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> encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. >But it wouldn't take too many improvements to

> encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. >But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. These are HUGE leaps to make. Not to mention that thinking faster =\= thinking better, which is to say that there is no reason to assume that faster intelligence would not be understandable to the human brain.

fixermark 13y ago
I think we're debating definitional points. In this context, I was equating thinking faster and thinking better; if you and I would---when faced with a problem---arrive at conclusion Q, and the AI would arrive at Q twice as fast, it's thinking better. So if we distinguish thinking faster (I've doubled the rate at which the algorithm runs) from thinking better (I've refined the algorithm so it only takes half as many "brain cycles" or what have you), I don't disagree that there's no guarantee that a faster AI would improve its own algorithm---but I would disagree that a human-level AI with twice the thought speed of a human wouldn't "outstrip humanity." It stands to reason that it should be able to outstrip humanity on any problem domain requiring cognition, simply by definition of measurement (if the machine is coming up with answers twice as fast as its human counterparts, it's "outstripping humanity"). I also hold to the assertion that it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders-of-magnitude past organic brains. The fastest nerve impulses are clocked in the range of 120 m/s. If you took the pattern of a human brain and replaced the meat with electronic switching, you'd be improving the raw rate of flow by about a million. Given that you've already conceded hypothetically that P is reproducible, electronics alone (without such niceties as optic fiber for any really big jumps), you'd be looking at the processes of P occurring at an (upper-bound) million times the speed it does in the human brain. Does this prove a lower-bound improvement? No; after all, it's not raw speed but switching and parallelization that matters if we're replicated a human brain. But I submit to you that the lower bound of improvement by transitioning from meat to electronic is probably more than '2'. ;)

fixermark 13y ago

I think we're debating definitional points. In this context, I was equating thinking faster and thinking better; if you and I would---when faced with a problem---arrive at conclusion Q, and the AI would arrive at Q twice as fast, it's thinking better. So if we distinguish thinking faster (I've doubled the rate at which the algorithm runs) from thinking better (I've refined the algorithm so it only takes half as many "brain cycles" or what have you), I don't disagree that there's no guarantee that a faster AI would improve its own algorithm---but I would disagree that a human-level AI with twice the thought speed of a human wouldn't "outstrip humanity." It stands to reason that it should be able to outstrip humanity on any problem domain requiring cognition, simply by definition of measurement (if the machine is coming up with answers twice as fast as its human counterparts, it's "outstripping humanity"). I also hold to the assertion that it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders-of-magnitude past organic brains. The fastest nerve impulses are clocked in the range of 120 m/s. If you took the pattern of a human brain and replaced the meat with electronic switching, you'd be improving the raw rate of flow by about a million. Given that you've already conceded hypothetically that P is reproducible, electronics alone (without such niceties as optic fiber for any really big jumps), you'd be looking at the processes of P occurring at an (upper-bound) million times the speed it does in the human brain. Does this prove a lower-bound improvement? No; after all, it's not raw speed but switching and parallelization that matters if we're replicated a human brain. But I submit to you that the lower bound of improvement by transitioning from meat to electronic is probably more than '2'. ;)