Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pron | Hacker News Reader

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> The brain also took decades to train.

The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either.

> I just don't see brains as the high watermark of intelligence. They occupy a very specific niche in what I assume is a vast unbounded landscape of possible intelligences.

That is a hypothetical claim because we don't know what intelligence is. Surely, some algorithms are much better at some tasks than the human brain, but that has been the case since the advent of computing, and it does not make them intelligent.

Intelligence, or how we would currently define it colloquially and imprecisely, is an algorithm or a class of algorithms with some specific capabilities. Could those capabilities be taken further than the human brain? We certainly can't say that they cannot, but it's not obvious that they can, either. The only kind of intelligence we know, our own, comes with a host of disadvantages that may be features of the particular algorithm employed by the brain and/or to limitations of the hardware, but they could possibly be essential to intelligence itself. Who knows, maybe an intelligence with access to more powerful hardware would be more prone to incapacitating boredom and depression or other kinds of mental illness. This is just one hypothetical possibility, but given how limited our understanding of intelligence is, there are plenty of possible roadblocks ahead.

Even if a higher intelligence than humans' is possible, its hypothetical achievements are uncertain. Some of the greatest problems encountered by humans are not constrained by intelligence but by resources and observations, and others (e.g. politics) are limited by powers of persuasion (that also don't seem to be simply correlated with intelligence). For example, what's limiting theoretical physics isn't brains but access to experiments, and what's limiting certain optimization problems are computational limits, for which our own intelligence, at least, does not give good approximate solutions at all.

> The brain of an insect doesn't take decades to train, and we're currently unable to match its capabilities, either.

It's not particularly useful to simulate insects. We can far surpass some of their capabilities, but the goal is not to make an insect-robot, just like we didn't care to make a mechanical horse.

Insect intelligence is already being emulated (poorly) because of its useful applications in swarm behavior.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603337/a-100-drone-swarm-...

Both of these are under active development

Robotic insects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboBee

Robotic horses: http://www.bostondynamics.com/robot_bigdog.html

Those are mostly interested in biomimetic movement rather than intelligence. They do have some applications, but i don't think they ve convinced the world that mimicking organisms is necessarily optimal.

> We can far surpass some of their capabilities

We could far surpass many of the human brain's capabilities from the moment computers were invented. That's what computers are for. But it doesn't mean we've come close to human intelligence, and we're not very close to insect intelligence now. As others have commented, getting to insect intelligence may be quite useful. In any event, that would at least likely put us on the path. Right now, the fact that computers can do more and more things that only humans could does not mean those approaches are getting us close to human intelligence. It just means that we've discovered more useful algorithms, but those algorithms are not necessarily on the path to human intelligence any more than the AI of the 1950s.

>That is a hypothetical claim because we don't know what intelligence is.

>Intelligence, or how we would currently define it colloquially and imprecisely, is an algorithm or a class of algorithms with some specific capabilities.

To me it sounds like you are expanding inability to describe how intelligent things function into an inability to even describe intelligence. Intelligence as algorithm does not match with what I think are the best descriptions of intelligence.

Intelligence is an individual's ability to act towards achieving goals in uncertain environments.

How an individual functions: the way it acts, how it forms goals, how it models the environment. These will all determine how intelligent that individual is.

>The only kind of intelligence we know, our own, comes with a host of disadvantages that may be features of the particular algorithm employed by the brain and/or to limitations of the hardware, but they could possibly be essential to intelligence itself.

I think the idea that limitations to intelligence are inherent to intelligence itself is wrong. Not unsupported, but actually wrong.

>Even if a higher intelligence than humans' is possible, its hypothetical achievements are uncertain.

But you must admit more intelligent beings will certainly not have the same achievements as humans. What separates intelligent beings are the quality of outcomes. By being more intelligence they will have better outcomes.

Given the same constraints they will act more intelligently and achieve better outcomes. And we know machine intelligence will certainly be less constrained than ourselves. They will be able to directly self modify their intelligence, have infinite life spans, construct any sensors and actuators to expand input/output signals, determine their level of energy consumption, etc.

I don't see how anyone could not concede that machine intelligence will obviously be superior to human intelligence. The space of intelligence is so much larger than the point we occupy.

The way you define intelligence makes the rest of your statements tautologically true, but makes the existence claim problematic. Of course there could hypothetically be algorithms that better deal with uncertain environments than humans. Those problems are computationally hard to solve precisely, and you must find a decent approximation. But it is not certain at all that we could find an algorithm that consistently and significantly outperforms the one used by human brains. In fact, there are theorems that it is impossible to improve optimization algorithms indefinitely. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_in_search_and_op...

Now, suppose we don't find a better algorithm than the brain. Wouldn't better hardware make it significantly better? No, because not knowing the algorithm, we don't know how it scales with resources.

> I don't see how anyone could not concede that machine intelligence will obviously be superior to human intelligence.

Because of computational complexity. There's a lot we don't know about computation, but there are some things we do know. A layperson reading sci-fi novels could imagine an artificial brain smart enough to solve the halting problem, but even though it's easy to imagine, we know that's not actually possible, no matter what resources are at our disposal. This means there may be disappointing limitations to our ability to scale intelligence. But note that I'm not saying machine intelligence would not be superior at all; I'm saying it may not be as significantly superior as some would imagine. I don't see what beyond science-fiction makes you so sure of an obvious significant advantage.

> The space of intelligence is so much larger than the point we occupy.

Computational complexity makes this uncertain. It is possible that significantly better approximate results would require an exponential increase in resources. The hypothetical space of computation is also huge, but we know very little of it is actually reachable. If you take into account that the entire "space of intelligence" is incapable of efficiently solving NP-hard problems -- many of which are very important for science and technology -- you'll see that it must exist within paramaters that may be pretty narrow.

Also, consider this: our own intelligence, which has been sufficient for art and science and technology that could one day create an intelligence far superior to itself according to you, was really created simply to hunt animals a little better than cats and wolves, and has not evolved much since the agricultural revolution. This may indicate that intelligence may be more a step function than a smooth one. Then how many steps are there past our own? Maybe you're right and there are some more, but for me it's hard to imagine such a significant jump over us without breaking unbreakable complexity barriers. Anyway, I don't think we have enough knowledge to dismiss the possibility that there are no more steps beyond us, and that any improvement, while important and useful, may be less than dramatic.

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