We already have a lot of digital intelligence greater than human intelligence, and have for a long time, in particular areas. Every time that computers beat us at some task, we pretend that task doesn’t really count.
Digital intelligence becomes greater than ours when it can solve problems better. And when it does, it usually solves them in different ways than ours does.
One of the most interesting results I’ve seen in a long time were these robotic fingers dribbling a ping pong ball. As it turned out, the secret wasn’t fancy algorithms, but fast electronics. If your feedback loops are fast enough, simple error feedback is enough. The same thing happened with Deep Blue with Kasparov and Watson on Jeopardy. They didn’t use our algorithms, but had algorithms leveraging the advantages of digital hardware.
We’ve been trying to build our intelligence in machines, but machines beat us with algorithms that aren’t our algorithms, and leverage the advantages that machines have over us in speed, computation, and memory.
When computers are more intelligent than us, there will probably still be areas where humans 1.0 are still better. Likely the real winner will merge the two technologies.
The question isn’t so much how to make programs that exceed human performance at any particular cognitive task; it is how to make programs that can reach or exceed human performance at the entire range of cognitive tasks we can deal with, and that we can expect to do at least as well as we would dealing with challenges that we haven’t encountered yet.
My question is how to create more value, and trying to be better than humans in all things likely yields a sub optimal result for creating value for me; it force feeds problems computers aren’t good at, while starving problems computers are good at.
The context of the OP, the hypothetical intelligence explosion, pretty much assumes this interpretation.
At the very least, it assumes that an AGI will be G enough to take a look at its own “code” (whatever symbolic substrate it uses for encoding the computations that define it, which may not necessarily look like the “source code” we are familiar with, though it may well start off being a human invention) and figure out how to change that code so as to become an even more effective optimizer.
“Create more value” doesn’t in and of itself lead to an intelligence explosion. It’s something that would be nice to have, but not a game-changer.
That cross-domain thing, which is where we still have the lead, is a game-changer. (Dribbling a ping-pong ball is cute, but I want to know what the thing will do with an egg. Dribbling the egg is right out. Figuring out the egg is food, that’s the kind of thing you want an AGI capable of.)
I think the real question is: When will computers be good enough that humans don’t need to work? They’re currently better at us at specialized tasks, but they are completely and utterly incapable of operating without us to guide them. People, on the other hand, have lived without computers for millennia.
We already have a lot of digital intelligence greater than human intelligence, and have for a long time, in particular areas. Every time that computers beat us at some task, we pretend that task doesn’t really count.
Digital intelligence becomes greater than ours when it can solve problems better. And when it does, it usually solves them in different ways than ours does.
One of the most interesting results I’ve seen in a long time were these robotic fingers dribbling a ping pong ball. As it turned out, the secret wasn’t fancy algorithms, but fast electronics. If your feedback loops are fast enough, simple error feedback is enough. The same thing happened with Deep Blue with Kasparov and Watson on Jeopardy. They didn’t use our algorithms, but had algorithms leveraging the advantages of digital hardware.
We’ve been trying to build our intelligence in machines, but machines beat us with algorithms that aren’t our algorithms, and leverage the advantages that machines have over us in speed, computation, and memory.
When computers are more intelligent than us, there will probably still be areas where humans 1.0 are still better. Likely the real winner will merge the two technologies.
The question isn’t so much how to make programs that exceed human performance at any particular cognitive task; it is how to make programs that can reach or exceed human performance at the entire range of cognitive tasks we can deal with, and that we can expect to do at least as well as we would dealing with challenges that we haven’t encountered yet.
In fewer words, mastering the trick of cross-domain optimization.
I don’t think that’s a good question at all.
My question is how to create more value, and trying to be better than humans in all things likely yields a sub optimal result for creating value for me; it force feeds problems computers aren’t good at, while starving problems computers are good at.
The context of the OP, the hypothetical intelligence explosion, pretty much assumes this interpretation.
At the very least, it assumes that an AGI will be G enough to take a look at its own “code” (whatever symbolic substrate it uses for encoding the computations that define it, which may not necessarily look like the “source code” we are familiar with, though it may well start off being a human invention) and figure out how to change that code so as to become an even more effective optimizer.
“Create more value” doesn’t in and of itself lead to an intelligence explosion. It’s something that would be nice to have, but not a game-changer.
That cross-domain thing, which is where we still have the lead, is a game-changer. (Dribbling a ping-pong ball is cute, but I want to know what the thing will do with an egg. Dribbling the egg is right out. Figuring out the egg is food, that’s the kind of thing you want an AGI capable of.)
I think the real question is: When will computers be good enough that humans don’t need to work? They’re currently better at us at specialized tasks, but they are completely and utterly incapable of operating without us to guide them. People, on the other hand, have lived without computers for millennia.