Eric Baum wrote:
Richard> efforts (some people seem to think that there is something
Richard> inherently impossible about a human being able to design
Richard> something smarter than itself, but that idea is really just
Richard> science-fiction hearsay, not grounded in any real
Richard> limitations).
Well, no it is grounded in real limitations. I doubt, Richard, that
even you think you could "design" a human level intelligence by hand,
any more than you could personally design a mirage jet, the blueprints
for which filled a warehouse. At the very least you would want to use
a computer, and write code for the computer, and have the computer do
a lot of the design for you by running the code. At the end of that
process, you wouldn't necessarily "understand" much about how that
design worked. And if the very guts of the reason that design worked
are because it contains programs that were output by finding
approximate solutions to computationally intractable problems,
you'd be in real trouble.
A bit of confusion going on here, I think.
I was not talking about a human 'understanding' the design of something
smarter than a human -- that point is being debated in parallel, and is
quite different from what I said.
I was only talking about the pop-science idea that a human, because it
has a certain level of intelligence, could never in principle design
something that could then become smarter than the human. It's a (false)
generalization of the idea that you cannot pull yourself up by your own
bootstraps.
Only a small point: I don't think you would agree with the position I
was trying to oppose, there.
But meanwhile, about the parallel question of whether a human could
*understand* a human-level intelligence. The points you make above
could be applied to an "aircraft designer". Such a person could design
a new aircraft perfectly well... in a certain sense. They would not be
qualified to design, say, all the details of the inflight entertainment
system, down to every last transistor in the amplifier of the sound
system -- but then, we wouldn't say "Ha! You don't really know how to
design an aircraft!"
Richard
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