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Comment by cicada | Hacker News Reader

Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence that invented it.

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The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.

...typed the person into his quantum-mechanically-mediated instantaneous conversation with ten thousand of the best-educated technologists on Earth.

You're going to have trouble convincing me that Google doesn't make me more intelligent. You're also going to have trouble convincing me that, say, cheap printing and cheap food -- both products of the industrial revolution, and without which I might be a subsistence farmer -- do not make me more intelligent. I wouldn't know quantum mechanics without them, after all, so I wouldn't understand how computers work.

And if you strive to define "intelligence" such that human intelligence has not been improved by technology -- which can be done; I'm clearly less intelligent than my Cro-Magnon ancestors by many criteria -- you are going to have a hard time convincing me that the future will be any different. If technology hasn't worked to improve "intelligence" before, why should it do so later?

A Google engineer should not expect to get a helpful response when he asks the Google search engine for advice on building a better Google.

> A Google engineer should not expect to get a helpful response when he asks the Google search engine for advice on building a better Google.

Why not?

Google does a lot of things right, but they don't have all the smart people.

Not to forget that IQ tests (for whatever they may actually measure) had to be constantly rescaled over the last half century to stay centered at 100. So an average IQ these days is comparable to a borderline genius IQ from the middle of the 20th century.

Edit: it's called the Flynn effect, and if this phone had decent copy and paste, I'd give you the wikipedia link, which you now are forced to find on your own. But at least I can rest reasonably assured that your general intelligence is sufficient for solving that task ;-).

> ...typed the person into his quantum-mechanically-mediated instantaneous conversation with ten thousand of the best-educated technologists on Earth.

Are you referring to HN?

Yes and no. HN is the proximate host of the conversation. But HN is linkable and indexed by Google, so if you make a sufficiently interesting comment it really does have the potential to be read by everyone with an Internet connection and a reading knowledge of the language it is in.

Perhaps the scientific revolution was not an innovation of a single person, but of the collective entity formed by the proto-scientists of civilization. That conceptual advance, along with communication, tool, and other conceptual advances since that time, have continued to accelerate civilization's collective intelligence.

We don't expect the singularity to improve the intelligence of transistors. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect that previous intelligence explosions of a collective being massively improved the intelligence of the humans comprising it.

The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.

I bet it led to a significant increase in the average IQ. It may not have been a Singularity with a capital S, but it certainly did reflect back on its creators.

The qualitative and quantitative improvements from the flynn effect and the population increase reflected back on humanity as a whole, not the creators of the industrial revolution. This is why we've got accelerating growth, but it's also why the second derivative is still small.

I agree, but this is orthogonal to the point I was trying to address. mechanical_fish, in a cousin thread, is talking about the same thing I was.

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