Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think there is a meaningful distinction. Do chess computers have a "fundamental understanding" of chess, which humans traditionally considered a benchmark of human intelligence/strategy?

Analogous to the philosophical zombie thought experiment, I think that "real intelligence/understanding" is indistinguishable from simply being able to perform actions to accomplish the same tasks that humans traditionally consider to require intelligence.

Of course, that's one of the PR problems that AI has always had: once a computer can outperform a human at some task, that task is no longer considered to be something that requires "true intelligence." Most people would consider someone who can multiply numbers together to be intelligent, but when computers do that (incomprehensibly faster and more reliably), few people consider even for a moment that it's AI. Same with more advanced mathematics, like computer algebra and automated theorem proving. Same with facial and voice recognition. And I'm sure it will be the same with self-driving cars.

The fundamental problem humans will have with strong AI is that it won't be able to properly rationalize it's actions. Sure you'll have a statistical model for why it did what it did but that means about as much to anybody as a numerical reification of the quantum states of every particle of a person's mind at the time they made a decision.

Who says they won't be able to? In fact, rationalizing may be the easiest part - the rules of logic are few, and computers are very good at using them fast.

Building new concepts from raw inputs is the difficult part at which humans are better, but now computers are showing that they may be able to do that too.

When you say "rationalize its actions," are you referring to some mechanism in the inner workings of the brain/software? Or are you just talking about saying things that help humans understand why an action was chosen? I maintain that there is no distinction between the two, and it's quite conceivable that an AI could take an action then say something that helps humans understand why that action was chosen.

If an AI can speak it can tell humans why it did what it did. But it's impossible to look through it's brain and see for yourself. To see if it's telling to truth or exaggerating or rationalizing.

That's also true of humans.

If fictional media is anything to go by, the single defining aspect of human intelligence is love. This is the last bastion of human understanding that is incomprehensible to evil, machines and aliens.

Humans can already fall in love with computers and virtual personalities, so we're halfway there

Depends on your choice of fictional media; try reading Peter Watts, some time when you're already not in a good mood.

Thanks, I'll place Blindsight by Peter Watts in my queue.

That's the place to start; the Behemoth trilogy isn't bad, per se, but it is a ramshackle thing by comparison, and I think only partly because it has a larger story to tell.

But love is indistinguishable from a set of actions that we traditionally associate with love, any of which a computer system (especially one connected to a realistic android) could conceivably perform.

What do you want?

Until I can just talk to a computer and it always understands what I'm asking, there's no AI is there? It's a fuzzy concept to exactly define, but it's pretty obvious what we all mean when we talk about it.

Brute forcing billions of moves of chess isn't going to achieve that, so it's nothing more than a cute trick that lay people don't understand is a trick so we have to tell them it is.

David Copperfield can "fly" but he can't just fly on demand, he can only fly in very special circumstances in a tightly controlled environment.

He's no more a flying man than deep blue is a thinking computer.

But that's the thing. We solve a problem and then the solution is just called a "cute trick". The goalpost gets moved further. Natural language processing is getting really advanced. Soon enough you will be able to talk to a computer in a conversation. And then you will just call that a cute trick.

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