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Just to play Devil's Advocate, not because I believe this: We can, and do, create machines that are faster than humans, and it is reasonable to assume that eve

Just to play Devil's Advocate, not because I believe this: We can, and do, create machines that are faster than humans, and it is reasonable to assume that eventually computers can be created that have capacity and connectivity larger than humans. But that doesn't prove that the result will be as intelligent as humans, let alone more intelligent, because intelligence is clearly more than just speed and capacity. Edit: for instance, faster and bigger does not change the O(n) complexity analysis of algorithms, thus faster and bigger does relatively little to improve the ability to solve exponential problems. Exactly what intelligence is, is still not known, and it is quite possible that we will need an algorithmic breakthrough to create something equivalent to human minds. And even if that happens, making that thing faster and bigger than human minds may turn out not to result in superintelligence -- that would just be another similar assumption as the first. So it might need yet another algorithmic breakthrough to create superintelligence, and it is possible that neither humans nor human-equivalent AIs will be able to make that breakthrough. Again, I don't believe the above, but I think it is purely a matter of optimism versus pessimism, not about things that are proven.

ikeboy 11y ago
>Exactly what intelligence is, is still not known, and it is quite possible that we will need an algorithmic breakthrough to create something equivalent to human minds. Let's assume this is true. >And even if that happens, making that thing faster and bigger than human minds may turn out not to result in superintelligence -- that would just be another similar assumption as the first. So it might need yet another algorithmic breakthrough to create superintelligence, and it is possible that neither humans nor human-equivalent AIs will be able to make that breakthrough. This seems unlikely to be true. Imagine we have a program that is as smart as the human brain. It's running on hardware a million times as fast, though. So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days. Even if it's restricted to human-level intelligence, it should still be far more effective than a human. This is even without considering self-modifications.
- DougMerritt 11y ago
  > So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days. You are simply reiterating the original position that I was devils-advocating against. It is not proven that a million days of work equals superintelligence, even though obviously it would be more effective than 1 day. If some activity is exponential, like if it takes 10^x days to accomplish, then a human could solve problems of size 3 in about three years, and the million-fold faster computer would take only 10^(x-6), or about a minute. And in three years it could solve problems of size 9. But a problem of size 1000 would take so many multiples of the lifetime of the universe that it would appear to be approximately as slow as a human, the difference is negligible. This is not hypothetical; the best known complete (not approximate) solutions to things like the traveling salesman problem, or to fitting odd sized containers into a container ship, are in fact exponential like that as far as we currently know. The topic is not limited to algorithmic complexity theory like that, it's just a proof of concept. So the point is that superintelligence might turn out to be something that a million-fold improvement isn't enough to achieve. We don't understand intelligence, so it's pretty obvious we don't have a handle on superintelligence. Again, all this is a matter of optimisim or pessimism up until the subject is understood far, far better.
  - ikeboy 11y ago
    >It is not proven that a million days of work equals superintelligence, even though obviously it would be more effective than 1 day. >This is not hypothetical; the best known complete (not approximate) solutions to things like the traveling salesman problem, or to fitting odd sized containers into a container ship, are in fact exponential like that as far as we currently know. Why would something need to solve problems like that to be significantly smarter than us? On real problems, working 1000 times as much time surely helps a lot. This is not even taking into account how much benefit you get from not being lazy and everything like that.
    - DougMerritt 11y ago
      I am merely playing Devil's Advocate. I personally think that speedups of 1000-fold and million-fold etc. are a really big deal. "Quantity has a quality all its own." Nonetheless, it remains possible that there is a difference between fast intelligence solving things faster than we can, versus a superintelligence (from extraterrestrial aliens or something) that can create superior inventions or art or math or whatever that humans couldn't no matter how much time was allowed. Time is not always the issue. Anecdote from the Feynman biography "Genius": A physicist once said that there were two kinds of genius. The first kind was the sort that a good but non-genius physicist could imagine that they, too, could have achieved the same results as the genius, if only they could work on just that for decades or even lifetimes. But then he said that Feynman was the second kind of genius, whose results seemed to have been created by magic, and that ordinary physicists could not imagine achieving no matter how long they worked at it. The key thing here is that some pretty smart people already believe that there are at least two kinds of very high intelligence, one of which is not related to speed. So my point is merely that the same might apply to these other topics. We know so little about how to create a mind that there simply is no proof one way or the other. And that latter is an objective fact. There is no existing algorithms for creating human-level minds that merely needs more cpu + ram + disk to work, there just isn't. So we don't know. Different people choose to believe one way or the other. That's all.

ikeboy 11y ago

>Exactly what intelligence is, is still not known, and it is quite possible that we will need an algorithmic breakthrough to create something equivalent to human minds. Let's assume this is true. >And even if that happens, making that thing faster and bigger than human minds may turn out not to result in superintelligence -- that would just be another similar assumption as the first. So it might need yet another algorithmic breakthrough to create superintelligence, and it is possible that neither humans nor human-equivalent AIs will be able to make that breakthrough. This seems unlikely to be true. Imagine we have a program that is as smart as the human brain. It's running on hardware a million times as fast, though. So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days. Even if it's restricted to human-level intelligence, it should still be far more effective than a human. This is even without considering self-modifications.

DougMerritt 11y ago
> So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days. You are simply reiterating the original position that I was devils-advocating against. It is not proven that a million days of work equals superintelligence, even though obviously it would be more effective than 1 day. If some activity is exponential, like if it takes 10^x days to accomplish, then a human could solve problems of size 3 in about three years, and the million-fold faster computer would take only 10^(x-6), or about a minute. And in three years it could solve problems of size 9. But a problem of size 1000 would take so many multiples of the lifetime of the universe that it would appear to be approximately as slow as a human, the difference is negligible. This is not hypothetical; the best known complete (not approximate) solutions to things like the traveling salesman problem, or to fitting odd sized containers into a container ship, are in fact exponential like that as far as we currently know. The topic is not limited to algorithmic complexity theory like that, it's just a proof of concept. So the point is that superintelligence might turn out to be something that a million-fold improvement isn't enough to achieve. We don't understand intelligence, so it's pretty obvious we don't have a handle on superintelligence. Again, all this is a matter of optimisim or pessimism up until the subject is understood far, far better.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  >It is not proven that a million days of work equals superintelligence, even though obviously it would be more effective than 1 day. >This is not hypothetical; the best known complete (not approximate) solutions to things like the traveling salesman problem, or to fitting odd sized containers into a container ship, are in fact exponential like that as far as we currently know. Why would something need to solve problems like that to be significantly smarter than us? On real problems, working 1000 times as much time surely helps a lot. This is not even taking into account how much benefit you get from not being lazy and everything like that.
  - DougMerritt 11y ago
    I am merely playing Devil's Advocate. I personally think that speedups of 1000-fold and million-fold etc. are a really big deal. "Quantity has a quality all its own." Nonetheless, it remains possible that there is a difference between fast intelligence solving things faster than we can, versus a superintelligence (from extraterrestrial aliens or something) that can create superior inventions or art or math or whatever that humans couldn't no matter how much time was allowed. Time is not always the issue. Anecdote from the Feynman biography "Genius": A physicist once said that there were two kinds of genius. The first kind was the sort that a good but non-genius physicist could imagine that they, too, could have achieved the same results as the genius, if only they could work on just that for decades or even lifetimes. But then he said that Feynman was the second kind of genius, whose results seemed to have been created by magic, and that ordinary physicists could not imagine achieving no matter how long they worked at it. The key thing here is that some pretty smart people already believe that there are at least two kinds of very high intelligence, one of which is not related to speed. So my point is merely that the same might apply to these other topics. We know so little about how to create a mind that there simply is no proof one way or the other. And that latter is an objective fact. There is no existing algorithms for creating human-level minds that merely needs more cpu + ram + disk to work, there just isn't. So we don't know. Different people choose to believe one way or the other. That's all.