Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

Developing philosophy was an appropriate action for scores of human beings. Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Descartes, and Daniel Dennett enjoyed their careers as philosophers. Perhaps I missed the meaning of your sentence.

But in that case we've still not gotten anywhere in understanding what intelligence is. You're effectively saying that whatever one did at any given time was probably an appropriate thing to be doing at that time?

Unless you are saying that the degree to which one is able to enjoy oneself is a measure of how intelligent one is?

Cheers Bent D

I agree that's an *attribute* of intelligence. I don't think it (alone) *defines* it.

I was struck, just this morning, reading an article about an archeological dig, how all human civilizations--ancient and modern--contain a specific kind of art: representations of both human and animal forms. Also representations of objects both real and imagined in the environment.

I believe that urge to re-represent perceptions is likely one of the "species-transcendent" properties of intelligence. Others might be:

• the drive to modify the environment to insure security

• the drive to communicate

• the drive to keep and manage information.

• the drive to explore

Thanks! And she'd love it!!

Intelligence is the capacity to choose an action in each situation which produces the most satisficing [Herbert Simon] or best consequence. This definition of intelli- gence is consequentialist (utilitarian). Of course, this can lead to the "frame problem", since we cannot easily pre- dict the consequences of every action in every situation. But intelligence does a better job of producing good- enough consequences than ignorance or stupidity. But perhaps this definition is too pragmatic for you, and you have or are looking for a more theoretical or ab- stract definition.

Certainly, choices and behavior which produce one's unhappiness are not very intelligent choices or behav- ior. And my take on happiness is the "greatest happi- ness principle". That is, other creatures' happiness is part of my calculation.

George

Not necessarily!

Optimum or Maximum Expected Utility (MEUs) algorithms are fine in artificial mechanisms,

but in biological organisms, the good-enough (as mentioend below) usually is the case.

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 20:09:11 GMT, "OmegaZero2003" wrote or quoted :

In the Darwinian selection game, what constitutes the "good enough" bar slowly raises.

However, most animals are almost unchanged since Neanderthal days. They have reached a plateau of evolution into their niches. Gazelles are about as fast as they can get. As an animal, you are weeded out by not meeting your species' passing grade.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

On Wed, 31 Dec 2003 13:23:41 -0600, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

I think an intelligent species capable of not going extinct within a million years would not have this attribute as strongly as humans. They would have an ethic that tried to disturb the environment as little as possible, even as they created pockets of optimum environment for themselves.

We humans are very casual about destroying the natural systems that sustain us. I would think an intelligent species watching us would be baffled why soil erosion is not a major issue in politics.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See

Rmember that it is a mechanism against (the unfit) - not for (the fit)!

So what is left over is fit for today, but may not be for tomorrow.

And long-term, the march may not be to greener pastures.

Until the niche changes. Evolution is ongoing everywhere.

Yup!

wrote:

Yes, that's what I said: "satisficing consequences" are good- enough consequences.

Successful parasites do not proliferate to numbers which overwhelm and destroy their host. We do not have this situation-action rule. In situations of limited resources successful species conserve their resources.

George

You would have to take into account what the decision-maker knew at the time and consider what the optimal solution would have been based on that information.

Anyway, if you want to use this definition to measure intelligence, you are left with the problem of determining what the "best" consequence actually is. This is certain to be extremely individual. Who gets to be the judge?

I'd like something that is practical in the sense that you could use it to detect or even measure intelligence.

Cheers Bent D

Are you familiar with the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, widely used by psychologists to measure intelligence? It poses situations to the subjects for which there is one correct (appropriate) action. There is a pretty good decription at

http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:XD6GjarQmIAJ:web.lemoyne.edu/~hevern/psy448/448documents/wais_iii.html+wais+intelligence&hl=en&start=5&ie=UTF-8 One of the subtests on the WAIS is digit span. (Short-term Memory is a component of intelligence.) The tester reads a sequence of digits to the subject and the subject must re- peat them. Longer and longer sequences are read to the subject until the subject's STM is exceeded. Intelligence is multifaceted, not a single capacity. There are many other subtests in the WAIS. In each case a situation is defined for the subject and the subject must execute the right action. Half the tests are not verbal.

George

It's fine to talk to telephones, they have "intelligent" agency (though not necessarily conscious in the case of speech recognition menus lately) on the other end, but talking back to a "Chatty Cathy" is stupid.

Pro-Lifers are similarly idiotic in being convinced that anything that LOOKS like a baby is the same as a baby, even when it is not. They might as well try to save little robots based on PICs.

This is a very common failure-mode for a species that has deeply layered pre-conscious reflexes to regard a specific arrangement of eyes, projections and orifices endearing. Lower animals are similarly endowed with the same reflexes, but that's ALL they have, they can't question their response with a higher order oversight of these lower automatic processes such as our awareness. We can, or should. The reason we take lower animals as pets is because we aren't too bright quite yet. It's actually as silly as a dog-bitch nursing a piglet.

-Steve

what can they expect? But of course we can argue with the Belgians about that, but we can't with lower species. And they ARE "lower"! They are NOT our "equals".

-Steve

------------------------------- Well, we may NOT actually be conscious, we may only entertain the notion that we are, and poorly. There might be quite a lot of higher levels of awareness between where we are and actual consciousness, for which that state may be in sight at moments, but not truly possessed by us.

------------------------------- It is hard to see awareness as being other than total or absent. This is one of those things that is simply true. If we are not truly fully conscious yet, we can at least see it, sometimes.

--------------------------- You see, you're doing it too. But animals don't, and we know they don't, for in waking from sleep we pass through their level of existence, in which we are unconscious and reflexive, but we emerge from it, and they never visit ours.

---------------------------- We don't eat infants. Now before they become aware, at between 2-4 months, according to congitive researchers, we COULD eat them, but as I have said elsewhere, primitive attachment reflexes overwhelm reason by the least aware among us, Pro-Lifers, etc., and they go nuts.

-Steve

------------------------ We can't see up or down from here. There's no continuum, it's strictly quantized.

------------------------- No, that's a faculty of animals, even unconsciouly, as is a computer that is properly programmed to protect its assigned tasks.

-------------------------- Saying what they are doesn't disparage them, and they wouldn't care or understand those ideas.

-------------------- Nope, rank superstition, like being afraid of kewpie dolls.

-Steve

computer program manifests, it isn't awareness. The Turing Test is often mis-described as a test for self-awareness, and it is not, it is merely that humans recognize intelligence and the lack of it, so they can judge it when they interact with it. Turing simply said an agency you found similar to human response must possess some degree of intelligence, not self-awareness.

-Steve

--------------------------------- Now try to figure out why Neanderthal didn't make art or improve their weapons over a million and ahalf years. My surmise is that they WEREN'T TRULY SELF-AWARE!!! And if THEY were not, then NO animals are either!

-Steve

On Fri, 02 Jan 2004 07:06:11 GMT, "R. Steve Walz" wrote or quoted :

One thing I know is that something even a tiny bit dumber than you are seems very dumb and something only a tiny bit smarter seems very smart.

I noticed this developing a program to design transmission lines.

We thus tend to overvalue our own intelligence. We ignore all the hard problems that animals can solve we cannot using our computers.

-- Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green. Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. See