On 24-08-2022 19:41, John Clark wrote:
On Wed, Aug 24, 2022 at 1:28 PM smitra <[email protected]> wrote:
All intelligent life in the universe likely ends in this way. The
takeover by machines with insect-level intelligence or less, then
explains why the galaxy hasn't already been colonized (the so-called
Fermi Paradox)."
If human beings go extinct because they are outsmarted by something
"_with insect-level intelligence or less_" then they deserve to go
extinct; but I haven't found many insects that can play Chess and GO
at a superhuman level, or make original paintings that are far far
better than anything I can do if I were just told to paint "infinite
joy". This is what a computer thinks it looks like:
We're currently struggling getting climate change under control by
fixing the way we use energy. What's the intelligence in the system
responsible for getting fossil fuels out of the ground to generate power
for our economy? It's far simpler than the metabolic processes in a
cell.
It's true that we can do amazing things with AI. Of course, an insect
cannot play chess, but we need to consider here that we're training an
AI system for some specific task like playing chess, while an insect has
to do many different tasks that have to do with staying alive. It has to
find food, stay away from predators etc. etc.
To compare an AI to an insect you must see how well they perform when
their entire machinery is devoted to the same task. Since we can't hack
an insect's brain to optimize it for playing chess, we then need to let
an AI simulate a virtual insect to see how well it performs compared to
a real insect. There then isn't a big difference in performance anymore.
We know that real brains function differently from AI systems, AI
systems use a lot of brute force that real brains are able to avoid:
https://www.technologyreview.com/2018/02/19/145532/why-even-a-moths-brain-is-smarter-than-an-ai/
But this is actually good news, as it means that a lot of progress can
still be made.
There is no contradiction with an AI being able to do many things better
than we can. Your brain can also do many things that you can't do well
consciously. For example, controlling the muscles when you walk is done
unconsciously. If you had to consciously control all the muscles needed
for walking including keeping balance, you would be unable to walk.
Walking would seem to be a task that is way beyond human control.
Saibal
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