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Intelligence and Imagination could not be more separate. I'm defining intelligence as sheer IQ, analogous to a computers' ability to process information. Imagi

Intelligence and Imagination could not be more separate. I'm defining intelligence as sheer IQ, analogous to a computers' ability to process information. Imagination is so essentially human in nature that there is no way to describe current AI as "imaginative". For example, the person with the highest IQ in the world is not more creative than the best musician. Some of the smartest minds in the world cannot "think outside of the box" effectively, because their minds are not wired that way. Intelligence is not imagination. Can anyone please explain how an intelligence-self-improving computer will shift from being incredibly smart to wildly imaginative? That's the one hole in singularity that I can't figure out.

mquander 14y ago
You started off defining intelligence as something limited and not independently useful, and then you concluded that its presence was limited and not independently useful. The answer is that it's not actually obvious that "intelligence and imagination could not be more separate" or that "imagination is...essentially human in nature," so when most people talk about AI, they are not excluding those abilities.
ajuc 14y ago
Imagination isn't any more human specific, than inteligence, or walking upright. That we can't do machines that are imaginative now, doesn't meant it's impossible to do. Besides - what if imagination is just heuristic to search solution space quicker? Maybe machine with orders of magnitude more processing power can give better solutions without using this heuristic? That would mean it's us who thinks inside the box (because we use this heuristic), and computers can search solution space exhautively, so they will come up with solutions that escape our heuristic - we wouldn't even consider such solutions.
- 6ren 14y ago
  Yes, it doesn't really matter how intelligence is defined, just that in aiming at creating an artificial mind, we'd try to include whatever was useful, including imagination. My reasoning is, if one machine can do it (us), it's possible for another machine to do it. (Though there's a question of whether we are smart enough to create that machine.) Exponential search space is a killer. Some form of heuristic seems necessary. Perhaps we will one day be able to simulate the heuristics we ourselves use - and then improve on them (e.g. apply them to more data than we can; use more complex heuristics; etc along the lines you say). Given variation between intellectual abilities of human beings, it is does not have an obvious fixed limit, and we may be able to extend the range of that variability. Though I expect increasing the associations an "imagination" can find suffers from exponential explosion.

mquander 14y ago

You started off defining intelligence as something limited and not independently useful, and then you concluded that its presence was limited and not independently useful. The answer is that it's not actually obvious that "intelligence and imagination could not be more separate" or that "imagination is...essentially human in nature," so when most people talk about AI, they are not excluding those abilities.

ajuc 14y ago

Imagination isn't any more human specific, than inteligence, or walking upright. That we can't do machines that are imaginative now, doesn't meant it's impossible to do. Besides - what if imagination is just heuristic to search solution space quicker? Maybe machine with orders of magnitude more processing power can give better solutions without using this heuristic? That would mean it's us who thinks inside the box (because we use this heuristic), and computers can search solution space exhautively, so they will come up with solutions that escape our heuristic - we wouldn't even consider such solutions.

6ren 14y ago
Yes, it doesn't really matter how intelligence is defined, just that in aiming at creating an artificial mind, we'd try to include whatever was useful, including imagination. My reasoning is, if one machine can do it (us), it's possible for another machine to do it. (Though there's a question of whether we are smart enough to create that machine.) Exponential search space is a killer. Some form of heuristic seems necessary. Perhaps we will one day be able to simulate the heuristics we ourselves use - and then improve on them (e.g. apply them to more data than we can; use more complex heuristics; etc along the lines you say). Given variation between intellectual abilities of human beings, it is does not have an obvious fixed limit, and we may be able to extend the range of that variability. Though I expect increasing the associations an "imagination" can find suffers from exponential explosion.