Hacker News Reader

I like his argument in the middle section of howcome IQ predicts income or social status despite the fact that general intelligence doesn't exist.

It seems to me that the categories of 'knowledge' and 'creativity' are more fruitful. For example, his idea that intelligence is 'situational' reflects the fact that people know more about some topics than others, and also that our environment contains knowledge (e.g. a machine embodies knowledge put there by the designers that the machine operator doesn't have).

> Automation of jobs and tasks is very real, but completely replacing humans and potentially destroying us all is a joke and only the people who no nothing about AI/brains think this.

Don't be absurd. Brains are simply biochemical computers. The idea of electrical or other types of computers superceding us is perfectly realizable. The only real debate is over the timeline.

It's not absurd to believe that humans will never be able to invent machines that match human level intelligence. Firstly, it's not necessarily logical to assume that brains are simply computers because we've never created or even imagined a computer that works anything like a brain. Even if it's possible, it might be beyond human intelligence to invent such a computer.

I like to think of AGI like the Warp Drive. It might well be possible, but we might never develop the capability to make one.

> It's not absurd to believe that humans will never be able to invent machines that match human level intelligence

It actually is absurd and it's easy to see why: nature evolved a series of progressively more intelligent biochemical computers by accident, simply by trial and error.

If that's all we ever did with computers, like enumerating all Turing machines, we would eventually find one more intelligent than us. The fact that we can do even better than simple trial and error, for instance, by building machines that help us build machines, we drastically accelerate that inevitability.

You are still making the assumption that the brain is a computer. Is there any theoretical proof that our brains are a permutation of a Turing machine? That to me would seem to be the first step towards your conclusion.

The Bekenstein bound requires any finite volume to contain a finite amount of information, otherwise it would collapse into a black hole. Therefore our brains are, at best, finite state automata, and not even Turing complete.

Wat?

Have you just proven that computers don't exist? I'm suffering a bit of cognitive dissonance here...

Superseding us in what way? The machine is already better at chess and Go, clearly not at classifying images[1], but the issue here is that the author argues that there is no such thing as a general intelligence. It's all situational.

On a separate note, does it even matter? Some people argue it's important so that we can put AI safe-guards in place, to protect mankind. But either:

A) Intelligence explosion won't happen and those safe-guards are not needed.

B) Intelligence explosion happens and the supersmart AI will easily find its way around feeble safe-guards put in place by the inferior humans.

While the end results are not the same; in either case the safe-guards are useless, though Asimov sure made a good story about them.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08864

A superintelligence can't circumvent mathematical proof, so your scenarios are not exhaustive and safeguards are not intrinsically useless.

> but the issue here is that the author argues that there is no such thing as a general intelligence. It's all situational

An intelligence that can adapt to changing situations seems pretty general to me.

C) Intelligence explosion happens and we'll like it and it will be non threatening. Again safeguards not needed. D) As above but it attempts to elevate is meatbags to its level.

>[AI] completely replacing humans and potentially destroying us all is a joke and only the people who no nothing about AI/brains think this.

This isn't true at all.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/05/22/ai-researchers-on-ai-ri...