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Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious
- trekky1700 13y agoWhen Zuckerberg and Ashton Kutcher invest in things, it doesn't really grab my attention. But when Musk does, it really does sound promising. The company's tech sounds really awesome, being able to perceive texture from photos and interpret objects from it would be so useful in so many real world applications.
- speeq 13y agoI think Elon Musk also invested in Stripe, which I found was interesting.
- skadamat 13y agoIn an interview he emphasized that he was a tiny initial investor / had no idea what they were doing (I'm guessing Peter Thiel convinced him to since Stripe was trying to help make their initial vision for Paypal a reality)
- loceng 13y agoIf true he's probably guiding them how he was going to guide PayPal before they sold.
- SunSparc 13y agoAgreed on watching what Musk does. He seems to have a knack for brazenly pushing the technological envelope.
- arfliw 13y agoFirst time I've ever heard of Mark Zuckerberg investing in anything, separate from Facebook. He always cited 'focus' as the reason why he never does it.
- skadamat 13y agoHe also invested in Panorama Education - http://www.crunchbase.com/person/mark-zuckerberg http://www.crunchbase.com/person/mark-zuckerberg
- dsugarman 13y agoprivatization of research is real and awesome!
- loup-vaillant 13y agoProbably not. If Noam Chomsky is to be believed (I do), most research to date has been publicly funded. In the US, it has been mostly through military expenditures. (To take only one example, ARPANET itself was funded by the military.) The actually awesome part is having huge investments on long term research. Private or public, it doesn't make any difference.
- throwawayaway 13y agoIn response to your comment on another topic: You can run a "freedom box" as follows: http://freedombone.uk.to http://freedombone.uk.to The guide will work for a raspberry pi or a beagle bone. It was created out of frustration with progress of the freedom box project.
- z3phyr 13y agoStark industries, Wayne industries etc
- deletesystem32 13y ago> Zuckerberg Oh how comforting
- IE5point6 13y ago> Zuckerberg oh how comforting
- SuperChihuahua 13y agoThis fits Elon Musk's vision. He had 3 main and 2 smaller things that in the future will most affect the future of humanity. Main: the Internet, the transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration, particularly extension of life to multiple planets Smaller: artificial intelligence and biology
- skadamat 13y agoYup he put his $ where his mouth was, he invested in all 5 (for biology he invested in halcyon molecular, which shut down a year back)
- z3phyr 13y agoSpace technology roughly covers all the other 4 aspects!
- Houshalter 13y agoIf AI succeeds, then none of those other things will matter at all.
- r00fus 13y ago> If AI succeeds, then none of those other things will matter at all. Define success. Now define for whom - the investors? mankind? The AIs themselves?
- Houshalter 13y agoAs in an Intelligence Explosion (http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/. http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/.) "Success" is really a bad way of wording it, I just mean if it happens, none of those things will matter. Regardless whether it is friendly or not. Either we go extinct or the AI is so far beyond us, our present progress doesn't make much difference.
- mattj 13y agoThe AI winter is very much over, and we're back to the good old days of selling the future. I bet this team is very sharp, but there's still merit to "over-promise, under-deliver." "Phoenix, the co-founder, says Vicarious aims beyond image recognition. He said the next milestone will be creating a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects, but the textures associated with them. For example, a computer might understand “chair.” It might also comprehend “ice.” Vicarious wants to create a computer that will understand a request like “show me a chair made of ice.” Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he says."
- samstave 13y agoFunny to think that instead of curing diseases or making cheap renewable energy, we'd instead try to spend resources to invent a computer to do that for us...
- danso 13y agoSo the question you should be asking is...if everyone agrees that cheap renewable energy and curing diseases is a good thing, why haven't we done it yet? I guess if you're cynical, you'd argue, because no one can make a profit from it (uh...right). However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised machine learning is critical to doing that.
- tremols 13y agoHave we cracked the brain's "programming language" yet? I am affraid that until now research has been focused on the biological side of it; and it makes more sense to me to replicate the logic instead of replicating the brain's biological structure. I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work on top of von neuman architectures.
- quomopete 13y agothe brain having a programming language would have to be based on a lot of assumptions that not everyone is willing to make.
- Vardhan 13y agoI don't think he meant that in the literal sense, hence the quotes. The brain's "programming language" refers more the to the idea of what makes the brain's biological structure work to produce human perception.
- quomopete 13y agoI realize that, I made my comment towards this being a metaphor and I still stand by it.
- tremols 13y agoIts true, but there are even fields of science based almost entirely on assumptions. Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".
- z3phyr 13y agoThis comes under the category of neuromorphic engineering. It is an excellent question, of which I am trying to find an answer for months now! I bet there is more, just buried under varied publications, and I am sure that they created a DSL for their specialized brain based chip. The most obvious and battle tested way to program a NeuroSynaptic hardware is to create models of the brain (any application) in an algorithm and burning it with an HDL into an fpga or an fpaa. For computation of numerical entities, a small controller running a customized embedded software is used.
- peterhunt 13y agoVicarious seems similar to Numenta. Which makes sense since they share the same cofounder.
- wikiburner 13y agoDoes anyone know why Dileep George left Numenta? Wasn't he a co-founder there with Jeff Hawkins? Is there much difference between the goals of Vicarious and Numenta?
- plainOldText 13y agoI don't think their goals are considerably different; I'm curious about their approaches however. How divergent are they?
- NoodleIncident 13y agoThere's some journalism-speak about it here.[1] It seems like the two algorithms are very similar, but that RCN's represent information in a more continuous way. Maybe this allows for more flexibility? Do the sizes of the hierarchical / recursive chunks get changed over time now, or is it not a strict hierarchy anymore? Stuff is weird. [1] http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-announces-15-million-funding-for-ai-software-based-on-the-brain http://www.kurzweilai.net/vicarious-announces-15-million-fun...
- ScottBurson 13y agoI can only speculate, but as you may recall, Numenta abandoned their original, belief-propagation-based design, replacing it with a new one based on sparse distributed memory. Dileep had done a lot of work on the original design, and I recall reading that's what Vicarious is using, having licensed it from Numenta. So I think you can put it down to a difference in technical direction between Dileep and Jeff. As far as I know, the split was amicable.
- otoburb 13y agoTheir marketing and fund-raising approaches also seem to be completely different. I think this was good for both of them, especially if Dileep is licensing from Numenta. Win-win scenario.
- pweissbrod 13y ago"Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings." This line made me laugh. Which of the three goals is the most likely and desired outcome? (I'll give you a hint, it isnt curing diseases or finding energy) That's like saying: 'my robots will cure cancer, bring world peace and replace most manual human jobs.'
- jaibot 13y agoAgricultural technology already replaced most manual human jobs (from the era when most human jobs were agricultural). Humans found other things to do, and we found ways to use the surplus. If it gets to the point where there isn't any unskilled labor left to do, we can always choose as a society to vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone. We have already moved in this direction a bit, and I expect to see more things along the lines of guaranteed minimum income in the future.
- netcan 13y ago"vastly expand the welfare state and divvy up at least part of the accumulated surplus to everyone" That's a technology we haven't had much luck with so far. We've had economies where "distribution" was related to direct wealth creation (make a sandwich and eat it myself), property & labour (you make a sandwich with my bread,we eat half each), thievery (gimme your sandwich). We've done sharing in small groups, that may have been the paleo-economy. We've doe bits of charity welfarism, redistribution and centralization but never really succeeded at making those work well at a large scale, especially for those supposed to be protected by it.
- jaibot 13y agoWe disagree about how well redistribution can and has worked at scale. My ultra-compressed (lossy) take is "pretty inefficient, but somewhat effective improving the lives of the less-wealthy". One of the most dramatic and promising examples of redistribution, GiveDirectly, is actually doing some followup research on the effectiveness of their redistribution, and it looks pretty good so far: (pdf warning) http://web.mit.edu/joha/www/publications/haushofer_shapiro_uct_2013.11.16.pdf http://web.mit.edu/joha/www/publications/haushofer_shapiro_u... That's an extreme example - a relatively-small scale transfer from wealthy donors to a much poorer country - but it speaks well to the principle.
- loup-vaillant 13y agoIf they do pull that off, I hope they will be very, very careful. You know, Intelligence explosion, Friendly AI, taking over the world, that sort of things. http://intelligenceexplosion.com/ http://intelligenceexplosion.com/
- lukifer 13y agoWe're at the middle of the process, not the beginning: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-soaking-in-it.html http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-... "Information has been running on a primate platform, evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship to a non-material being which we call language. We think it's ours, and we think we control it. It's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving towards its own conclusions." - Terrence McKenna
- loup-vaillant 13y agoI'm not sure what your link has to do with your quote… Anyway, this blog post is not quite right. While I agree capitalism is a more pressing problem than AI right now, it won't kill us all in 5 minutes. A self-improving AI… we won't even see it coming. There is also much more brainpower dedicated to "fixing" industrial capitalism, than addressing existential risks such as AI. And industrial capitalism doesn't need fixing, it needs to be abolished altogether. Corporations are even less autonomous than the author thinks. Sure, kill a CEO, and some other shark will take its place. On the other hand, those sharks are all from the same families. Power is still hereditary. If the people were truly informed about how the current system works, it would collapse in minutes. To take only one example, Fractional Reserve Banking is such fraud that if everyone suddenly knew about it, there would be some serious "civil unrest", to put it mildly. The same does not apply to an AI. It's just too powerful. Picture the how much smarter we are from chimps. Now take an army of chimps, and a small tribe of cavemen (and women), which somehow want to exterminate each other. Well, the chimps don't stand a chance, if the humans have any time to prepare. They have fire, sticks, lances… Their telepathy have unmatched accuracy (you know, speech). And they can predict the future far better than the chimps. Now picture how much more intelligent than us an AI would be. It's way worse. --- Now, this new agey speak about information taking a life of its own… It doesn't work that way. Sure, there's an optimization process at work and it is not any particular human brain. But this optimization process is nowhere near as dangerous as a fully recursive one (that is, an optimization process that optimizes itself). And for that to happen, we need to crack a few mathematical hurdles first, like Löb's theorem. But that's not the hard part. The hard part is to figure out what goals we should program into the AI. Not only we need to pin them down to mathematical precision, but we don't even know what humanity wants. We don't even know what "what humanity wants" even mean. Hell, we don't even know if it has any meaning at all. Well, we're not completely blind, we have intuitions, and a relatively common sense of morality. But there's still a long road ahead.
- secondForty 13y agoAnd it'll be great at selling ads!
- Punoxysm 13y agoI know someone who intereviewed at Vicarious and came away unimpressed. That said, any company with an investment by a guy who can make his company buy it out is a good one to invest in.
- pmcpinto 13y agoI'm really looking forward to see what this team is building.
- adamio 13y ago'Seeing' & understanding unstructured textual data is a huge step towards replacing manual human work. Captcha appears to be a good place to start. It'd be awesome to feed some software a mess of an Excel document, and ask it to analyze a question
- spinchange 13y agoReplicating the neocortex is Kurzweil's vision / approach also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Create_a_Mind http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Create_a_Mind
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoProbably Larry Page already knew about this when he recently said he'd rather invest in Musk biz than Gates charity? (Not that I agree with him, but it helps explain why he uttered such a thing.)
- raldi 13y agoLarry didn't actually utter that, BTW. Check the transcript: http://insideevs.com/google-ceo-larry-page-billions-go-tesla-ceo-elon-musk/ http://insideevs.com/google-ceo-larry-page-billions-go-tesla...
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoI agree that a paraphrase =/= a quote. Are you saying my paraphrase significantly misrepresented him? If so, how? (I'm not trying to be argumentative, I just genuinely don't understand your point.)
- raldi 13y agoHe didn't mention Gates or charity at all. It's like if you said, "I like ice cream" and I reported it as, "This person thinks buying ice cream is more noble than giving a starving family a bag of rice."
- 6cxs2hd6 13y agoOK I understand now. I read this sentence in the article: ...suggesting that when he passes away, he’d like for his billions to go to Tesla’s Musk. Although leaving your billions to X implies not leaving it to Y -- e.g. Gates -- that's not necessarily true. And more basically, this is the article writer's sentence -- not a quote from Larry Page. I was wrong. Thank you for helping me understand why.
- z3phyr 13y agoComputers based on neuromorphic design are the best bet for intelligent Machines. The question is, how to control analog computations with a programming language?
- TeMPOraL 13y ago> Computers based on neuromorphic design are the best bet for intelligent Machines. I wouldn't go that far. We don't understand enough about the nature of intelligence and the way brain works; right now saying that "the best bet for AI is for computer to look like a brain" is like saying "the best bet for heavier-than-air flight is for a machine to flap wings like birds", which was a stupid idea for the reasons we now understand well.
- z3phyr 13y agoNeuromorphic computers do not look like a brain. They just borrow some of it's so called 'features'. I am not saying that we should copy the brain. But at least we could copy the design, just like we did for aeroplanes. Neuromorphic sensors could act like our cerebellum, which act during unforeseen incidents. They are typically error tolerating.
- enupten 13y agoIn that case, we should probably move to a noisier (/faster/cheaper) floating point processor.
- Houshalter 13y agoI wonder if you could make it completely analog. Find functions that can be done fast/cheaply in silicon, and then design learning algorithms that can take advantage of them.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- kolbe 13y agoDoes this company do research or implementation of existing research?
- klrr 13y ago* First Law: A robot must never harm a human being or, through inaction, allow any human to come to harm. * Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given to them by human beings, except where such orders violate the First Law. * Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence unless this violates the First or Second Laws.
- CmonDev 13y ago* The Actual Law: A robot must deliver the highest possible profit to its seller.
- deletes 13y ago* Zeroth Law: A robot must never harm humanity or, by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. Every other law gets an unless this interferes with the zeroth law. suffix. I encourage anyone to read the robots series, specifically( in that order ): The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun and The Robots of Dawn, where the three laws are used in the story, and even the zeroth law is implied in the third book.
- z3phyr 13y agoJust sayin, they named it after the Zeroth law http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2013/10/10/introducing-qualcomm-zeroth-processors-brain-inspired-computing http://www.qualcomm.com/media/blog/2013/10/10/introducing-qu...
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- otikik 13y agoAnd don't assume that since you watched the "I, Robot" movie you don't need to read the series.
- MBlume 13y agoThe movie was really more of a deconstruction than an adaptation of the books
- pjbrunet 13y agoCall it what it is, an expert system, market research, a database of decisions/observations. Real "artificial intelligence" only exists in science fiction, in the minds of children playing with toys. Your computer (doll) won't ever love you back or have any awareness or understanding no matter how bad you want it to. It's a cool sounding buzzword for marketing, but if there's any intelligence here it's coming from a few developers hiding behind their tricky algorithms. A computer will never have intelligence, no matter how many factors and randomizations you code in to give the illusion of intelligence. Calling a collection of observations "intelligence" is an insult and severe underestimation of what intelligence is. If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive. There's no hint of evidence you = your brain. It's safe to say the brain processes information literally. But we have no idea where intelligence originates. Sadly, some people never get beyond a literal interpretation of things.
- gnaritas 13y agoYou have no idea what you're talking about, please just stop, you're embarrassing yourself.
- ethanbond 13y ago> But we have no idea where intelligence originates. It seems to me we don't even have a good definition of intelligence, never mind an understanding of it. You admit it yourself, so why the diatribe on how (not even why) "real artificial intelligence" is impossible? You haven't defined what AI is nor demonstrated why it will never happen.
- JamesArgo 13y agoSadly, some people confuse their ignorance with knowledge and make all kinds of embarrassing claims. >There's no hint of evidence you = your brain. Sign up for a lobotomy we'll see much "you" is left afterwords. > If you believe artificial intelligence is possible, you're missing out on what life has to offer--or you would never think a box of switches could come alive. You got me. Believing x would make me think life has less meaning. Therefore, x is false. What an argument.
- chris_mahan 13y agoIf they could make something with the intelligence of a common bee, they could make awesome drones.
- kriro 13y agoI read/markered "On Intelligence" on my train commute to work and have scribbled a bunch of notes in the book. Pretty interesting and I like the basic idea of the memory-prediction framework, invariant representations, "melodies of patterns", focus on neocortex and the whole same general algorithm for all senses. I haven't had the time to research how far the general idea has gone or if it is relevant at all but the scetched examples were pretty interesting. I also found the random remark of "consciousness = what it feels like to have a neocortex" interesting. Glad to see that some smart money is bet in this general direction.
- eurleif 13y ago>I also found the random remark of "consciousness = what it feels like to have a neocortex" interesting. So there's a way it feels to not have a neocortex? Doesn't feeling anything imply you're conscious, which means you don't need a neocortex to be conscious?
- Lambdanaut 13y agoAn insect "feels" pain. It doesn't however feel retrospective pain, and it doesn't feel the past in the same way we do. Having a neocortex is like having a 6th sense. Our taste, smell, hearing, sight, and feeling neurons are all indirectly fed into our brain. With a neocortex, that input is also fed in. It's our "consciousness" feeling. I hope that explains the confusion.
- eurleif 13y agoThanks, that makes sense. I was thinking of a different definition of "consciousness", the "hard problem" definition. [0] For an ant to feel pain, it would have to be conscious in the hard problem sense. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_problem_of_consciousness
- dd36 13y agoHow in the world would you know this?
- JackFr 13y agoLong con.
- sirkneeland 13y ago"Elon Musk made the electric car cool. Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook. Ashton Kutcher portrayed Apple founder Steve Jobs in a movie." Which one of these things is not like the others?
- giardini 13y ago"Replicating the neocortex, the part of the brain that sees, controls the body, understands language and does math. Translate the neocortex into computer code and 'you have a computer that thinks like a person,” says Vicarious co-founder Scott Phoenix.'" Do you? Other than the language part it sounds like you may instead have an electronic lizard or cow. Add language and you might have an electronic parrot or dolphin(they can do some language processing). Something's missing - the ability to reason: deduction, induction and abduction. The ability to set goals and to find a path to those goals. These are the magic that everyone has been seeking and not finding for a long time. The pieces the Vicarious found speaks of are available today. We have exquisite computer vision, pretty good language understanding and fair robots but no strong AI and certainly no embodied AI. The promises above are hollow. But it will make some people a lot of money.
- NoodleIncident 13y agoNot trying to be rude here, I promise. Don't those other animals not even have neocortices? Or if they do, they are very thin and smooth? I was under the impression that the human neocortex is abnormally thick and wrinkled, making it plausible that the reasoning capabilities are in fact in there. The neocortex doesn't directly control the body or see, but there are bits that light up when we do. Lizards have the other parts of their brain, directly wired in. We have those parts, too, in addition to our neocortex.
- Houshalter 13y agoWell it's not clear where such high level functions come from, but it's certainly progress. Making an AI as smart as an animal would be an incredible advancement btw.
- giardini 13y ago"Making an AI as smart as an animal would be an incredible advancement btw." Only if your goal was to make an artificial (non-human) animal. But would that be a step toward making an artificial human?
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- SimpleXYZ 13y agoI like how their contact form has a captcha.
- graycat 13y agoLook, guys, sure, in some sense computing is part of the best promise for AI. Fine. I'll even agree that at least for now computing is necessary. But, note, nearly everything we've done in computing, especially in Silicon Valley for the past 15 years, has been to apply routine software development to work that we already well understood how to do manually. A small fraction of the efforts have been some excursions into more, but these have been relatively few and with rarely very impressive results. Net, what Silicon Valley does know how to do is build, say, SnapChat (right, it keeps the NSA spooks busy looking at the SnapChat intercepts from Sweden!). But for anything that should be called AI, there is another challenge that is very much necessary -- how to do that. Or, if you will, write the software design documents from the top down to the level of the individual programming statements. Problem is, very likely and apparently, no one knows how the heck to do that. Given a candidate design, people should want to review it, and about the only way to convince people, e.g., short of the running software passing the Turing test or some such, is to write out the design in terms of mathematics. Basically the only solid approach is via mathematics; essentially everything else is heuristics to be validated only in practice, that is, an implementation and not a design. Thing is, I very much doubt that anyone knows how to write a design with such mathematics. If so, then long ago there should have been such in an AI journal or with DARPA funding. Basically, bluntly, no one knows how to write software for anything real about AI. Sorry 'bout that. Wby? We just do not know hardly anything about how the brain works. We don't know more about how the human brain works than my kitty cat knows about how my computer works. Sorry 'bout that. And AI software will have a heck of a time catching up with my kitty cat. By analogy, we don't know more about how to program AI than Leonardo da Vinci knew about how to build a Boeing 777. Heck the Russians didn't even know how to build an SR-71. Da Vinci could draw a picture of a flying machine, but he had no clue about how to build one. Heck, Langley fell into the Potomac River! Instead, the Wright brothers built a useful wind tunnel (didn't understand Reynolds number), actually were able to calculate lift, drag, thrust, and engine horsepower, and had found a solution to three axis control -- Langley failed at those challenges, and da Vinci was lost much farther back in the woods. We now know how our daughters can avoid cervical cancer. Before the solution, "we dance 'round and 'round and suppose, and the secret sits in the middle, and knows.", and we didn't know. Well, the cause was HPV, and now there is a vaccine. Progress. Possible? Yes. Easy? No. AI? We're not close enough to be in the same solar system. F'get about AI.
- pond_lilly 13y agohow about investing in something real and useful like preserving biodiversity for example? Too much to ask from inanimate-matter-lovers-computer-crazed autists like Musk and Facebook boy, right?
- erikpukinskis 13y agoThe trouble with this kind of artificial intelligence is that I don't think it's possible to think like a human without actually having the experience of being human. Sure, I think we could aim to build basically a robot toddler that had a sensory/nervous/endocrine system wired up analogously to ours. It would basically be a baby, and would have to go through all the developmental stages that we go through. But I suspect we'll have a hard time modeling that stuff well enough to create anything more than "adolescent with a severe learning disability". People underestimate just how carefully tuned we are after millions of years of evolution. The notion that we could replicate that without having another million years of in situ testing and iteration seems naive. And even then, why would we expect the AI to be smarter than a human? There is already quite a lot of variation in humans. Many people at the ends of the bell curve have extraordinary processing power in ways typical humans don't. But it turns out while those things are useful in some ways, they limit those people in other ways. So it's not like we're not trying out evolved designs, it's that on balance they don't seem to actually function fundamentally better. One cool thing about the robot is that you could have many bodies having many experiences all feeding into one brain. But I'm not convinced that would actually lead to "smarter". I mean, look at old people. Yes we get smarter as we age. But age also calcifies the mind. All of that data slowly locks you into a prison of past expectations. In the end, it's a blend of naive and experienced people in a society that maximizes intelligence. And again, it's not like societies haven't been experimenting with that blend. Cultures have evolved to hit the sweet spot. It's not clear that adding 1000 year old intelligences would help. And anyway, we already have 1000 year old intelligences: books! You could say that there is benefit to having all of that in one "head" but then you have to organize it! Which experience drives the decisions, the one from 2014 or the one from 3014? Again, culture evolved explicitly to solve this problem. People write books and the ones that work stick around. I guess what I'm saying is the evolution of the human being is already here: it's the human race, fed history via culture, connected by the internet, in symbiosis with computers. The idea that removing the humans from that system would make it smarter makes no sense to me. Nor does the idea of writing programs to do the jobs that humans do well. It's like creating a basketball team with 5 Shaquille O'Neils. I don't think they'd actually be able to beat a good, diverse team with one or two Shaqs. Or think of it this way: if numerical/logical aptitude is such a huge advantage in advancing capital-U Understanding, why do smart people bother learning to paint? Why do we bother listening to children? Why do we bother having dogs? I would argue it's because intelligence is as multi-media as the universe is. Sometimes a PhD has something to learn from a basset hound. And the human race has just as good a handle on it as any AI ever will. We just have a different view of the stage. We have the front row and they have the balcony.