Yes, my dumb position is, in essence, to respond by asking WTF are you even talking about? How does intelligence have levels, in your opinion, and how is "super-intelligence" meaningful outside of superhero comics? How about the parsimonious position that there's one form of intelligence with one level, pending an explanation of what it is and how it could be dialled up? Why assume it even has a dial? Are you just being overawed by IQ tests, which are notorious for measuring only ability to pass IQ tests?
> Are you just being overawed by IQ tests, which are notorious for measuring only ability to pass IQ tests?
People like to say things like this, but nothing could be further than the truth. There is a vast literature showing that IQ predicts things like job performance, school performance, income and wealth [1]. IQ is highly persistent across time for fixed individuals. Yes, "intelligence" is not a precisely defined concept, but that doesn't mean that it isn't real. A lot of useful concepts have some vagueness about, even "height" to take the example parodied in the OP.
And "super intelligence" is admittedly even vaguer, it just means sufficiently smarter than humans. If you do have a problem with that presentation just think of specific capabilities a "super intelligence" would be expected to have. For instance, the ability to attain super-human performance in a game (e.g., chess or go) that it had never seen before. The ability to produce fully functional highly complex software from a natural language spec in instants. The ability to outperform any human at any white-collar job without being specifically trained for it.
Are you confident that a machine with all those capabilities are impossible?
> and then it would be a person, and an anticlimax.
It might be a person (but: can you prove those things are sufficient for personhood?), but even then it sure isn't a human person.
And what do you mean by an anticlimax?
To circumvent any question of what it takes to make an AI work, let's posit a brain upload. Just one person, so it's a memetic monoculture — no matter how many instances you make, they'll all have the same skills and same flaws.
Transistors are faster than synapses by about the same ratio to which a marathon runner is faster than continental drift, so even if the only difference is speed, not quality of thought, that's such a huge chasm of difference that I can't see how it would be an anti climax even if the original person is extraordinarily lazy.
> WTF are you even talking about? How does intelligence have levels, in your opinion,
Having previously met humans, I have noticed using my intelligence that the intelligence of other humans differs, and exists on a set of spectra.
It seems reasonable to me that the range from the least intelligent human to the most intelligent human does not completely cover the range of possible intelligence, just as the range of body temperatures from the coldest (living) human to the warmest (living) human does not define an absolute range for temperature.
I'm very confused as to what you find difficult with this concept. Do you believe all humans are equally intelligent, or do you believe that humans encompass the entire range of possibility for intelligence?
You could imagine we all have different bags of tricks. How do you measure intelligence? I did an engineering degree, so I have a bag of math tricks. But, my bag of writing tricks is not all that good. Did learning these tricks make me intelligent? No, but if we were designing a circuit together I could probably trick you into thinking I was smart.
Think of athleticism. We might have a general understanding that someone could be more or less athletic. But, we have all these different sports. Even sports that are extremely similar in the grand scheme of things—take soccer, football, and rugby, so close compared to fencing or baseball! But the players are all completely different, we might have some intuition that they are all athletic, but if we try to define it in any rigorous way we’ll find that we’re just picking specific skill that they are either trained on or not, and the players will score artificially high or low depending on their field. Then if we try and create some machine super-athlete, say, a tractor, we’ll find it is extremely good at American football (try to tackle a tractor) and not so great everybody else’s football.
What you call a bag of trick are learned skills. And yes, learning many does often cause people to "look smart" — this is why, when I was a kid, smart meant things like "having a big vocabulary" or "can speak many languages, specifically Latin" or "plays chess well" or "good at maths". The AI we have already demonstrate all these things, and indeed look smart.
What we can do that our AI cannot (yet) do, is learn quickly from relatively few examples.
That's my current working model for the scale of intelligence: number of examples required to be able to generalise.
It seems hard to get a baseline, though. We experience the universe continuously, and so we see examples constantly with various levels of applicability. Mostly we manage to leverage similar experiences (we roll a ball and have some expectation based on decades of rolling balls, how a ball ought to roll). Lots of things in the physical world fit these sort of analogies pretty well.
I actually think a good source of really novel experiences is videogames, because they have (often poorly programmed) mechanics that aren’t constrained by the real world. And discussion around that stuff is full of errors—hold down and b to catch more Pokemon!—I don’t think we generalize in truly novel situations very well at all.
Because AI’s don’t have thousands of hours of marble rolling and rock skipping, how can we evaluate their ability to study fields and waves?
With humans, we approximate this with school grades. School grades correlate, imperfectly but they do correlate, with IQ test scores — that's actually where IQ tests came from.
IQ tests (and school grades) are imperfect, but again they still correlate somewhat with general success in life.
Unfortunately, school grades aren't quite right as a measure for AI intelligence despite being interesting measures for AI capabilities, as AI are effectively studying much longer than any human when you adjust for raw processing speed — a human simply cannot read English Wikipedia in their lifetime, it's too long, but that's just a small part of the training set for a good LLM.
> Because AI’s don’t have thousands of hours of marble rolling and rock skipping,
They can if you put it on their curriculum.
> how can we evaluate their ability to study fields and waves?
Same way as a human with the same subjective experience.
Although, if we suppose intelligence can’t even be defined, then I don’t see how the question is even meaningful in the first place.
We could I guess look at cognitive type tasks one by one, pick ones for which there is some sort of objective grading that can be done, and then ask if there’s any proof that a machine couldn’t do it better. But my gut says that machines should have a huge advantage in tasks where there’s an objective score.
Anyway the satire falls a bit flat if we don’t suppose intelligence is a thing like size that can be easily defined.
> Although, if we suppose intelligence can’t even be defined, then I don’t see how the question is even meaningful in the first place.
No one is really saying that it can't be defined, just that it hasn't been defined yet. Until this latest round of LLMs basically flushed the Turing test down the drain, no one but ivory tower philosophers had cared about a rigorous definition of intelligence and without something akin to LLMs to experimentally ground their theories in language (like Wittgenstein's work), several thousand years of philosophy on the topic is pretty much useless to us now.
It seems pretty obvious to me that any useful definition of intelligence (if we even need one to make progress) is going to have levels. We're not all on equal footing at every task, and we're not even on equal footing in our abilities to _learn_ a particular task. It may be a parsimonious position but it seems totally at odds with reality?
