Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

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This would fall down into a semantic debate over what is meant by intelligence.

There is a well known phenomenon known as the AI effect: when something works we start calling it something else, not AI. Heuristics and complex reasoning trees were once called AI. Fuzzy logic with control systems was once called AI. Clustering was once called AI. And so on…

This certainly has one root in human or carbon-based life cheuvanism but I think there’s something essential happening too. With each innovation we see its limits and it causes us to go back and realize that what we colloquially call intelligence was more than we thought it was.

Intelligence predicts, but is prediction intelligence?

Again, here by intelligence I mean what complex living organisms and humans do.

I still believe there are things going on here not modeled by any CS system and not well understood. Not magic, just not solved yet. We are reverse engineering billions of years of evolution folks. We won’t figure it all out in a few decades.

Demonstrably, humans do think, and arguably demonstrably, early life would go down a path of simple predictions (in the form of stimulus -> response). And demonstrably, evolution did lead to human level intelligence.

So I don’t think there needs to be a semantic debate over where in the process intelligence started. The early responses to stimulus is a form of prediction, but not one that requires thinking.

There can be much disagreement that prediction is at the core of intelligence, or if optimizing ability to predict leads to intelligence. But from the established facts, it is the case the higher forms of life were bootstrapped from the lower ones, and also our biochemistry does have reward functions. Successfully triggering those rewards will generally hinge on making successful predictions. Take from that what you will.

Prediction is a huge part of what intelligence does. I was questioning “prediction maximalism.”

Intelligence is also very good at pattern recognition. Did people once argue for pattern recognition maximalism?

Biological (including human) intelligence is clearly multi-modal and I strongly believe there are aspects that are barely understood if at all.

The history of CS and AI is a history of us learning how to make machines that are unbelievably good at some useful but strictly bounded subset of what intelligence can do: logic, math, pattern recognition, and now prediction.

I think we may still be far from general intelligence and I’m not even sure we can define the problem.

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