A.I. Developer Challenges Pro-Human Bias

destinyland writes "After 13 years, the creator of the Noble Ape cognitive simulation says he's learned two things about artificial intelligence. 'Survival is a far better metric of intelligence than replicating human intelligence,' and "There are a number of examples of vastly more intelligent systems (in terms of survival) than human intelligence." Both Apple and Intel have used his simulation as a processor metric, but now Tom Barbalet argues its insights could be broadly applied to real life. His examples of durable non-human systems? The legal system, the health care system, and even the internet, where individual humans are simply the 'passive maintaining agents,' and the systems can't be conquered without a human onslaught that's several magnitudes larger."

Comments

He's too close.

[Toonol]

By redefining intelligence to have nothing to do with what anybody means by intelligence, he can then claim that other systems exhibit more intelligence. Like a rock, presumably, since it survives far better than humans. I think this may be an example of somebody getting too interesting in specifics of tree-bark, and forgetting about the forest.

Re:He's too close.

[Trepidity]

This seems to be a common mode of argument for people who for some reason don't like what people commonly mean by "intelligence", which is something closer to "critical thinking skills combined with ability to acquire, retain, and use information", but nonetheless like the aura of the term. There's been a decades-long wave of politically correct attempts to broaden intelligence to include other things, like "emotional intelligence", which might indeed be important, useful, and worthy of study, but aren't really what the word "intelligence" means, so should probably get new names instead of being shoehorned in there. Now we've got survivability, which is indeed an interesting trait of an organism, but is not in itself actually what anyone calls intelligence (though being more intelligent might help with survivability, at least in some contexts).

It's a perfectly valid argument to say: look, I don't think intelligence is the most interesting property to study; here's this other property, which might overlap somewhat, but I argue is more interesting. But pretending that your new property is really intelligence is a weird sort of linguistic move, because your property is not what people use that word to mean.

Re:Bad metric

[MrMista_B]

You mean stupid. Most lions and tigers are endangered, if not close to extinction, and bears aren't too well off either.

A better example would be insects, like mosquitoes.

Re:Banks

[johnsonav]

The banking system is another example of a system much better than human intelligence for survival and resilience. Oh wait...

It persuaded us to save its "life", didn't it?

Re:Bad metric

[Kjella]

I think we've defined intelligence almost like the halting problem, it's everything can't be solved by an algorithm and every time we find something solved by an algorithm we exclude it. Every time computers and robots do something we reduce it to mere execution of an algorithm, even when the algorithm wasn't defined by a human like in neural nets. As long as it stays within the problem domain we'll never consider it intelligent, intelligence is creativity and thinking outside the box. The best sign of intelligence in a Chess program would be "Want to play a game of Go instead?"