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Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?

Posted by timothy on from the they-already-have dept.

destinyland writes "A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games. Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates 'a Moore's law for artificial intelligence,' with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes. 'What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic ...' writes Peake, adding 'Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we're dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.'"

9 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. No by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?

    If all the universities, colleges, think tanks, etc can't produce super-intellegent humans then what makes them think we'll be able to produce AI that can?

    1. Re:No by ShakaUVM · · Score: 4, Insightful

      >>The Creationists, ID-ists and the slew of others nutjobs all having their pound of flesh taught in the US school system seems to show that it certainly isn't simply a matter of getting the right teaching methods.

      Yes, like in Creationist Texas that just voted 8 to 0 to reject Evolution! Oh, wait. It was 8 to 0 to support Evolution and reject ID.

      Your paranoid hysteria is a bit overblown if IDers can't even get one vote in *Texas*. You're probably one of those folks that confused the proposals for changes to the history standards with actual changes.

      While I'd agree that a slew of nujobs have their say in education, it's more the people who invent new teaching methodologies every year, and then force them on teachers, not your fantasy about the all-powerful Koch brothers rewriting textbooks.

      Education is screwed up for a lot of reasons, but that's not one of them.

    2. Re:No by bmo · · Score: 1, Insightful

      IN CASE YOU HAD NOT NOTICED, IT SHOULD NOT BE NEWS THAT TEXAS SAID THAT EVOLUTION WAS OKAY.

      IT SHOULD NOT EVER BE NEWS.

      YES, I AM SHOUTING. DEAL WITH IT.

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  2. Well that's a new record by JoshuaZ · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This is one of the silliest versions of a Singularity I've seen yet, and there are already a lot of contenders. This has a lot of the common buzzwords and patterns (like a weakly substantiated claim of exponential growth). It is interesting in that this does superficially share some similarity with how we might improve our intelligence in the future. The issue of recursive self-improvement where each improvement leads to more improvement is not by itself ridiculous. Thus, for example humans might genetically engineer smarter humans who then engineer smarter humans and so on A more worrisome possibility is that an AI that doesn't share goals with humans might bootstrap itself by steadily improving itself to the point where it can easily out-think us. This scenario seems unlikely, but there are some very smart people who take that situation seriously.

    The idea contained in this post is however irrecoverably ridiculous. The games which succeed aren't the games that make people smarter and challenge us more. They are the games that most efficiently exploit human reward and mechanisms and associated social feelings. Games that succeed are games like World of Warcraft and Farmville not games that involve human intelligence in any substantial fashion. The only games that do that are games that teach little kids to add or multiply or factor, and they never succeed well because kids quickly grow bored of them. The games of the future will not be games that make us smarter. The games of the future will be the games which get us to compulsively click more.

  3. Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The Di by SpectreBlofeld · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I don't think citing a work of fiction to support your thesis about video games will get you taken very seriously,

  4. Re:Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The by Bieeanda · · Score: 3, Insightful

    He writes tortured metaphors about katana-wielding Mafia pizza delivery men, and pulls endings out of his ass. Referencing mathematicians and writing novels that appeal to backpatting nerds doesn't make him a genius, it just makes him aware of his audience.

  5. Re:Have you not seen by bky1701 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You do realize those aren't documentaries, right? Sometimes I wonder if slashdot forgets that.

    --
    Great Intellect...
  6. Smart as we are already by Vecanti · · Score: 2, Insightful

    No. Kids playing with AI that is as smart as a humans will not make them smarter than if they were kids playing with people that "are" actually human. We've been doing that for a while now. ;)

  7. Re:Have you not seen by tehcyder · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Your whole argument is conditional on the fact that anything like AI is possible any time soon. It isn't.

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