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> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Uh, because up until and including now, we are

> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Uh, because up until and including now, we are...?

virgildotcodes 7mo ago
Every living thing on Earth is unique. Every rock is unique in virtually infinite ways from the next otherwise identical rock. There are also a tremendous number of similarities between all living things and between rocks (and between rocks and living things). Most ways in which things are unique are arguably uninteresting. The default mode, the null hypothesis should be to assume that human intelligence isn't interestingly unique unless it can be proven otherwise. In these repeated discussions around AI, there is criticism over the way an AI solves a problem, without any actual critical thought about the way humans solve problems. The latter is left up to the assumption that "of course humans do X differently" and if you press you invariably end up at something couched in a vague mysticism about our inner-workings. Humans apparently create something from nothing, without the recombination of any prior knowledge or outside information, and they get it right on the first try. Through what, divine inspiration from the God who made us and only us in His image?
- slopinthebag 7mo ago
  I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far. But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this. > There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical. Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
  - blackcatsec 7mo ago
    > I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers. I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual. What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so. There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle... But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).
    - slopinthebag 7mo ago
      I largely agree with you, but I also see this same type of thinking appear in people who I know are not arrogant - at least in the techbroisk way.
- gormen 7mo ago
  [dead]
- gf000 7mo ago
  Humans are obviously unique in an interesting way. People only "move the goalpost" because it's not an interesting question that humans can do some great stuff, the interesting question is where the boundary is. (Whether against animals or AI). Some example goals which makes human trivially superior (in terms of intelligence): invention of nuclear bomb/plants, theory of relativity, etc.
  - stavros 7mo ago
    But that's unique in the sense of "you have a bag of ten apples and I have a bag of eleven apples, therefore my bag is unique". It's not qualitatively different intelligence than a dog's, you just have more of it.
    - gf000 7mo ago
      I would argue that point. The biological components are the same, but emergent behavior is a thing. So both the scale and the number of connections/way they connect have surpassed some limit after which cognitive capabilities increased severalfold to the point that humans "took over the world". And arguably further increase in intelligence seems to fall into a diminishing returns category, compared to this previous boom. (Someone being "2x smarter" doesn't give them enough benefit of reigning over others, at least history would look otherwise were it the case, in my opinion) Probably dumb example, but just by increasing speed you get well-behaving laminar flow vs turbulence, yet it's fundamentally the same a level beneath.
      - stavros 7mo ago
        Yeah, I don't know that there's such a jump. Dogs, for example, clearly communicate, both with us and with each other. They don't have language, but they also don't lack communication skills. To me, language is just "better communication" rather than a qualitatively different thing.
        gf000 7mo ago
        You may want to watch this video: https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4?is=bl5TPvk9_mdnG3Om https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4?is=bl5TPvk9_mdnG3Om Human language is way above what communication animals show. We don't really know what's the exact boundary, but again, the difference is significant and not just "scaled up".

> I don't know why I am still perpetually shocked that the default assumption is that humans are somehow unique. Uh, because up until and including now, we are...?

virgildotcodes 7mo ago

Every living thing on Earth is unique. Every rock is unique in virtually infinite ways from the next otherwise identical rock. There are also a tremendous number of similarities between all living things and between rocks (and between rocks and living things). Most ways in which things are unique are arguably uninteresting. The default mode, the null hypothesis should be to assume that human intelligence isn't interestingly unique unless it can be proven otherwise. In these repeated discussions around AI, there is criticism over the way an AI solves a problem, without any actual critical thought about the way humans solve problems. The latter is left up to the assumption that "of course humans do X differently" and if you press you invariably end up at something couched in a vague mysticism about our inner-workings. Humans apparently create something from nothing, without the recombination of any prior knowledge or outside information, and they get it right on the first try. Through what, divine inspiration from the God who made us and only us in His image?

slopinthebag 7mo ago
I doubt you can even define intelligence sufficiently to argue this point. Since that's an ongoing debate without a resolution thus far. But you claimed that humans aren't unique. I think it's pretty obvious we are on many dimensions including what you might classify as "intelligence". You don't even necessarily have to believe in a "soul" or something like that, although many people do. The capabilities of a human far surpass every single AI to date, and much more efficiently as well. That we are able to brute-force a simulacrum of intelligence in a few narrow domains is incredible, but we should not denigrate humans when celebrating this. > There's still this seeming belief in magic and human exceptionalism, deeply held, even in communities that otherwise tend to revolve around the sciences and the empirical. Do you ever wonder why that is? I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers.
- blackcatsec 7mo ago
  > I often wonder why tech has so many reductionist, materialist, and quite frankly anti-human, thinkers. I think it comes from a position of arrogance/ego. I'll speak for the US here, since that's what I know the most; but the average 'techie' in general skews towards the higher intelligence numbers than the lower parts. This is a very, very broad stroke, and that's intentional to illustrate my point. Because of this, techie culture gains quite a bit of arrogance around it with regards to the masses. And this has been trained into tech culture since childhood. Whether it be adults praising us for being "so smart", or that we "figured out the VCR", or some other random tech problem that literally almost any human being can solve by simply reading the manual. What I've found, in the vast majority of technical problem solving cases that average people have challenges with, if they just took a few minutes to read a manual they'd be able to solve a lot of it themselves. In short, I don't believe as a very strong techie that I'm "smarter than most", but rather that I've taken the time to dive into a subject area that most other humans do not feel the need nor desire to do so. There are objectively hard problems in tech to solve, but the amount of people solving THOSE problems in the tech industry are few and far in between. And so the tech industry as a whole has spent the last decade or two spinning circles on increasingly complex systems to continue feeding their own egos about their own intelligence. We're now at a point that rather than solving the puzzle, most techies are creating incrementally complex puzzles to solve because they're bored of the puzzles that are in front of them. "Let me solve that puzzle by making a puzzle solver." "Okay, now let me make a puzzle solver creation tool to create puzzle solvers to solve the puzzle." and so forth and so forth. At the end of the day, you're still just solving a puzzle... But it's this arrogance that really bothers me in the tech bro culture world. And, more importantly, at least in some tech bro circles, they have realized that their target to gathering an exponential increase in wealth doesn't lie in creating new and novel ways to solve the same puzzles, but to try and tout AI as the greatest puzzle solver creation tool puzzle solver known to man (and let me grift off of it for a little bit).
  - slopinthebag 7mo ago
    I largely agree with you, but I also see this same type of thinking appear in people who I know are not arrogant - at least in the techbroisk way.
gormen 7mo ago
[dead]
gf000 7mo ago
Humans are obviously unique in an interesting way. People only "move the goalpost" because it's not an interesting question that humans can do some great stuff, the interesting question is where the boundary is. (Whether against animals or AI). Some example goals which makes human trivially superior (in terms of intelligence): invention of nuclear bomb/plants, theory of relativity, etc.
- stavros 7mo ago
  But that's unique in the sense of "you have a bag of ten apples and I have a bag of eleven apples, therefore my bag is unique". It's not qualitatively different intelligence than a dog's, you just have more of it.
  - gf000 7mo ago
    I would argue that point. The biological components are the same, but emergent behavior is a thing. So both the scale and the number of connections/way they connect have surpassed some limit after which cognitive capabilities increased severalfold to the point that humans "took over the world". And arguably further increase in intelligence seems to fall into a diminishing returns category, compared to this previous boom. (Someone being "2x smarter" doesn't give them enough benefit of reigning over others, at least history would look otherwise were it the case, in my opinion) Probably dumb example, but just by increasing speed you get well-behaving laminar flow vs turbulence, yet it's fundamentally the same a level beneath.
    - stavros 7mo ago
      Yeah, I don't know that there's such a jump. Dogs, for example, clearly communicate, both with us and with each other. They don't have language, but they also don't lack communication skills. To me, language is just "better communication" rather than a qualitatively different thing.
      - gf000 7mo ago
        You may want to watch this video: https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4?is=bl5TPvk9_mdnG3Om https://youtu.be/e7wFotDKEF4?is=bl5TPvk9_mdnG3Om Human language is way above what communication animals show. We don't really know what's the exact boundary, but again, the difference is significant and not just "scaled up".