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This idea of singularity relies on the assumption that intelligence scales easily. If we have a machine that is more intelligent than the average human, or even

This idea of singularity relies on the assumption that intelligence scales easily. If we have a machine that is more intelligent than the average human, or even more intelligent than the most intelligent human. Will it be more intelligent than a group of intelligent people? How many? If you have an AI running on a supercomputer that is more intelligent than the most intelligent human you might still need a few billion supercomputers to outmatch the human race.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
This assumes that a single greater-than-human AI doesn't figure out how to get humans onto its side. Given that it will not be a cartoon supervillain, that task will actually be incredibly easy: find ways to give humans what they want in exchange for doing what the AI wants.
- worldsayshi 12y ago
  Sure, then it will become just another productive person/citizen. We work together because we benefit from it. Working against another intelligent being is significantly harder in the long term. edit: And the collective is significantly more intelligent than the individual (for some but definitely not all reasonable definitions of intelligent and collective).
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    >Sure, then it will become just another productive person/citizen. Only in the sense that Stalin or Pinochet was a productive citizen. Powerful people can mobilize others to their own ends without those ends being at all good or moral for everyone who is not so mobilized.
    - BEEdwards 12y ago
      You can disagree with his methods, but saying Stalin wasn't productive is just plain wrong. From agrarians to victors of ww2 in ~20 years is pretty impressive by any measure.
baddox 12y ago
It's only one data point, but observe how much more intelligent humans are than the next most intelligent species on Earth.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  And observe how large our brains have to be to achieve that, and how many calories it requires.
  - _archon_ 12y ago
    I don't understand how this is relevant to the conversation at hand. I had assumed that we were discussing this topic with the assumption that we can make full use of first world resources, so we should have a capable, (mostly) reliable power source, food, materials, etc. readily available.
- worldsayshi 12y ago
  We are much more intelligent because we have efficient ways to interchange information. It allows us to use our collective intelligence. Our singular intelligence isn't that much more evolved. ("Intelligence is in our language") Sorry for reviving old thread.
ufmace 12y ago
What messy about this is figuring out exactly how to define intelligence, and what it really means to be more intelligent than someone. If somebody said that an AI was more intelligent than the most intelligent human, then how would you figure out if that was true? If it was true, what exactly would this AI be able to do that the human couldn't do? How does a difference in the level of intelligence of a particular entity compare to the effective intelligence of having lots of less intelligent entities? Having lots of people means that you can apply intelligence towards a lot of tasks, but perhaps all of them together will never come up with something that a greater intelligence could come up with. Thinking about it, it seems to me that you have to apply it against an actual difficult task. Take a task like "build a power-producing fusion reactor" that nobody knows how to do yet. Would we be able to figure out how to do that faster if there was some superior intelligence applied to it? Or does the huge number of engineering problems associated with building such a thing respond better to a large number of more ordinary intelligence?

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

This assumes that a single greater-than-human AI doesn't figure out how to get humans onto its side. Given that it will not be a cartoon supervillain, that task will actually be incredibly easy: find ways to give humans what they want in exchange for doing what the AI wants.

worldsayshi 12y ago
Sure, then it will become just another productive person/citizen. We work together because we benefit from it. Working against another intelligent being is significantly harder in the long term. edit: And the collective is significantly more intelligent than the individual (for some but definitely not all reasonable definitions of intelligent and collective).
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  >Sure, then it will become just another productive person/citizen. Only in the sense that Stalin or Pinochet was a productive citizen. Powerful people can mobilize others to their own ends without those ends being at all good or moral for everyone who is not so mobilized.
  - BEEdwards 12y ago
    You can disagree with his methods, but saying Stalin wasn't productive is just plain wrong. From agrarians to victors of ww2 in ~20 years is pretty impressive by any measure.

baddox 12y ago

It's only one data point, but observe how much more intelligent humans are than the next most intelligent species on Earth.

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
And observe how large our brains have to be to achieve that, and how many calories it requires.
- _archon_ 12y ago
  I don't understand how this is relevant to the conversation at hand. I had assumed that we were discussing this topic with the assumption that we can make full use of first world resources, so we should have a capable, (mostly) reliable power source, food, materials, etc. readily available.
worldsayshi 12y ago
We are much more intelligent because we have efficient ways to interchange information. It allows us to use our collective intelligence. Our singular intelligence isn't that much more evolved. ("Intelligence is in our language") Sorry for reviving old thread.

ufmace 12y ago

What messy about this is figuring out exactly how to define intelligence, and what it really means to be more intelligent than someone. If somebody said that an AI was more intelligent than the most intelligent human, then how would you figure out if that was true? If it was true, what exactly would this AI be able to do that the human couldn't do? How does a difference in the level of intelligence of a particular entity compare to the effective intelligence of having lots of less intelligent entities? Having lots of people means that you can apply intelligence towards a lot of tasks, but perhaps all of them together will never come up with something that a greater intelligence could come up with. Thinking about it, it seems to me that you have to apply it against an actual difficult task. Take a task like "build a power-producing fusion reactor" that nobody knows how to do yet. Would we be able to figure out how to do that faster if there was some superior intelligence applied to it? Or does the huge number of engineering problems associated with building such a thing respond better to a large number of more ordinary intelligence?