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"I find it rather plausible that machine intelligence will very soon be capable of doing things we humans cannot do. In fact, that's already the case to some de

"I find it rather plausible that machine intelligence will very soon be capable of doing things we humans cannot do. In fact, that's already the case to some degree (and I don't mean just doing things faster)." What can today's computers do that a human couldn't do given infinite time, patience, pencil and paper?

fauigerzigerk 17y ago
Theoretically the answer is probably nothing. What I was thinking about is the kind of structure that is the internet for instance. Could humans collectively _be_ the internet? Could they simulate it, very slowly, without computer programs and hardware other than pencil and paper? A single person could not. Another thing are parallel algorithms that include random factors. I don't think humans can think like that, consciously and rationally, even though the brain might work like that underneath. Or could a human sift through massive amounts of data (even given an infinite amount of time) and do something similar to a data mining algorithm? I doubt it. He wouldn't be able to remember enough of the things he had seen and looking them up in his notes would take so long that he would have forgotten where he was when he started. The overall picture of a particular rule or pattern just might not form in his mind.
- electromagnetic 17y ago
  A single computer cannot be the internet either. Essentially the internet is a much more accessible version of the postal system, which has dated back for centuries. I send you a piece of paper requesting such and such information, you being the server sends me back a piece of paper with all the information I requested. Just instead of taking several weeks to send a request from one side of the world to the other, it may only take a few seconds. Incidentally the version of the internet protocol being tested for use in space behaves even more like a postal system as they want to be able to store information in relay stations. So rather ironically, in the far future the internet will likely operate more like the postal service than ever before. The mere fact of the matter is that until computers begin creating things exclusively of their own, all things computers run are made of the human mind and built of human systems and experience. You refer to data miners, however have you ever seen the server farms they use for such tasks? There's thousands of computers in them, and incidentally tens or hundreds of thousands of individual processors. I'd argue that when comparing a human to a computer, you should be comparing a human to a single core processor. Your data mining example is complete bunk when you consider the sheer amount of processors they use. Can 100,000 people do a data mining task? I'd guess yes. Ed: If you doubt my claim that a large group of people cannot be the equivalent of a server farm for data mining, then you should read up on the history of how the Enigma Machine was cracked. The British invented the Colossus computer system specifically to speed up the work already done by humans in Bletchley Park. Cryptanalysis is much more complicated than mere data mining, especially considering the enigma machine was actually designed to change to make it even more difficult to decipher. If people can do mass cryptanalysis, people can do data mining.
  - fauigerzigerk 17y ago
    I don't think the number of CPUs matters. The interesting question is whether machine intelligence can do things we humans cannot do with pen and paper, either individually or as a group. You may be right about the internet and the postal service, but there's no doubt in my mind that some of the things algorithms do with data is impossible to do for humans due to cognitive limits. Sure, you could try to split the work into many parts and have many people work on it, but given enough data and sufficiently complex patterns, coordinating all those people to find patterns that are not local to one such part would overwhelm the organisation. I don't think it's important, but even a single machine can find patterns in large amounts of data that I cannot find with pen and paper no matter how much time I have. What machines cannot do today is make a judgement about the relevance of the patterns found.

fauigerzigerk 17y ago

Theoretically the answer is probably nothing. What I was thinking about is the kind of structure that is the internet for instance. Could humans collectively _be_ the internet? Could they simulate it, very slowly, without computer programs and hardware other than pencil and paper? A single person could not. Another thing are parallel algorithms that include random factors. I don't think humans can think like that, consciously and rationally, even though the brain might work like that underneath. Or could a human sift through massive amounts of data (even given an infinite amount of time) and do something similar to a data mining algorithm? I doubt it. He wouldn't be able to remember enough of the things he had seen and looking them up in his notes would take so long that he would have forgotten where he was when he started. The overall picture of a particular rule or pattern just might not form in his mind.

electromagnetic 17y ago
A single computer cannot be the internet either. Essentially the internet is a much more accessible version of the postal system, which has dated back for centuries. I send you a piece of paper requesting such and such information, you being the server sends me back a piece of paper with all the information I requested. Just instead of taking several weeks to send a request from one side of the world to the other, it may only take a few seconds. Incidentally the version of the internet protocol being tested for use in space behaves even more like a postal system as they want to be able to store information in relay stations. So rather ironically, in the far future the internet will likely operate more like the postal service than ever before. The mere fact of the matter is that until computers begin creating things exclusively of their own, all things computers run are made of the human mind and built of human systems and experience. You refer to data miners, however have you ever seen the server farms they use for such tasks? There's thousands of computers in them, and incidentally tens or hundreds of thousands of individual processors. I'd argue that when comparing a human to a computer, you should be comparing a human to a single core processor. Your data mining example is complete bunk when you consider the sheer amount of processors they use. Can 100,000 people do a data mining task? I'd guess yes. Ed: If you doubt my claim that a large group of people cannot be the equivalent of a server farm for data mining, then you should read up on the history of how the Enigma Machine was cracked. The British invented the Colossus computer system specifically to speed up the work already done by humans in Bletchley Park. Cryptanalysis is much more complicated than mere data mining, especially considering the enigma machine was actually designed to change to make it even more difficult to decipher. If people can do mass cryptanalysis, people can do data mining.
- fauigerzigerk 17y ago
  I don't think the number of CPUs matters. The interesting question is whether machine intelligence can do things we humans cannot do with pen and paper, either individually or as a group. You may be right about the internet and the postal service, but there's no doubt in my mind that some of the things algorithms do with data is impossible to do for humans due to cognitive limits. Sure, you could try to split the work into many parts and have many people work on it, but given enough data and sufficiently complex patterns, coordinating all those people to find patterns that are not local to one such part would overwhelm the organisation. I don't think it's important, but even a single machine can find patterns in large amounts of data that I cannot find with pen and paper no matter how much time I have. What machines cannot do today is make a judgement about the relevance of the patterns found.