Example 3: Stephen Wiltshire. He made a nineteen-foot-long drawing of New York City after flying on a helicopter for 20 minutes, and he got the number of windows and floors of all the buildings correct.
I think ~everyone understands that computers can do this. The “magical” part is doing it with a human brain, not doing it at all. Similarly, blindfolded chess is not more difficult than normal chess for computers. That may take a little knowledge to see. And “doing it faster” is again clear. So the threshold for magic you describe is not the one even the most naive use for AI.
Can a computer do this? That is, take in the footage and output a drawing or a 3D model that accurate? I don’t know what SOTA of that sort of image processing is (and of course nowadays we have better ML models).
A simple version of this is done for panoramic photos. If he looked at the city from a consistent direction throughout the flight, that’s all that’s needed. If the direction varied, it can’t have varied a lot—he had to at least see the sides of the building he was drawing, if maybe from a different angle, and not all the buildings would have been parallel. That kind of rotation seems doable with current image transformers (and that’s only neccesary if the drawing has accurate angles even over long distances).
In any case, I don’t think it matters to my argument if current ML can do it. All the parts that might be difficult for the computer are doable even for normal humans, and therefore not magical. The only thing that’s added to the normal human skill here is perfect memory, which we know is easy for computers and have known for a long time.
I think ~everyone understands that computers can do this. The “magical” part is doing it with a human brain, not doing it at all. Similarly, blindfolded chess is not more difficult than normal chess for computers. That may take a little knowledge to see. And “doing it faster” is again clear. So the threshold for magic you describe is not the one even the most naive use for AI.
Can a computer do this? That is, take in the footage and output a drawing or a 3D model that accurate? I don’t know what SOTA of that sort of image processing is (and of course nowadays we have better ML models).
A simple version of this is done for panoramic photos. If he looked at the city from a consistent direction throughout the flight, that’s all that’s needed. If the direction varied, it can’t have varied a lot—he had to at least see the sides of the building he was drawing, if maybe from a different angle, and not all the buildings would have been parallel. That kind of rotation seems doable with current image transformers (and that’s only neccesary if the drawing has accurate angles even over long distances).
In any case, I don’t think it matters to my argument if current ML can do it. All the parts that might be difficult for the computer are doable even for normal humans, and therefore not magical. The only thing that’s added to the normal human skill here is perfect memory, which we know is easy for computers and have known for a long time.