priors. It's skill acquisition efficiency, not just taking good decisions. I recommend "On the Measure of Intelligence" by François Chollet >We argue that solely measuring skill at any given task falls short of measuring intelligence, because skill is heavily modulated by prior knowledge and experience: unlimited priors or unlimited training data allow experimenters to "buy" arbitrary levels of skills for a system, in a way that masks the system's own generalization power. We then articulate a new formal definition of intelligence based on Algorithmic Information Theory, describing intelligence as skill acquisition efficiency and highlighting the concepts of scope, generalization difficulty, priors, and experience. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
  - Xcelerate 4y ago
    > Intelligence needs to be defined with respect to a range of tasks and a range of priors. Yep, you’re right. I forgot to mention that in my “loosely put” sentence, although the work by Hutter and Legg does mention that and discusses algorithmic information theory heavily.
sinenomine 4y ago
There is no problem with convergent evidence of various different measures correlating positively with general intelligence, which is also measured by IQ tests: 1. Reaction speed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5608941/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5608941/ 2. Dendritic tree arborization, synaptic density, electrophysiological properties of pyramidal neurons https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363383/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363383/ There is a problem with sophistry and competitive virtue signaling around these phenomena. Instead of ignoring biology we could as well embrace it.
dr_dshiv 4y ago
Whatever intelligence is, more of it should lead to greater success, on average.
- dionidium 4y ago
  And of course that's exactly what studies on the relationship between IQ and achievement actually show.
buttery101 4y ago
My dog is very intelligent. Each time I stop and let him play he remembers the place we stopped at. So going back home with my dog is really hard since he tries to stop in all the previous places he remembers, and usually they are like fifty or so. Also he always tries to go as far as possible from home, taking exactly the direction in which global distance increases, so my huskie dog should become a great mathematician if he desired so. I think one day we will discover how much more intelligent are dogs compared to what we think. Some more hints for dogs intelligence: My dog is a master in dodging other dogs while running. He takes a long time analyzing the pee he smells. Furthermore, to pee over other dogs pees, he usually spends about 15 seconds trying to find the best position to do it well, it must be a difficult task for him or perhaps he foresees and enjoys the real pleasure he will obtain doing so.
magwa101 4y ago
sullyj3 4y ago
The belief that an airtight definition is required in order for a concept to be meaningful is just philosophically confused. That isn't how concepts work. Conceptual boundaries are always fuzzy, with confusing edge cases and ambiguities, and that's ok. I'd challenge people who think definitions are necessary to grapple with coming up with a definition of a chair, in the form of a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. Make sure you don't exclude anything commonly thought of as a chair, or include anything not commonly thought of as a chair. For an extra challenge, come up with a definition most people would agree on. This endeavour will be a struggle. And yet we manage to discuss chairs without difficulty. We have a generally understood concept of what we mean by a chair, with central examples like dining chairs or lounge chairs commonly held to be chairs. In the case of ambiguities of communication, we can clarify on a case by case basis ("Did you want me to take the ottomans to the other room too?")

65 points by BerislavLopac 4y ago

The problem of not having a definition is over-emphasized. There is a widespread consensus that there is something that is an important part of human behavior and being human (and exhibited to some degree by many other species, not to mention extinct hominids), and that concept is well-enough constrained that we can study it. Defining it is something we will work towards as we come to understand it better. I suspect the idea that we need definitions first comes from education, where much of what we know is presented in this manner. This is rarely, however, the way our initial understanding was achieved - just consider how our concepts and definitions of 'energy' and 'matter' have changed over time.

3pt14159 4y ago
We have perfectly fine definitions for intelligence amongst creatures that are not closely related to humans, and it mostly centres around problem solving, even when introduced to problems that the creature and its ancestors had never grappled with. In these situations does the creature try the eager solution despite it obviously not working near the end? For example, does it take the close bridge that gets it 99% of the way across the river or does it not even bother and travel to the farther one that actually gets it across. If it uses small sticks in nature will it employ artificially introduced tools to solve artificially introduced problems? Etc. The key here is to apply the test without breeding for it first. That is how you tell the individual is intelligent rather than the breeding mechanism. For example, I don't think the individuals are at all intelligent in OpenAI's[0] Hide and Seek. It's basically burned in instincts since the introduction of a button that would, say, swap positions with the farthest enemy agent wouldn't be utilized for hundreds of rounds of play. The learning is the brain and replication together. Reminds me of a story about aliens on LessWrong[1] about baby eating aliens. [0] https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/ https://openai.com/blog/emergent-tool-use/ [1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-eating-aliens-1-8 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/n5TqCuizyJDfAPjkr/the-baby-e...
PurpleRamen 4y ago
The definition marks the goal. We can reach the goal without definition, but would we recognize it? And how much time and effort will be wasted by blindly tinkering around in the dark? The definition is a light beacon. Having it, will speed up progress significantly.
- coldtea 4y ago
  >We can reach the goal without definition, but would we recognize it? You can very easily shoot a porn, even without being able to define what is pornographic and what is not (a proverbially notoriously difficult to define thing, often times debated legally in various countries, for example "movie where sex acts are performed" or "movie meant to arouse the viewer sexually" both don't cut it).
  - PurpleRamen 4y ago
    Because people know how sex works and how filming works. The debate is about organizing the space, how to divide the already revealed map.
    - coldtea 4y ago
      >Because people know how sex works and how filming works. Not exactly, because both sex and filming could be done in a non-porn setting - including those two together (e.g. a sexual art film). And the question mentioned wasn't what is a "film that has sex", but what is porn - and even more so, what is it's definition (the same thing you asked for in the original comment, as necessary to "marks the goal"). The answer here (but how do we know we made a porn if we can't give a strict definition of what porn is) is that we can tell intuitively. Well, the same holds for intelligence. That's perhaps the case for many things. Famously, we don't need to know what quadratic equations are to catch a baseball. Even though formally predicting its trajectory means solving one.

vouaobrasil 4y ago

Interesting article. I personally don't think we'll ever have a definition of intelligence because it is an emergent behaviour. We'll just keep working on it, all the while believing that what we create is not intelligent, until one day it is and kills us all.

jononomo 4y ago

"For example, we often say that dogs are intelligent. But what do we mean by that? Some dogs, like sheep dogs, are very good at performing certain tasks. Most dogs can be trained to sit, fetch, and do other things. And they can disobey. The same is true of children, though we’d never compare a child’s intelligence to a dog’s. And cats won’t do any of those things, though we never refer to cats as unintelligent." I, for one, definitely think of cats as unintelligent. A cat is like a potted plant compared to the companionship and relationship a dog offers.

wtetzner 4y ago
Having grown up with both, I strongly disagree. You can build very strong bonds with cats, but you have to earn their trust first. Just because they don't feel that the purpose of their existence is to please their owner doesn't mean they're not intelligent.
- jononomo 4y ago
  The inability of a cat to communicate with a human being is what makes cats unintelligent. People like to think that cats are above communicating with humans when the fact is that they're just too stupid. It's not like cats could follow instructions if they wanted to but they just don't want to -- it's that cat are dumb and they can't follow instructions.
  - czx4f4bd 4y ago
    This is just flat-out incorrect. Scientists have found cats are plenty intelligent and simply don't cooperate with testing. https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-rival-dogs-many-tests-social-smarts-anyone-brave-enough-study-them https://www.science.org/content/article/cats-rival-dogs-many...
    - jononomo 4y ago
      Apparently dogs have been objectively measured to be twice as intelligent as cats: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-cat-brains-neurons-intelligence-study-spd https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/dog-cat-b...

jononomo 4y ago

"some research shows that elephants communicate with each other using low frequency rumbles that can be heard for miles (if you’re an elephant)." Apparently whales can hear each other over distances of several thousand miles -- entirely across oceans.

jononomo 4y ago

"We have “intelligence tests” to measure intelligence–or do they just measure test-taking ability?" Life is just a series of different kinds of tests, one after the other, every single day.

wtetzner 4y ago
That's just playing on words though. Not every kind of "test" requires the same skills and abilities.
- jononomo 4y ago
  That's true -- there are tests of brute strength, for instance, and there are also vocabulary tests. But the kinds of tests life throws at you aren't often so narrow -- they're more general tests. Once in a while you'll be faced with an immediate test of whether you can lift a heavy car off a human being in the next five minutes because there has been an accident and someone is pinned under a car, but the generalized form is "can you move a heavy object", for which the answer is something along the lines of "invent a crane".
- bena 4y ago
  People do get weird about intelligence though. A bench press is simply a test of how much you can lift. But no one will say that it doesn't measure how strong your arms are. A foot race is simply a test of how fast your legs can move. But no one will say that it doesn't measure how fast you are. I think the thing that trips people up is that they often confuse knowledge tests with intelligence tests. Reciting the periodic table is not a sign of intelligence, it is a sign of knowledge. As is knowing geography, languages, etc. If it requires a recitation of knowledge, it's most likely a knowledge test. Like most of those Facebook quizzes "Only the smartest can answer all these questions!!!". And you go to the test and it's just trivia. Trivia tests knowledge. Knowledge tests can be biased, they can be 'gamed' (except the best way to game them is to memorize the knowledge), etc. Intelligence tests are something different. They test our ability to reason. Which is harder to measure. Because often there is a baseline of knowledge required. People like to dump on the old "brain teaser" and less old "leetcode" style interview questions. But they're probably better than quizzing people on esoteric language features. Language features are trivia. Questions with no real answer or no known answer are better proxies for intelligence. Not great and if you stick with the same questions, you'll eventually turn them into trivia as the answers become codified. But, you know, proxies are never the real thing. I also happen to agree with the article. We do not have a clear definition of intelligence. Or consciousness. Or sentience. So unclear, we kind of use all three interchangeably. We have a fuzzy feeling. We don't think Lamda is intelligent/sentient because we don't feel it is. We feel that each other is intelligent/sentient because of course we are. We can't prove that to each other. And we can't come up with a definition that both includes everything our fuzzy feeling says is intelligent/sentient and excludes everything we think is not.

mushufasa 4y ago

> these discussions tend not to go anywhere, largely because we don’t really know what intelligence is. 40 years of academic cognitive science would beg to differ.... This sounds like it suffers the common tech dunning-kruger approach to pre-existing literature

motohagiography 4y ago

The simplest definition of intelligence I use is one's capcity for abstraction. Is a mind capable of generalizing accurately and then refining it with some good tools for feedback? Pattern recognition is close, as it's abstracting things into symbols and then comparing the symbols, but it's not sufficient. "Smart" I define as the ability to effect intentions, or to get what you want. In this sense, a lot of intelligent people are not very smart, and a lot of very smart people are unhindered by intelligence. Animals are perfectly smart for their environment without needing much intelligence. Humans are poorly adapted to our physical environment, and require a great deal more intelligence to have survived. Language is useful for many things, but the things it isn't good for are anti-smart (e.g. I think our ego as a refining filter for experience is an artifact of language) Anyway, the Turing Test as a thought experiment isn't really a measure of intelligence so much as it is an economics model of an indifference curve, which is how much the observer cares (or not) about whether they are dealing with a machine. I'm actually more bullish on the possibility of AGI for some admittedly very strange reasons, even though I am harsh about people who anthropomorphisze code and fall for animism. My view reduces to a kind of theistic argument where if we can create conscious life from rude materials, it is logical evidence that we ourselves may also have been the expression of some similar intention. If AGI is demonstrably impossible within our physics (like incompleteness theorem level proof), then we exist within a hard ontological boundary, and the best we can do is infer what that boundary is made of (probably time/gravity). The reason I think AGI is plausible is because I have theistic axioms that create a kind of circular reference where if we can Create life, then we could also have been Created with the intent to discover and appreciate the meaning of that, and if we cannot Create, we were not meant to experience that Creation. Maybe even if there is something on the other side of death, we may still just be programs or epiphenomena that aren't intended to reflect or apprehend our substrate, sort of like the one-way directional relationship between an instrument and a song played on it. An AGI would make the leap from song, to software, to operating on its environment using abstraction, generalization and feedback. It wouldn't be "us," but I think it could certainly become a them that could eventually exist independently of us.

AndrewDucker 4y ago

Intelligence doesn't seem that complex a thing to define, to me. Oxford Dictionary says "the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills". I generally go for a slightly wider "The ability to create models of the world around them, and make predictions based on those models" - where "knowledge" would be "models" and "making predictions based on those models" is a sort of proto-skill. Sure, the kinds of things that different people find easy to model vary. One person might find it easy to model mathematical theorems, others the internal working of car engines. But in both cases there's an underlying ability to make a mental model of the thing you're learning about, and use that to predict how it will function, and work out what you can do with it.

visarga 4y ago
We're only as intelligent as the models we learn. Where we don't have models we tend to learn by simple correlation. Discoveries are rare, even researchers only grind at that 0.01% beyond the known modelling space. A human in a primitive society, even with the same IQ with a modern man, would be much less intelligent about solving a variety of tasks because they lack the mental "furniture". Most of our intelligence does not come from the brain, it comes from the culture, which is an evolutionary process.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
TheBigSalad 4y ago
Does memory count as intelligence? I've seen people with great memories and people think they are very intelligent. They people I'm thinking about were actually intelligent, but their great memories really set them apart. For example, the guy at work who remembers every project, every shortcoming, and the reasoning behind every technical decision.
- AndrewDucker 4y ago
  I certainly think more memory allows you to build more complex models and to build them from more information at once.

thallukrish 4y ago

Humans seem to do a million different things. And all of them were kids growing into adults and do by learning to do things. Isn't that good enough if a machine did just that - ready to learn if taught, to be classified as being generally intelligent ?

WJW 4y ago
> Isn't that good enough ... I think approximately nobody is studying AI with the end goal of making a machine that is (say) as smart as a dog. It is a good intermediate goal but the hope has always been to surpass humans. If we want more doglike intelligences we can just breed more dogs. Generally intelligent is only the start, and not a very interesting part. Animals can obviously learn things and they are "generally intelligent", but most are not all that bright. We are not all that clear on why either. Elephants have larger brains than us, so clearly it's not raw size but rather the complexity of the brain that makes us so much smarter. Which parts of brain complexity matter and which are accidents of evolution is almost entirely unknown.

Xcelerate 4y ago

Much as how Kolmogorov solved the problem of defining randomness, I feel like Legg and Hutter solved (or at least mostly solved) the problem of defining universal intelligence. Loosely put, it is an agent that makes the best possible decision about the future with the information that it has available. “Best” can be defined however you want; it’s less about the particular cost function and more about achieving optimality. And no, the oft-cited yet frequently misunderstood NFL doesn’t rule this out.

visarga 4y ago
> makes the best possible decision about the future with the information that it has available So would a good thermostat be considered intelligent, assuming it takes great decisions? Intelligence needs to be defined with respect to a range of tasks and a range of priors. It's skill acquisition efficiency, not just taking good decisions. I recommend "On the Measure of Intelligence" by François Chollet >We argue that solely measuring skill at any given task falls short of measuring intelligence, because skill is heavily modulated by prior knowledge and experience: unlimited priors or unlimited training data allow experimenters to "buy" arbitrary levels of skills for a system, in a way that masks the system's own generalization power. We then articulate a new formal definition of intelligence based on Algorithmic Information Theory, describing intelligence as skill acquisition efficiency and highlighting the concepts of scope, generalization difficulty, priors, and experience. https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547 https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.01547
- Xcelerate 4y ago
  > Intelligence needs to be defined with respect to a range of tasks and a range of priors. Yep, you’re right. I forgot to mention that in my “loosely put” sentence, although the work by Hutter and Legg does mention that and discusses algorithmic information theory heavily.

sinenomine 4y ago

There is no problem with convergent evidence of various different measures correlating positively with general intelligence, which is also measured by IQ tests: 1. Reaction speed https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5608941/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5608941/ 2. Dendritic tree arborization, synaptic density, electrophysiological properties of pyramidal neurons https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363383/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6363383/ There is a problem with sophistry and competitive virtue signaling around these phenomena. Instead of ignoring biology we could as well embrace it.

dr_dshiv 4y ago

Whatever intelligence is, more of it should lead to greater success, on average.

dionidium 4y ago
And of course that's exactly what studies on the relationship between IQ and achievement actually show.

buttery101 4y ago

My dog is very intelligent. Each time I stop and let him play he remembers the place we stopped at. So going back home with my dog is really hard since he tries to stop in all the previous places he remembers, and usually they are like fifty or so. Also he always tries to go as far as possible from home, taking exactly the direction in which global distance increases, so my huskie dog should become a great mathematician if he desired so. I think one day we will discover how much more intelligent are dogs compared to what we think. Some more hints for dogs intelligence: My dog is a master in dodging other dogs while running. He takes a long time analyzing the pee he smells. Furthermore, to pee over other dogs pees, he usually spends about 15 seconds trying to find the best position to do it well, it must be a difficult task for him or perhaps he foresees and enjoys the real pleasure he will obtain doing so.

magwa101 4y ago

sullyj3 4y ago

The belief that an airtight definition is required in order for a concept to be meaningful is just philosophically confused. That isn't how concepts work. Conceptual boundaries are always fuzzy, with confusing edge cases and ambiguities, and that's ok. I'd challenge people who think definitions are necessary to grapple with coming up with a definition of a chair, in the form of a list of necessary and sufficient conditions. Make sure you don't exclude anything commonly thought of as a chair, or include anything not commonly thought of as a chair. For an extra challenge, come up with a definition most people would agree on. This endeavour will be a struggle. And yet we manage to discuss chairs without difficulty. We have a generally understood concept of what we mean by a chair, with central examples like dining chairs or lounge chairs commonly held to be chairs. In the case of ambiguities of communication, we can clarify on a case by case basis ("Did you want me to take the ottomans to the other room too?")