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Comment by sosuke | Hacker News Reader

There is a hope I have, that I see many others have too, which is that our human intelligence is somehow special. That somehow the leaps in logic we can perform somehow make us unique. That we won't be outdone by a computer a million times faster or smarter than us because we have something else that we can't replicate in transistors and circuits.

I love AI, but I have that hope too. That somehow we won't be made irrelevant by our own creations. Makes me think of our autonomous vehicle fun taking over the trucking industry. Millions of people made irrelevant through no fault of their own.

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I would guess a number of people have that in the 'fear' category, that should it not be special then somehow people will feel diminished.

It would make a good punchline for a fictional story of people researching brain disorders and intelligence. It would work like this; The researchers in the story develop the means to 'cure' someone of all known neurological disorders. They try it on their test subject and the result is someone who perfectly happy just to be there, has no ambition or curiosity, and requires no entertainment or outside stimulus. The researchers recognize that the person is acting like an intelligent but non-sentient species, and they realize they have "undone" what ever happened to humans according to the garden of eden story in Genesis.

See Peter Watts' Blindsight.

Ok then, added that one to the queue. Thanks!

I kind of hope the opposite really. I hope that one fine day, a billion years from now, a mighty intelligence that started here on lowly earth finds another like itself somewhere out there and they drink a star together and show each other the youtube videos of the tiny creatures that somehow gave birth to them.

> they drink a star together and show each other the youtube videos of the tiny creatures that somehow gave birth to them.

...or they watch the tiny creatures in universe simulation cages.

But isn't our relevance a concept of our own design? We consider our works to be "achievements" because we tell ourselves they are - but I can't point to a single non-human entity that considers what we've managed an "achievement".

If we had autonomous vehicles would millions of people become irrelevant? Their "relevance" is solely constrained to trucking? Or are you projecting that "relevance" of people is constrained to their ability to work as a cog in your society?

I would love a future where so many pursuits are actively being consumed by computing that I can just enjoy a life of pursuing whatever I figured was interesting at the time. Where I wasn't constrained by work not because I was "irrelevant" but because the notion of needing work was.

That uniqueness may be just in the fact that our brains were "trained" during the billions of years of life on Earth, with all the quirks of that particular environment. That may indeed be hard to replicate exactly, so it can be imagined that AI will not match us in some particular tasks, just as it is hard for the aviation industry to match the characteristics of bird-wings. (which they can of course outperform along some, but not all parameters)

Unless intelligence is non-computable I don't see how it being "unique" would prevent AI.

Why not augment our intelligence utilizing AI and become more than human?

I think the cyborg route is great so long as we can develop some standards that work over the years.

I think it would be sad if humanity is the best we have to offer.

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