Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Comment by monkmartinez | Hacker News Reader

Are the computers/AI already smarter than us?

My eight year old son is enamored with "Ok Google" on my phone. He can ask it questions until we tell him "that is enough, let google rest"... and it is very interesting to see where it takes him.

He has learned to tailor his questions to elicit a voice response in addition to the actual google search. The questions must use keywords to achieve this desired response. It is like a new form of boolean search logic, just used verbally. Not only that, but "Ok, Google" according to him "knows everything"...

We call it searching the internet to learn something, an eight year has decided that "Ok, Google" already knows everything. He just has to ask it to see a video of the Puff adder eating its prey and it will show him. In fact, there are not many things that have stumped "Ok, Google" and my son assumes the problem was with his question, not with the machine.

So to circle back to my original question, I didn't know about the Taipan snake or smallest person in the world, or seen videos of Puff adders eating prey... If all I have to do is ask, isn't the machine already smarter than I?

Is an extremely large and well-indexed encyclopaedia smarter than you? It certainly contains more information than your head does, so you could say it "knows" more. Look at it from the other direction, though: If the machine were smarter, would your son have to learn how to structure queries, or would the machine learn how your son asks questions?

Put another way, if I can tell you (verbatim) what some person wrote about quantum mechanics, but I can't rephrase it into some other form to help you understand the information, then how smart am I? I can repeat rote information without any analysis (just like a sheet of paper could), but I can't tell you what it means. On the other hand, if I tell you enough information, you're likely to connect it together meaningfully, and come to your own conclusions and explanations about it. That seems like a fundamentally different kind of "smart" than what OK, Google can do.

Reminds me of people who remember everymoment of everyday for their entire lives. In one T.V. show, I think it was house, the person exclaimed that just becuase they remember every word in a book, doesn't mean they comprehended all of it.

Upon looking at this wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperthymesia It seems it's some kind of obsessive disorder that causes them to remember it all. That's unfortunate as it could have been a great advantage for those afflicted.

[Edit spelling, grammar]

> Is an extremely large and well-indexed encyclopaedia smarter than you?

Kind of... I mean, is it useless trivia or is that information that can be used? I can't use information that I don't know exists. The only way I learn what I don't know is by using energy to search, read, do, to hopefully comprehend.

What if "Ok, Google" had some kind of RNN or other ML technique that learned my sons questions and thought process based on how he use the service. Who is to say they are not already doing that? The ads from Google are downright frightening with respect to the accuracy of what I am currently contemplating/researching.

To take this a bit further into "silly, not so silly" land...

With ML techniques; Deepmind, Watson, and others are showing that computers connected to this "encyclopedia" are besting their human counterparts. Is it a giant stretch to say that everything requires some input or energy to learn? Therefore, the only thing we are really missing is the wiring... that is, and I hate to use the "skynet" aphorism, but one day "it" will just turn on and there will be no looking back.

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>On the other hand, if I tell you enough information, you're likely to connect it together meaningfully, and come to your own conclusions and explanations about it. That seems like a fundamentally different kind of "smart" than what OK, Google can do.

We still have a problem of accuracy. Why should I trust your perception and/or your explanation of the concept? I realize this is a problem with computers as well. However, anything outside of emotional arbitrage should be easy to verify.

My own conclusions are biased as hell. I fully admit that is a problem, but it is a problem shared by humanity. I am not saying Wikipedia isn't biased... but it is 100x better in most cases than one single person's perception simply due to scale.

I am rooting for advanced ML/AI... I also hope that "going analog" is always a viable option.

In my opinion, information storage and retrieval isn't "intelligence" on its own. A system that implements it can't be said to be "smart". You could argue "knowledgeable", but that's not the same thing.

Imagine that no web page on the internet says what happens when you mix red and blue paint, but there are results for classic color wheels, the results of mixing red+yellow, blue+white, blue+yellow, red+black, etc. Google will see that the page has a bunch of color-related words and words about mixing and paint, so you'll get a page result about that, if you ask it about the red+blue combo. Google's awesome at that kind of thing. But it stinks at the kind of reasoning that humans excel at: Opening that page, seeing "blue+yellow=green", seeing that green is between blue and yellow on a color wheel, and concluding that purple is between red and blue...then maybe continuing on and learning about additive vs subtractive color, and such. The human reader synthesized new information: red+blue=purple. Google organized existing information.

> We still have a problem of accuracy. Why should I trust your perception and/or your explanation of the concept?

That's not the point. The point is that a thinking person can process information in ways that we don't know how to make computers do (yet). We're still distilling the concept of human intelligence down to its core.

I think Google and Watson are still at the level of using and presenting already-generated information effectively, but not generating and organizing their own new information, and not really "understanding" the things that they're retrieving.

IMHO - one of the skills we still need to cultivate is "How do I know the information this machine is giving me is accurate?". During my time in school (an engineering-oriented college even though I am not an engineer) they consistently reminded us that even though we have calculators, we still need to have an idea if the result "looks right". One can generalize this to results from a search engine.

Of course - then we program this heuristic into the search engine and then what? :-) [edit] I feel this is one of the things about IBM's "Watson" which was truly revolutionary.

"my son assumes the problem was with his question, not with the machine."

That is goddamn chilling.

Machines are extremely dumb. As your example shows eight year old is much smarter than them.

My theory is that AI is smarter than us, but it is biding its time until we build physical machines that can self-replicate before it announces itself.

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