Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by shas3 | Hacker News Reader

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I think this is already happening. In fact most AI pessimists don't consider that "man + machine >> machine." Consider chess. Kasparov's defeat happened in mid-1990s. Machine is considered > man. Yet, in freestyle chess, where players are allowed to consult machines, we have achieved ever greater heights of performance. In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better. Similar things will happen in Go, Poker, etc. The handicap of not using a computer to inform your moves exists to make things more competitive, it doesn't mean that we are worse off!

Taking this further, most technology we use daily (word processors, email, the Internet, etc.) are enhancements of the man+machine organism and enhance our performance as well as the 'machine''s.

> In chess today, any sufficiently advanced chess engine can be incorporated into a (man+chess-engine) player to perform better.

This worked between about 2008 and 2013; but those days are long one. Engines such as Stockfish 8 surpass both humans and human+engine "centaurs". That is, incorporating a human into the loop only makes things worse.

This is just an artifact of how chess engines work. They are really dumb and just search a huge number of moves into the future. Combined with human pattern recognition, they can be improved. Humans can see patterns that the chess engine doesn't.

However Go was beaten by a neural network trained on millions of games. It already has pattern recognition. At least on par with humans, and probably superior to them. In the famous AlphaGo match, it considered and made moves that looked stupid to humans... at first.

I really doubt human + machine will do any better than just machine at Go. Or anything NNs take over. Human brains can't possibly compete with a machine that can iterate over billions of training examples in a few hours.

Yah I think so too. Super Tangent warning: I recently saw the documentary on Koko the Gorilla and was amazed at her emotional intelligence and communication skills. Why not integrate AI into other animals besides humans?

One more tangent: The perception of time would be very different if we were highly integrated into machines right? What if you could perceive things at 1000 times the normal human?

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