Every normal person (and lots of abnormal ones) use language every day, and communicate with others using language, using it in ways that no computer program (including Alexa etc.) can do. That's intelligence by any reasonable standard. So no, those people (which is everyone, really) are not functioning on an animal level.
I tend to agree with you that a true artificial intelligence is probably a long ways off, but not for the reasons you give.
1. IIUC, you're saying that an AI needs to remap hardware; remapping software doesn't count. Why not? It's possible that neurons are a hardware (wetware) encoding of some kind of program (broadly understood). But why should that be the only way to improve an intelligence?
2. "just computers "matching" up failures and successes according to predetermined criteria": Either I don't understand what you're saying, or you're wrong. Computers can do a form of machine learning called clustering, in which the derived categories are not at all predetermined. There are other forms of machine learning where the goal is not a set of predetermined categories--in fact, any form of unsupervised learning. BTW, one might argue that the growing human mind is using a lot of predetermined categories; language learning by children almost certainly (in my opinion, and that of a lot of other linguists) uses some kind of predetermined criteria. It's really the only explanation for how children do it so fast, and with so little training data.
3. Transitive learning was (and to some extent still is) a fundamental part of some kinds of symbolic AI, dating back to the 1960s. I'm not familiar enough with current machine learning technology to say to what extent this is still true, but one might at least argue that that's what's going on in multi-layer neural nets. But again, maybe I don't understand what you mean by this.
4. Humor: Ok, it's possible that this could be a part of the definition of "intelligence", although I'm not sure why it's a necessary part. I do believe that there are programs that have been trained to recognize jokes, although I'm pretty sure they're not general, and it's unclear what they're reacting too. I could write a program that looks for the words "Sven" and "Olly", or "A __ walks into a bar", and it would probably recognize a lot of jokes. Of course I'd agree with you that this program has nothing to do with intelligence. The problem is that defining humor, in a general way, is probably as hard as defining intelligence; indeed, you and I might not agree on what's humorous (stop me if I've told you this...). But yes, it might be that there is no real intelligence without the ability to recognize (not necessarily laugh at) humor, in which case there are no Vulcans.
IIRC, there was a program back in the 1980s--in the days of floppy diskettes--there was such a program. You told it what was in your refr, and it suggested a recipe. I'm told the recipe was always hash.
By that standard, coat hangers and socks can procreate. Socks are, I think, an example of sexual propagation; you start with a left and right (i.e. male and female), and nine months later you look in the drawer and behold, there's an offspring. The offspring is always a left or a right; I've never found a sock in my drawer that is ambidextrous, which proves that this is sexual reproduction, with one jean coming from one parent and the other jean from the other. Coat hangers, on the other hand, seem to reproduce asexually.
What I haven't figured out is where the sock's parents went. Also, their reproduction in my drawer is not at a level that can maintain the population; I have to replenish it from time to time with new male and female socks. Perhaps the environment in my drawer is not as favorable to the sock species as the environment in the sock factory is. Or maybe it's Climate Change.
That is doubtless part of it, but a computer playing chess is confronted throughout the game with novel situations, if by "novel" you mean chess pieces in positions the computer has never "seen" before. You could say that's not novel enough, and there's some truth to that; but the question then would be how novel, and how do you measure novelness [that's ok, I'm a linguist, I have a license to invent new words]. Novel traffic configurations on the street? Self-driving cars are pretty good with that. Novel sentences? As a linguist, I don't think computers are very good at that, but they are impressively better than they were ten or twenty years ago. Which is not to say they'll necessarily make the same progress in the next decade or two.
WindBourne's post (to which the AC you were responding to was himself responding to) said, "there is fast tidal movement..." The AC you're responding to is quite right: tides are caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon and (to a lesser extent) the sun. They are also affected by other things, such as the size of the water basin (tides in the Atlantic can be sizeable, while tides in the Great Lakes are negligible), the position of the measuring station (tides act something like standing waves, so the tidal range tends to be greatest on the margins, and least in the middle), other geological factors (tides in the Bay of Fundy can reach 50 feet or more, due to the shape and length of the Bay), and yes, to some extent by weather. But to repeat, the ultimate cause of tides is the gravitational attraction of the moon and sun.
Perhaps you should repeat eight grade. Oh, and on a lighter note, you might read Larry Niven's "Neutron Star", and pay special attention to the ending.
I was also thinking about overfishing, but not migration. I instead suspect these fish have always been that far north, but nobody knew because the fishing was easier further south. But now that the more southern fisheries have been overfished, the fishermen are going further north and finding new--to them--schools.
Hmmph. Never heard of Bay's rule, although I have heard of (and can work with) Baye's Theorem.
As for casting out 9s, I'm sure that's really useful. If for some reason you're without your calculator (or slide rule). Indeed, as thegarbz says (in another reply), knowing what an integral or derivative *means* is far more important than remembering how to do it. I'm 50 years out of my last calculus course, and I don't remember how to do anything more than the simplest integrals. But I still know (some of the) things they're good for, i.e. what they *mean*, and I think that's what's useful.
The giving tenure part is getting smaller. I believe (but don't have statistics to back it up) that lecturerships are much more common now than they were 30 years ago.
Also, a lot of professors' work is in research, more so than teaching. (And my title is Research Scientist, which I believe is also more common in universities than it used to be.)
Not disagreeing with anyone here, but when my first wife got her RN in the late 60s, it was a two year course (or maybe a bit longer with the OJT). I don't believe you can get an RN now in 4 years. I suspect that's due to at least two things: nurses have to work more independently from MDs these days; and there's a lot more to learn about patient care now. Also, I'm sure that methods will continue to change, and being a life-long learner of those methods will be critical.
FWIW, I doubt that AI and robotics will replace nurses, or even most of a nurse's role, in the next 30 years. But I could be wrong.
cayenne8 speaks to the personal skills part of your post, and I think I agree with him about that. I'd like to ask you about the asynch communication part of your post.
I started working at a job in 1972. Well into the 1990s, I worked on large projects that required concentrating for long periods of time: editing book-length documents, writing longish computer programs, etc. I didn't have trouble getting myself started. And when I read the news, I'd spend a half hour going through a newspaper.
But now, with social media (you know, things like \.), I find it so much easier to spend time answering a single email or post (oops...)--or now a single text message. And I skim the news sites for a couple-three short articles. I get a feeling of accomplishment doing these short tasks much more quickly, and I seem to find it harder to get started (or return to) large projects, where the feeling of accomplishment doesn't come so quickly. I fear that if everyone is doing this in twenty years--as you say--there will be a lot less progress on large projects.
Of course it's also possible that I'm just slowing down with old age, and that tweeters and text messagers have no such problem going to work on projects where the big reward won't come for weeks, months or even years. Then again...
If college has gone that far downhill in the past 50 years, then I guess there's a problem. I got my BS in 1972. I got through courses like organic chemistry not by memorizing a bunch of facts, but by learning a handful and then using rule-based extrapolation to derive answers (sort of analogous to constructing proofs in geometry). A carbon triple bond is stronger than a double bond, which is stronger than a single bond. From that a bunch of properties having to do with IR spectra etc. can be inferred. Same thing for a lot of other classes, in a range of disciplines. (Not so good for biochemistry, though, where afaict God could have caused organisms to use a bazillion other methods for aerobic respiration. But the biochem course required me to know the real Krebs Cycle. I squeaked by in that course.)
I later got a PhD in (generative) linguistics, where literally everything past first semester courses required building arguments or finding flaws in arguments, not in memorization. Again, maybe things have changed since then (1984).
"In other cultures, they do not claim this or teach these things not really study them. They focus on the necessary, and frankly, are beating us badly." I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but let me relate an anecdote which may--or may not--be relevant.
My experience is limited to a couple years a long time ago teaching at the university level in South America. And my experience was that they knew far less about critical thinking than (I would hope) an American student would. Afaict, their learning had emphasized memorization and regurgitation. This was driven home for me by two experiences: assigning a homework problem of showing why the textbook's analysis of a certain problem was wrong, and giving an open book final exam. The textbook wrong? How could it be? And an open book exam: won't everyone get 100? (No, they didn't.) In the real world, you won't get far by assuming the general consensus is correct, nor by trying to work without checking reference material. You can't keep enough in your head (at least my head is too small for that).
I'm sure things are better wrt critical thinking in Europe, and perhaps in some other parts of the world. And that's not a racist comment, it's just my lack of experience in those regions.
I have to agree about the programming language part. My first programming course taught FORTRAN and PL/1. I haven't used it since, but the concepts were foundational, and I've used them every day, with every programming language I've learned since: Pascal, IBM Assembler, LISP, C, Python, a few others on the side.
Prolog was in there too, but is enough different from FORTRAN etc. that it's almost a different concept. But even there, general notions of commenting, program-internal documentation, even useful conventions for naming predicates (~ functions) and variables, all came in useful.
I've of course learned a ton more about writing maintainable programs since 1968 (Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy, learned the hard way), but I got the foundations, and some basic understanding of how computers work, back then.
Back on the math(s): I would add probability and statistics. If there's anything I regret about my education, it's not having gotten a better background in that. I've of course done reading on it, but while I found calculus, linear algebra etc. easy, statistics (at the level needed) is hard for me. YMMV.
Actually, virtually all fonts these days _can_ work on both Windows and Linux (and MacOS). The only issue you're like to find (this is probably what you're referring to) is fonts that are proprietary to a particular operating system. Some Windows fonts are proprietary, although if you're willing to pay for them, some can be bought.
SIL is of course another good provider of high quality fonts for both Latin-based scripts (with better coverage of non-ASCII code points than most other Latin-based fonts) and especially for non-Roman scripts. (Disclaimer: I was once an SIL member.)
Yes, the Earth was moved further away as a means to control climate change.
And before anyone mentions this, Jules Verne (IIRC) actually wrote a story about moving the Earth closer to the Sun, to make up for the fact that the Sun was (in some future) outputting less light/ heat.
Pretty hard to write s.t. that runs on MacOS, Windows and Linux, unless you program it in Java or Python. I've used a few Java applications (jEdit is my favorite), and Python is my favorite programming language. But for the most part big applications aren't written in Java, afaict.
I live south of Baltimore MD, and my daughter was attending college in Fairmont WV. The Verizon map showed (as of three or four years ago) continuous coverage from here to there, and there. There was not; there were numerous long gaps along I-70 and I-68 between Frederick MD and somewhere in eastern WV, and no coverage whatsoever that I ever discovered in Fairmont or the surrounding area for ten or so miles--not even at Fairmont State University, which is on a hill above much of the city of Fairmont. It was around that time that I switched to AT&T (via StraightTalk), and since then I've always had good reception all along that route.
So no, I do not believe Verizon's coverage maps. I'm glad someone in the FCC agrees.
Slashdot Mirror
Every normal person (and lots of abnormal ones) use language every day, and communicate with others using language, using it in ways that no computer program (including Alexa etc.) can do. That's intelligence by any reasonable standard. So no, those people (which is everyone, really) are not functioning on an animal level.
I tend to agree with you that a true artificial intelligence is probably a long ways off, but not for the reasons you give.
1. IIUC, you're saying that an AI needs to remap hardware; remapping software doesn't count. Why not? It's possible that neurons are a hardware (wetware) encoding of some kind of program (broadly understood). But why should that be the only way to improve an intelligence?
2. "just computers "matching" up failures and successes according to predetermined criteria": Either I don't understand what you're saying, or you're wrong. Computers can do a form of machine learning called clustering, in which the derived categories are not at all predetermined. There are other forms of machine learning where the goal is not a set of predetermined categories--in fact, any form of unsupervised learning. BTW, one might argue that the growing human mind is using a lot of predetermined categories; language learning by children almost certainly (in my opinion, and that of a lot of other linguists) uses some kind of predetermined criteria. It's really the only explanation for how children do it so fast, and with so little training data.
3. Transitive learning was (and to some extent still is) a fundamental part of some kinds of symbolic AI, dating back to the 1960s. I'm not familiar enough with current machine learning technology to say to what extent this is still true, but one might at least argue that that's what's going on in multi-layer neural nets. But again, maybe I don't understand what you mean by this.
4. Humor: Ok, it's possible that this could be a part of the definition of "intelligence", although I'm not sure why it's a necessary part. I do believe that there are programs that have been trained to recognize jokes, although I'm pretty sure they're not general, and it's unclear what they're reacting too. I could write a program that looks for the words "Sven" and "Olly", or "A __ walks into a bar", and it would probably recognize a lot of jokes. Of course I'd agree with you that this program has nothing to do with intelligence. The problem is that defining humor, in a general way, is probably as hard as defining intelligence; indeed, you and I might not agree on what's humorous (stop me if I've told you this...). But yes, it might be that there is no real intelligence without the ability to recognize (not necessarily laugh at) humor, in which case there are no Vulcans.
Hash.
IIRC, there was a program back in the 1980s--in the days of floppy diskettes--there was such a program. You told it what was in your refr, and it suggested a recipe. I'm told the recipe was always hash.
By that standard, coat hangers and socks can procreate. Socks are, I think, an example of sexual propagation; you start with a left and right (i.e. male and female), and nine months later you look in the drawer and behold, there's an offspring. The offspring is always a left or a right; I've never found a sock in my drawer that is ambidextrous, which proves that this is sexual reproduction, with one jean coming from one parent and the other jean from the other. Coat hangers, on the other hand, seem to reproduce asexually.
What I haven't figured out is where the sock's parents went. Also, their reproduction in my drawer is not at a level that can maintain the population; I have to replenish it from time to time with new male and female socks. Perhaps the environment in my drawer is not as favorable to the sock species as the environment in the sock factory is. Or maybe it's Climate Change.
That is doubtless part of it, but a computer playing chess is confronted throughout the game with novel situations, if by "novel" you mean chess pieces in positions the computer has never "seen" before. You could say that's not novel enough, and there's some truth to that; but the question then would be how novel, and how do you measure novelness [that's ok, I'm a linguist, I have a license to invent new words]. Novel traffic configurations on the street? Self-driving cars are pretty good with that. Novel sentences? As a linguist, I don't think computers are very good at that, but they are impressively better than they were ten or twenty years ago. Which is not to say they'll necessarily make the same progress in the next decade or two.
WindBourne's post (to which the AC you were responding to was himself responding to) said, "there is fast tidal movement..." The AC you're responding to is quite right: tides are caused by the gravitational attraction of the moon and (to a lesser extent) the sun. They are also affected by other things, such as the size of the water basin (tides in the Atlantic can be sizeable, while tides in the Great Lakes are negligible), the position of the measuring station (tides act something like standing waves, so the tidal range tends to be greatest on the margins, and least in the middle), other geological factors (tides in the Bay of Fundy can reach 50 feet or more, due to the shape and length of the Bay), and yes, to some extent by weather. But to repeat, the ultimate cause of tides is the gravitational attraction of the moon and sun.
Perhaps you should repeat eight grade. Oh, and on a lighter note, you might read Larry Niven's "Neutron Star", and pay special attention to the ending.
I was also thinking about overfishing, but not migration. I instead suspect these fish have always been that far north, but nobody knew because the fishing was easier further south. But now that the more southern fisheries have been overfished, the fishermen are going further north and finding new--to them--schools.
plastics.
Hmmph. Never heard of Bay's rule, although I have heard of (and can work with) Baye's Theorem.
As for casting out 9s, I'm sure that's really useful. If for some reason you're without your calculator (or slide rule). Indeed, as thegarbz says (in another reply), knowing what an integral or derivative *means* is far more important than remembering how to do it. I'm 50 years out of my last calculus course, and I don't remember how to do anything more than the simplest integrals. But I still know (some of the) things they're good for, i.e. what they *mean*, and I think that's what's useful.
The giving tenure part is getting smaller. I believe (but don't have statistics to back it up) that lecturerships are much more common now than they were 30 years ago.
Also, a lot of professors' work is in research, more so than teaching. (And my title is Research Scientist, which I believe is also more common in universities than it used to be.)
Not disagreeing with anyone here, but when my first wife got her RN in the late 60s, it was a two year course (or maybe a bit longer with the OJT). I don't believe you can get an RN now in 4 years. I suspect that's due to at least two things: nurses have to work more independently from MDs these days; and there's a lot more to learn about patient care now. Also, I'm sure that methods will continue to change, and being a life-long learner of those methods will be critical.
FWIW, I doubt that AI and robotics will replace nurses, or even most of a nurse's role, in the next 30 years. But I could be wrong.
cayenne8 speaks to the personal skills part of your post, and I think I agree with him about that. I'd like to ask you about the asynch communication part of your post.
I started working at a job in 1972. Well into the 1990s, I worked on large projects that required concentrating for long periods of time: editing book-length documents, writing longish computer programs, etc. I didn't have trouble getting myself started. And when I read the news, I'd spend a half hour going through a newspaper.
But now, with social media (you know, things like \.), I find it so much easier to spend time answering a single email or post (oops...)--or now a single text message. And I skim the news sites for a couple-three short articles. I get a feeling of accomplishment doing these short tasks much more quickly, and I seem to find it harder to get started (or return to) large projects, where the feeling of accomplishment doesn't come so quickly. I fear that if everyone is doing this in twenty years--as you say--there will be a lot less progress on large projects.
Of course it's also possible that I'm just slowing down with old age, and that tweeters and text messagers have no such problem going to work on projects where the big reward won't come for weeks, months or even years. Then again...
If college has gone that far downhill in the past 50 years, then I guess there's a problem. I got my BS in 1972. I got through courses like organic chemistry not by memorizing a bunch of facts, but by learning a handful and then using rule-based extrapolation to derive answers (sort of analogous to constructing proofs in geometry). A carbon triple bond is stronger than a double bond, which is stronger than a single bond. From that a bunch of properties having to do with IR spectra etc. can be inferred. Same thing for a lot of other classes, in a range of disciplines. (Not so good for biochemistry, though, where afaict God could have caused organisms to use a bazillion other methods for aerobic respiration. But the biochem course required me to know the real Krebs Cycle. I squeaked by in that course.)
I later got a PhD in (generative) linguistics, where literally everything past first semester courses required building arguments or finding flaws in arguments, not in memorization. Again, maybe things have changed since then (1984).
"In other cultures, they do not claim this or teach these things not really study them. They focus on the necessary, and frankly, are beating us badly." I'm not sure exactly what you're saying, but let me relate an anecdote which may--or may not--be relevant.
My experience is limited to a couple years a long time ago teaching at the university level in South America. And my experience was that they knew far less about critical thinking than (I would hope) an American student would. Afaict, their learning had emphasized memorization and regurgitation. This was driven home for me by two experiences: assigning a homework problem of showing why the textbook's analysis of a certain problem was wrong, and giving an open book final exam. The textbook wrong? How could it be? And an open book exam: won't everyone get 100? (No, they didn't.) In the real world, you won't get far by assuming the general consensus is correct, nor by trying to work without checking reference material. You can't keep enough in your head (at least my head is too small for that).
I'm sure things are better wrt critical thinking in Europe, and perhaps in some other parts of the world. And that's not a racist comment, it's just my lack of experience in those regions.
I have to agree about the programming language part. My first programming course taught FORTRAN and PL/1. I haven't used it since, but the concepts were foundational, and I've used them every day, with every programming language I've learned since: Pascal, IBM Assembler, LISP, C, Python, a few others on the side.
Prolog was in there too, but is enough different from FORTRAN etc. that it's almost a different concept. But even there, general notions of commenting, program-internal documentation, even useful conventions for naming predicates (~ functions) and variables, all came in useful.
I've of course learned a ton more about writing maintainable programs since 1968 (Master Foo and the Programming Prodigy, learned the hard way), but I got the foundations, and some basic understanding of how computers work, back then.
Back on the math(s): I would add probability and statistics. If there's anything I regret about my education, it's not having gotten a better background in that. I've of course done reading on it, but while I found calculus, linear algebra etc. easy, statistics (at the level needed) is hard for me. YMMV.
There ought to be an after-market in licenses and CDs for Office 2007 (or whatever the last version before the dreaded Ribbon was).
Of course there's LibreOffice...
"I don't need PowerPoint since I use Godot." I was going to ask you to enlighten me, since I had never heard of Godot for presentations. But gimf.
But if you use TeX, why not use Beamer? Do you need the ability to animate your presentations?
Actually, virtually all fonts these days _can_ work on both Windows and Linux (and MacOS). The only issue you're like to find (this is probably what you're referring to) is fonts that are proprietary to a particular operating system. Some Windows fonts are proprietary, although if you're willing to pay for them, some can be bought.
SIL is of course another good provider of high quality fonts for both Latin-based scripts (with better coverage of non-ASCII code points than most other Latin-based fonts) and especially for non-Roman scripts. (Disclaimer: I was once an SIL member.)
Yes, the Earth was moved further away as a means to control climate change.
And before anyone mentions this, Jules Verne (IIRC) actually wrote a story about moving the Earth closer to the Sun, to make up for the fact that the Sun was (in some future) outputting less light/ heat.
I'll sell you my Windows phone. Cracked screen, but otherwise good. So long as you don't want a bunch of games, etc. ... and you don't want FB.
My Windows phone (Nokia Lumia 950) doesn't have an FB app, and never did.
Did you read the article?
Pretty hard to write s.t. that runs on MacOS, Windows and Linux, unless you program it in Java or Python. I've used a few Java applications (jEdit is my favorite), and Python is my favorite programming language. But for the most part big applications aren't written in Java, afaict.
"That's warmer than the current temperature at the North Pole." Just in time for Santa Claus's workshop. Apart from the pressure...
I live south of Baltimore MD, and my daughter was attending college in Fairmont WV. The Verizon map showed (as of three or four years ago) continuous coverage from here to there, and there. There was not; there were numerous long gaps along I-70 and I-68 between Frederick MD and somewhere in eastern WV, and no coverage whatsoever that I ever discovered in Fairmont or the surrounding area for ten or so miles--not even at Fairmont State University, which is on a hill above much of the city of Fairmont. It was around that time that I switched to AT&T (via StraightTalk), and since then I've always had good reception all along that route.
So no, I do not believe Verizon's coverage maps. I'm glad someone in the FCC agrees.