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Comment by ajmurmann | Hacker News Reader

> a world where AI is indistinguishable, or far superior, to human intelligence

I think the part about being "indistinguishable from human intelligence" is potentially a intellectual trap. We might get to it being far superior while still underperforming at some tasks or behaving in ways that don't make sense to a human mind. An AI mind will highly likely work completely differently from humans and communicating with it should be more thought of as communicating with a quite foreign alien than with a human trapped in a computer.

As a comparison, I'm sure there are some tasks in which some animals do better than humans. Yet no human would conclude that humans are inferior to some monkey who might find its way around the rain forest better or whatever we are worse at.

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An example of your point, chimps winning over humans at some games

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chimps-outplay-hu...

Computers are already exponentially more intelligent than humans in constrained domains, like executing mathematics. Presumably we'll just keep expanding this category until they're better at everything than us, all the while reaping industrial benefits from each iterative improvement.

You're right. I didn't word that very well. Human intelligence vs. AI will always have different qualities as long as one is biological vs. silicon based. I still think we'll be surprised how quickly AI can catches up to human performance on most tasks that comprise modern jobs.

I think your wording was fine. My point was more to expand on yours of us getting surprised by progress. In fact, wet might have GAI long before we understand what we have because the AI is so foreign to us. In some way we might be building the big pudding from Solaris.

Only if you don't assume that consciousness comes from complexity.

The physical ability of an animal to see better/different/faster doens't matter as we do not compare / seperate us from animals by those factors. We seperate us by consciousness and it might get harder and harder to shut down a PC on which a ML model is running which begs you not to do it.

I think we are talking past each other on a few things.

1. I should have been cheater. I want necessarily referring to physical ability, but cognitive. This might need navigation skills or pattern recognition, certain types of memory. A sibling comment linked an interesting article that had concrete experiments in which chimps outdid humans in certain games.

2. I thought this discussion was about general AI not consciousness. I suspect these two are related, but don't know. I suspect that anything that processes information might be conscious, but don't know. I'm even open to the idea that plants, my laptop or even a photo cell might be conscious. I would be shocked of we found that mammals aren't. But this is now closer to religion than anything else, since we cannot disproof that something has consciousness.

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