4 ms·

We don't know how to define the essence of intelligence, so all we can do is knock all the strawmen we traditionally attribute to intelligence, until we're eith

We don't know how to define the essence of intelligence, so all we can do is knock all the strawmen we traditionally attribute to intelligence, until we're either left with the essence of true intelligence, or we knock off everything and we find intelligence was just a bunch of tricks after all.

somenameforme 4y ago
I don't think the essence is especially elusive. It's the ability to make novel, meaningful, and useful discoveries from precepts that don't immediately "obviously" lead to those discoveries. Observing the sky and nature leading to a mathematical formulation of gravity is an absolutely amazing leap. In part because of what was done, but perhaps even more so for even beginning to imagine it was something that could be done. Imagine stargazing in a time prior to Newton, observing objects falling on Earth, and somehow managing to derive an accurate mathematical formulation of something you had no reason to imagine even existed. Man hadn't been to space, let alone the moon, and so for all we knew if you dropped an apple anywhere it would just as well fall. Perhaps how Newton may have began his discovery was by asking himself where it would fall, but that's a tangent. --- Humanity's entire existence has been but a blink of time on any sort of timescale, besides our own lives. And in that time we went from the bleeding edge of technology, perhaps pun intended, being 'poke them with the pointy end' to having men travel into space, voyage to other 'planets', land on them, and imminently live on them. A truly intelligent machine, given its capacity for practically infinite storage, infinitely more accurate recall, and arbitrarily small 'generations' (in terms of self recursive evolutionary improvement) ought be able to not only match this, from a similar starting base of knowledge, but move rapidly beyond it at an extremely swift rate. So I don't think it would be particularly ambiguous, or debatable. An intelligent machine would quickly advance nearly all fields of humanity by an unimaginable amount. Given the ability for a machine to also scale its own processing capacity to arbitrarily higher degrees (while we're, more or less stuck with fixed 'hardware') this should be able to continue for an exceptionally long period of time as well. You would end up completely revolutionizing humanity to a degree we can't even really imagine today - repeatedly, and it would all happen within a matter of years. I'm even being somewhat generous here by allowing for a greater intelligence to remain mindless and servile, which seems quite antithetical to intelligence. But if we can "just" get to here, as described, I think that'd be pretty compelling, servility notwithstanding.
- Matumio 4y ago
  > practically infinite storage, infinitely more accurate recall You can already hold all of humanity's written cultural knowledge on a thumbnail-sized drive. Recall is pretty accurate, too. > revolutionizing humanity Tell that anyone who lived 100 or 1000 years ago. World-wide instant communication. A cultural species of interconnected thought, a network the size of a planet. Augmented with tools of perfect memory recall, error-free precision calculations, way beyond what an unaugmented human brain can do. Welcome to the present. We even got remote-controlled robots working for us on other planets. I'll keep my ad-blocker enabled, though. But allow me to think of it as a brain augmentation. We do what we always did: cultural evolution. We are creating tools to augment ourselves, not machines that are independent from us. As we integrate those tools into our daily routine, the tools are shaping our practice and needs. So we again create different tools, or ways of living. We diversify, then copy the successful. What's the point of creating a new god of intelligence? We have plenty of gods already. Let's maybe study and discuss non-human intelligence instead. (Edit: rewrote last paragraph.)
- naasking 4y ago
  > I don't think the essence is especially elusive. It's the ability to make novel, meaningful, and useful discoveries from precepts that don't immediately "obviously" lead to those discoveries. But that's trivial simply by enumerating all Turing machines that reproduces the observed outputs. The point of intelligence is that it somehow "filters" the space of possible theories in some specific, computable way. The ideal model of this is Solomonoff induction, which orders Turing machines by Kolmogorov complexity, but that ordering is not computable. So intelligence is some computable approximation of this, but discovering the specifics of how that works is non-trivial.
  - somenameforme 4y ago
    I would define intelligence not in terms of search, but creation. And the two are indeed different. As one simple example - early man had no concept of math, or even numbers. Incidentally, the same is even true of some isolated tribes to this day [1]. Somehow we created numbers, seemingly from nothing. And it was only this creation that enabled us to move onto even more creation where the search space continues to grow ever wider, yet we continue to pull something from nothing. It's not like we had any real basis for the formulation of numbers, or even reason to imagine they existed. The further you go back in our development, the greater the distinction between creation and search becomes. The article itself even gets into a bit of a paradox on this note. It suggests that language defines thought, and since they have no numbers in their language - they cannot think about numbers. But then how do we have numbers? Somebody was certainly able to, and it's not because they started with numbers in their language. And for that matter how do we even have language? Another thing that was developed from absolutely nothing. Go for enough back in our evolutionary timeline and we wouldn't have even had the ability to express e.g. 'angry noise'. Yet somehow, we created such things - again seemingly from nothing. And I think that is the purest essence of intelligence. [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/news040816-10 https://www.nature.com/articles/news040816-10

somenameforme 4y ago

I don't think the essence is especially elusive. It's the ability to make novel, meaningful, and useful discoveries from precepts that don't immediately "obviously" lead to those discoveries. Observing the sky and nature leading to a mathematical formulation of gravity is an absolutely amazing leap. In part because of what was done, but perhaps even more so for even beginning to imagine it was something that could be done. Imagine stargazing in a time prior to Newton, observing objects falling on Earth, and somehow managing to derive an accurate mathematical formulation of something you had no reason to imagine even existed. Man hadn't been to space, let alone the moon, and so for all we knew if you dropped an apple anywhere it would just as well fall. Perhaps how Newton may have began his discovery was by asking himself where it would fall, but that's a tangent. --- Humanity's entire existence has been but a blink of time on any sort of timescale, besides our own lives. And in that time we went from the bleeding edge of technology, perhaps pun intended, being 'poke them with the pointy end' to having men travel into space, voyage to other 'planets', land on them, and imminently live on them. A truly intelligent machine, given its capacity for practically infinite storage, infinitely more accurate recall, and arbitrarily small 'generations' (in terms of self recursive evolutionary improvement) ought be able to not only match this, from a similar starting base of knowledge, but move rapidly beyond it at an extremely swift rate. So I don't think it would be particularly ambiguous, or debatable. An intelligent machine would quickly advance nearly all fields of humanity by an unimaginable amount. Given the ability for a machine to also scale its own processing capacity to arbitrarily higher degrees (while we're, more or less stuck with fixed 'hardware') this should be able to continue for an exceptionally long period of time as well. You would end up completely revolutionizing humanity to a degree we can't even really imagine today - repeatedly, and it would all happen within a matter of years. I'm even being somewhat generous here by allowing for a greater intelligence to remain mindless and servile, which seems quite antithetical to intelligence. But if we can "just" get to here, as described, I think that'd be pretty compelling, servility notwithstanding.

Matumio 4y ago
> practically infinite storage, infinitely more accurate recall You can already hold all of humanity's written cultural knowledge on a thumbnail-sized drive. Recall is pretty accurate, too. > revolutionizing humanity Tell that anyone who lived 100 or 1000 years ago. World-wide instant communication. A cultural species of interconnected thought, a network the size of a planet. Augmented with tools of perfect memory recall, error-free precision calculations, way beyond what an unaugmented human brain can do. Welcome to the present. We even got remote-controlled robots working for us on other planets. I'll keep my ad-blocker enabled, though. But allow me to think of it as a brain augmentation. We do what we always did: cultural evolution. We are creating tools to augment ourselves, not machines that are independent from us. As we integrate those tools into our daily routine, the tools are shaping our practice and needs. So we again create different tools, or ways of living. We diversify, then copy the successful. What's the point of creating a new god of intelligence? We have plenty of gods already. Let's maybe study and discuss non-human intelligence instead. (Edit: rewrote last paragraph.)
naasking 4y ago
> I don't think the essence is especially elusive. It's the ability to make novel, meaningful, and useful discoveries from precepts that don't immediately "obviously" lead to those discoveries. But that's trivial simply by enumerating all Turing machines that reproduces the observed outputs. The point of intelligence is that it somehow "filters" the space of possible theories in some specific, computable way. The ideal model of this is Solomonoff induction, which orders Turing machines by Kolmogorov complexity, but that ordering is not computable. So intelligence is some computable approximation of this, but discovering the specifics of how that works is non-trivial.
- somenameforme 4y ago
  I would define intelligence not in terms of search, but creation. And the two are indeed different. As one simple example - early man had no concept of math, or even numbers. Incidentally, the same is even true of some isolated tribes to this day [1]. Somehow we created numbers, seemingly from nothing. And it was only this creation that enabled us to move onto even more creation where the search space continues to grow ever wider, yet we continue to pull something from nothing. It's not like we had any real basis for the formulation of numbers, or even reason to imagine they existed. The further you go back in our development, the greater the distinction between creation and search becomes. The article itself even gets into a bit of a paradox on this note. It suggests that language defines thought, and since they have no numbers in their language - they cannot think about numbers. But then how do we have numbers? Somebody was certainly able to, and it's not because they started with numbers in their language. And for that matter how do we even have language? Another thing that was developed from absolutely nothing. Go for enough back in our evolutionary timeline and we wouldn't have even had the ability to express e.g. 'angry noise'. Yet somehow, we created such things - again seemingly from nothing. And I think that is the purest essence of intelligence. [1] - https://www.nature.com/articles/news040816-10 https://www.nature.com/articles/news040816-10