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Comment by alyxya | Hacker News Reader

Intelligence is whatever we consider ourselves capable of. It turns out that computers are increasingly able to do whatever we can do. Maybe the only thing we can do is advanced pattern matching, but we didn't think of our intelligence that way before.

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Humans seem to be able to invent interesting questions about the unknown and then figure out how to try techniques to answer those questions and then systematically attack those questions. This is why LLMs generally can’t do unsupervised research or novel high level engineering by themselves. They’re getting closer and closer in some ways and in others they remain quite lacking.

The other thing is their inability to intelligently forget and their inability to correctly manage their own context by building their own tools (some of which is labs intentionally crippling how they build AI to avoid an AI escape).

I don’t think there’s anything novel in human intelligence as a good chunk of it does appear in more primitive forms in other animals (primates, elephants, dolphins, cepholapods). But generally our intelligence is on hyperdrive because we also have the added physical ability of written language and the capability for tool building.

I mean if you ask an llm to do those things it will.

https://chatgpt.com/share/68fd15af-ee48-8010-8269-e10f518a3a...

> Intelligence is whatever we consider ourselves capable of

Then, what is what we are incapable of? Magic? ;-)

> Maybe the only thing we can do is advanced pattern matching

Pattern matching as a way to support the excellent heuristic "correlation is likely causation", yes. This is what allows us to analyze systems, what brings us from "something thrown away will eventually fall to the ground" to the theory to relativity.

Intelligence is understanding, and understanding comes from hacking systems in order to use them to our advantage - or just observe systems being broken or being built.

By doing that, we acquire more knowledge about the relationships and entities within the system, which in turn allows more advanced hacking. We probably started with fire, wolves, wheat, flint; and now we are considering going to Mars.

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