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None of that is fact, or inevitable, or meaningful. What are "thinking capabilities", what are they made of? More RAM? A human can have more RAM, by installing

None of that is fact, or inevitable, or meaningful. What are "thinking capabilities", what are they made of? More RAM? A human can have more RAM, by installing it in the human's computer. More parallelism? Maybe, but that's like having more humans. More speed? It's not clear what you'd do with it, since research tends to involve interaction and the outside world has a pace of its own: sitting in a cell on amphetamines does not make you brilliant. More of some unknown component of the yet-to-be-discovered formula for intelligence? Maybe, if it even works that way, which is a massive assumption. I'm sorry, I'm not buying "superintelligence", outside of sci-fi plots. Even there it's kind of irritating deus ex machina stuff.

Vampiero 2y ago
I'd agree with what you're saying, but the jump to "not believing in superintelligence" doesn't make sense either. Are you implying that humans are the absolute peak of intelligence or that computers can't ever achieve something that is even just one iota better than human-level intelligence? There's one thing machines have that we don't: time. A human-level AI would be better than a human because you can ask it to solve a problem for years on end without ever resting.
- card_zero 2y ago
  I'm implying that intelligence doesn't have quantifiable levels, so I disagree with "peak" and "better" as concepts. I know we can become better at solving problems in a domain, often with the assistance of tools. But I think the bogeyman of "superintelligence" is just a human with better tools. Perhaps including a synthetic brain. I expect its smarts to be cultural, made of ideas, mediated by technology, as usual, and domain-dependent, as usual, and not frighteningly "super" for the culture it exists in. I anticipate AGI as a development of us. OK, so, maybe there are paradigm shifts to be reached that way, and maybe technology (familiarity with tools) will be crucial for these paradigm shifts which are the only way to understand certain new things intuitively. But, maybe this has been going on already, even before there were computers.
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  Humans do that too, ie research institutes.

Vampiero 2y ago

I'd agree with what you're saying, but the jump to "not believing in superintelligence" doesn't make sense either. Are you implying that humans are the absolute peak of intelligence or that computers can't ever achieve something that is even just one iota better than human-level intelligence? There's one thing machines have that we don't: time. A human-level AI would be better than a human because you can ask it to solve a problem for years on end without ever resting.

card_zero 2y ago
I'm implying that intelligence doesn't have quantifiable levels, so I disagree with "peak" and "better" as concepts. I know we can become better at solving problems in a domain, often with the assistance of tools. But I think the bogeyman of "superintelligence" is just a human with better tools. Perhaps including a synthetic brain. I expect its smarts to be cultural, made of ideas, mediated by technology, as usual, and domain-dependent, as usual, and not frighteningly "super" for the culture it exists in. I anticipate AGI as a development of us. OK, so, maybe there are paradigm shifts to be reached that way, and maybe technology (familiarity with tools) will be crucial for these paradigm shifts which are the only way to understand certain new things intuitively. But, maybe this has been going on already, even before there were computers.
actionfromafar 2y ago
Humans do that too, ie research institutes.