Comment by ACCount37 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ACCount37 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

In my eyes that "chorus" is just insecurity talking.

If it's not "actual real AI", we can keep pretending that human intelligence is something distinct and special - and that what our computers are doing now is some sort of other, obviously fake and vastly inferior thing.

When Deep Blue won at chess, people didn't revise their estimates of AI capabilities upwards. They revised their estimates of how much intelligence is required to play chess at world level downwards, by a lot. Surely playing chess must have never required any intelligence in the first place!

Now, the list of things that "must have never required any intelligence in the first place" includes gems like "reading comprehension at high school level", "copywriting", "frontend work", "CTF tasks", "theory of mind", "arguing with people online" and more.

If the goalposts were moved far enough that the claim to "actual intelligence" is denied to a double digit percentage of human population, hasn't something gone wrong somewhere?

It has, but I think in both directions.

It used to be assumed that playing chess would require the same level of general purpose problem solving cognitive skills that the best chess players possess. But of course a Chess grandmaster that spend a few minutes learning Go can beat a Chess AI at Go with no trouble at all, because a chess AI is incapable of making effective moves in Go at all. Clearly those expectations were incorrect. Pointing that out isn't revisionism.

On the other hand, intelligence is an incredibly broad term. About as broad as a term can get. Arguably Eliza, or an Excel macro has some degree of decision making ability in some sense, it's just unbelievably primitive.

So, we need to be clearer what we mean by intelligence. We're learning that as we go along. At least now we have a few more bits of the map between us and an IF statement visible to us.

>So, we need to be clearer what we mean by intelligence

I disagree in one sense. The word intelligence is burned, mostly useless at this point. I've been a strong proponent of new terms that break intelligence into much smaller subcategories so we can define what different software, humans, and animals have.

> When Deep Blue won at chess, people didn't revise their estimates of AI capabilities upwards. They revised their estimates of how much intelligence is required to play chess at world level downwards, by a lot. Surely playing chess must have never required any intelligence in the first place!

You are wrong, many did temporarily revise their estimates of AI capabilities upwards, but then 10 years later they realized they were wrong and adjusted chess downward as you say.

We have seen that pattern over and over.

"But it's not really doing arithmetic," he mumbled to himself, as he punched the numbers into his Busicom LE-120A.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com