Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?

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.'"

Comments

aperture education

[Anonymous Coward]

"children. Keep calm and continue testing."
"At the end there will be cake."

Well that's a new record

[JoshuaZ]

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.

Re:No

[ShakaUVM]

>>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.

Re:Have you not seen

[bky1701]

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

Re:Have you not seen

[wagnerrp]

You have to remember two things:

1. 1. Of all the colleges at a university, the teaching college will generally have the lowest, or near the lowest, admissions requirements. Low pay just doesn't draw the high quality talent. Now sure, you'll find some absolutely stellar teachers, ones that actually care about their students, and spend lots of time outside of school researching the stuff they're teaching, building lesson plans, projects, field trips. You'll find a lot more who are just teaching straight out of the text book. I could outwit at least half my grade school teachers.
2. 2. We are in school of some form or another for a good chunk of our lives. A couple years of daycare. Another decade of elementary and high school. From there, a few years of vocational, or several years of college, or up to another decade for higher level degrees. For 20 years of care, we only get another 40-50 of functional lifetime out of a person. We simply can't afford as a society to have a low student/teacher count. AI could fill the gaps for the less demanding tasks. An AI could guide individual students through directed self study, and aid them in homework, allowing a teacher to assign more work and still expect it be accomplished. An AI could handle larger lectures, allowing teachers to focus one-on-one, or with small groups.

AI in schools would allow the teachers we had to operate more efficiently and more effectively. That in turn means fewer teachers per student, increasing individual teacher pay, and drawing in a better quality of teacher. Think of it as the same thing that has happened in manufacturing for the last 200 years. Machines don't replace humans all together. They simply fulfill the more repetitive tasks.