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:He's too close.

[nine-times]

You have a fair point, but there's the other side to things too. At least part of the reason there's been an attempt to redefine "intelligence" as something touchy-feely by some people is that there's an attempt by other people to conflate "intelligent" with "good in math and science" with "worthwhile human beings". Basically some people who happen to score high on IQ tests are trying to push the idea that we need to let people with high IQs run the world, because they're better than everyone else. (Yes, I scored pretty well on IQ tests when I've taken them, but no, I don't think they're a good measure of a person's worth)

But then on the other hand, there has been a tendency to restrict "intelligence" to the math/science arena much more than is proper, given what we really mean by "intelligence". We get wrapped up in testing how smart people are by testing their ability to take a square root in their head, or in asking questions about geometry or science. You get a model of intelligence where Rain Man is smarter than us all.

I think it's fair, though, to talk about "emotional intelligence" insofar as intelligence includes abilities that enable us to figure things out mentally. The ability to understand ones own mind, to understand social situations, and to navigate difficult interpersonal problems is within the realm of "intelligence". I would say that "street smarts" is a kind of intelligence. I've certainly known people who always aced all the tests in school, but at the same time couldn't be trusted to cross a street without getting run over because they were complete dumbasses. Because of that, I don't think it's right to say that "intelligence" is a simple 1 dimensional scale, and it's certainly not something that's measured well by IQ tests.

But anyway, I'm not sure any of this is what the author of this article has in mind (can't be sure, only RTFS). I think the idea is more like, "When thinking about intelligence abstractly, or in thinking about AI, we tend to assume that intelligence should be measured in a thing's ability to think about the things we think about the way we think about them. This might be a mistake." Imagine you had an alien intelligence that had no ears, only saw in X-rays, and had a thick hide that provided adequate shelter from the elements. Would you assume it was stupid because it didn't develop spoken language? If it hadn't made clothes for itself or built itself housing, would you assume that it was less intelligent than cave men?

There's a strong philosophical argument that intelligence requires some kind of motivation or drive. It might follow, then, that the measurement of intelligence ought to be in measuring the efficacy of satisfying that drive, rather than satisfying the drives of other beings (us).

Re:Bad metric

[SomeJoel]

Survival is a terrible metric of intelligence. By that standard, lions and tigers and bears are the most intelligent species on the planet.

They were, then we started shooting them. Who's the smartest one now, bitches?

Re:Bad metric

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right; that fake word refuses to die.

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?

A bit of a Summary

[digitally404]

Unsurprisingly, most of the people here haven't read, or perhaps not really absorbed, what TFA discusses, and are jumping to quick and irrelevant conclusions.

The author explains that Survival is a good metric of Intelligence, and he uses humans as an example. One human can definitely kill one lion, bear, mosquito, single bacteria, etc. if equipped with his intelligently designed tools such as a gun, or a mosquito zapper, antibacterial soap. He uses these tools, intelligently, to kill one bear, and hence, the human is more intelligent. However, if you take 10 bears, then sure, they may be able to kill the 1 human, but that means they are less intelligent, and take more numbers.

He simulates intelligence this way, and he defines a simulation as any environment with applied constraints, and that may include the internet, legal system, your neighbourhood community, etc.

So here's what he says: A system, such as the health care or legal system, will not be shutdown by one person. In fact, it probably won't even be shutdown by 10 people, maybe 100. And hence, the system is vastly more intelligent than a human, intrinsically since we worked in numbers to evolve this system.

I think it's a very interesting way of looking at intelligence. Again, this is all based Mr. Barbalet's assumptions.

Survival and planning horizon issues

[Animats]

There's something to be said for focusing on low-level survival issues, but one can do more than pontificate about it. As someone who's worked on legged locomotion control, I've made the point that a big part of life is about not falling down and not bumping into stuff. Unless you've got that working, not much else is going to work. Once you've got that working well, the higher level stuff can be added on gradually. This is bottom-up AI, as opposed to top-down AI.

Bottom-up AI is now mainstream, but it was once a radical concept. I went through Stanford at the height of the expert systems boom in the mid-1980s, when abstraction was king and the logicians were running the AI programs. The "AI Winter" followed after they failed.

Rod Brooks made bottom-up AI semi-respectable, but he went off onto a purely reactive AI tangent, with little insect robots. That works, but it doesn't lead to more than insect-level AI. My comment on this was that it was a matter of the planning horizon for movement planning. Purely reactive systems have a planning horizon of zero. That works for insects, because they are small and light, and can just bang feelers into obstacles without harm.

As creatures get bigger and faster, they need a longer planning horizon. The minimum planning horizon for survival is your stopping distance. (This is explicit in autonomous vehicle work.) Bigger and faster animals need better motion planners. This is probably what drove the evolution of the cerebellum, which is most of the brain in the mammals below the primates.

I've had horses for many years; I was on horseback an hour ago. Horses are interesting in this respect because they're big, fast, have very good short-term motion planning, but do little long-term planning. Horse brains have a big cerebellum and a small cortex, which is consistent with horse behavior. This gives a sense of what to aim for in bottom-up AI; good motion control, good vision, defer work on the higher level stuff until we have the low-level stuff nailed.

That's happening. The DARPA Grand Challenge, especially the 2006 season with driving in traffic, forced some work on the beginnings of short term situational awareness. BigDog has some of the low-level motion control working really well, but BigDog isn't yet very good at picking footholds. They're just getting started on situational awareness. There's some good stuff going on in the game community, especially in programs that can play decent football. This problem is starting to crack.

Short-term planning in these areas revolves around making predictions about what's going to happen next. The ability to ask "what-if" questions about movement before trying them improves survival enormously. This kind of planning isn't combinatoric, like traditional AI planning systems. It's more like inverting a simulation to run it as a planner.

I have no idea how we get to "consciousness", but if we can get to horse-level AI, we're well into the mammal range. I encourage people to work on that problem. There's enough compute power to do this stuff now without beating head against wall on CPU time issues. There wasn't in the 1990s when I worked on this.

Re:Bad metric

['nother poster]

Huh? Please tell me that was a fucking joke.

Lets just go with cyanobacteria. Not harmful, but the first photosynthisizing critters on earth. They created stromatolites a couple of billion years ago, and they are still doing it today, but on a much reduced scale. As far as they can tell the stromatolites in Sharks Bay Australia today are the same as the ones 2.8 billion years ago. The roaches we have today aren't the same species of roaches they had 354-295 million years ago. Notice that order of magnitude difference?

Re:The banks "persuaded" "us," didn't they?

[imakemusic]

That's "what" you "said", right?