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Comment by timid_oshima | Hacker News Reader

That sounds a bit early - whats your source? This one says at least mid 19th century for not practical electric lights https://www.energy.gov/articles/history-light-bulb

But either way, is knowing the electron knowing electricity? There are so many properties of it that can be known and manipulated without that insight- and indeed they built up that understanding to reach practical engineering and use of electricity. That’s what I think is being gotten at wrt intelligence.

“Knowing” something isn’t necessarily about being aware of its smaller parts.

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> That sounds a bit early - whats your source?

The source you linked already cites it as the first arc lamp.

> But either way, is knowing the electron knowing electricity? There are so many properties of it that can be known and manipulated without that insight- and indeed they built up that understanding to reach practical engineering and use of electricity. That’s what I think is being gotten at wrt intelligence.

Yes. That is exactly my point. We don't need to entirely understand what intelligence is in order to be able to create it. The same way we didn't know what fire is, but we created it with no problem.

Ok, I’ll give you the lightbulb point :).

But we can hardly define intelligence, let alone “entirely understand” it. A child could give a good , practical definition of fire and manipulate it skillfully thousands of years ago. Not so much us grown adults wrt intelligence today.

Here is a child-like, practical definition of intelligence: "ability to solve problems".

That’s a good start, but doesn’t help us since even the most basic programs can fit that definition and are not what we mean when we say AGI. I have yet to see anything approaching a useful definition of intelligence across several discussions of impressive new language, and other statistical models - it feels like we should have that before talking about making it real!

With fire, even “when things turn from themselves to ashes and produce heat” (which I imagine a prehistoric child could come up with) distinguishes fire usefully from most other phenomena in the world

You are equivocating throughout this thread: you accept that we developed an understanding of fire incrementally, and concurrently developed fire-based technologies, yet you insist it is different for intelligence, without giving any good reason to think so.

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