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There is a famous Dijkstra quote, “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” Do t
by flatline 3y ago
There is a famous Dijkstra quote, “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”
Do the intrinsic properties of the system really matter at the end of the day if it performs as well as we do at some task? Heck they’ve been doing many things better for decades, but those are the types of tasks we take it for granted that a machine should be able to do. Solve differential equations. Play chess. But now computers are doing “human” tasks competently. Writing creative fiction. Generating graphical art.
We don’t have a good working definition or metric for intelligence. Surely it is not a monolithic property. Animals exhibit many traits we associate with intelligence. Some of the stuff GPT 3+ generates sounds pretty intelligent. It is the type of things an intelligence may have produced, because it was trained to do just that. If we look at intelligence as a cluster of traits, or behaviors, I think we are surrounded by intelligence - human, artificial, or otherwise. Doesn’t have to be an AGI to fall in that category. It doesn’t even have to be particularly impressive.
- emodendroket 3y agoSure, it's neat that it can do those things... still I don't think that I'm exactly ready to toss aside books written by humans in favor of AI-generated alternatives.
- jack_pp 3y agoWriters have started using AI-generated ideas to help them write books. Same with code. Sure it might not write your product code from start to finish with no help but it will speed up your dev speed significantly for certain tasks. Just because we haven't reached singularity doesn't mean what we have now is useless and putting it down as a "parlor trick" as grandparent said seems to me very unwise.
- emodendroket 3y agoAd copy has served a similar purpose but nobody would claim ad copy has (or could) supplant creative writing because of that.
- fttx_ 3y agoAd copy is (a form of) creative writing.
- emodendroket 3y agoOK. Literary writing.
- vczf 3y agoI wrote about my definition of intelligence earlier this month: https://tildes.net/~comp/194n/language_is_a_poor_heuristic_for_intelligence#comment-a2ka https://tildes.net/~comp/194n/language_is_a_poor_heuristic_f... I have a definition of intelligence. [...] Intelligence is prediction. In the case of intelligent living processes ranging from single celled organisms to complex multicellular life, intelligence arises from the need to predict the future to survive and reproduce. More intelligent organisms build more elaborate models of the world using better developed senses in order to do so. Humans model the world primarily with language, which allows us to share our models with each other, across both space and time! Without language, it is extraordinarily more difficult to communicate complex abstract thoughts. As a side effect of our high level of intelligence, our wetware is capable of modeling things outside of language, such as mathematics. [...] In general, I think we need to stop equating intelligence with consciousness, agency, moral value, and living things. These are entirely different concepts, and, as a species, we are blinded by our egotistical identity of being smarter than the other animals. According to my definition, intelligence is actually all around us. We are blind to it because we focus only on how intelligence manifests in humans (defined by by our specific social organization and biological senses), and then use that as a benchmark to judge every other thing in the world. A less socially-charged definition of intelligence would make it easier to compare intelligence across living and non-living processes, though it would not be "popular science" useful for ranking humans.
- oldandtired 3y agoYour definition of intelligence has been around for millennia and is part of the pantheism concept.
- worksonmine 3y agoI don't agree with your definition at all. 2 people want to kill each other. The one taking the first step is the intelligent one because according to your definition he was better at predicting an outcome than his opponent. The real world is more complex than that and there are multiple options where both survive, or letting your opponent live and killing yourself because his life is more beneficial to humanity and so on. Any organism can survive, but for most (including us) that implies a selfish outlook but the most intelligent people I know or heard of never even consider their own ego.