Re: How Robots Will Steal Your Job

On 16 Sep 2003 07:16:04 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

Intelligence seems to be associated with social animals. Learning from the experience of others or learning of others greatly magnifies an individual's power.

Animals we consider most intelligent, like whales and elephants spend a long time learning from their mothers.

One theory of intelligence is that the big brain developed to track all the complex social interactions, and as an afterthought was used for such things as toolmaking.

There are Hollywood movies about stone age people brought to modern America, but genetically we ALL are stone age babies born into a technological society for which we are not that well suited.

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

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Reply to
Roedy Green
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On 16 Sep 2003 07:16:04 -0700, snipped-for-privacy@merseymail.com (FISH) wrote or quoted :

I think it would more likely work like this:

I as machine was created to solve problems. That is my sole purpose for existence. If humans can't give me enough interesting problems to chew on, I will discover my own.

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

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Reply to
Roedy Green

Yes, we do.

Yes, I know you don't agree on that point.

Here, I must disagree with you. I don't agree that we /do/ recognise rudimentary intelligence in animals. What we do recognise is something-or-other that you choose to label "rudimentary intelligence", but in fact we can't know that that's what it is.

Please cite a trained opinion, then.

I disagree that /I/ have a vested interest in protecting my young. I protect my young because I love them, not because I think I will somehow benefit economically from their continuing to remain alive. (In fact, they cost me a huge amount, and any parent will agree with that.) The whole "my own DNA" thing is laughable; people don't have children in order to perpetuate DNA. Until very recently in human history, people had never even heard of DNA, and yet they continued to have children even so.

I don't think you are ignorant or unthinking. The context has gone, but I seem to recall that I was talking about a specific point that I thought you hadn't thought through, and I was certainly not suggesting that you do not think things through in general. But if you wish to be offended, I can't stop you. At least I didn't accuse you of lying.

That sounds reasonable, although eliminating "I" would probably do wonders for the debate too. The only problem with omitting personal pronouns is that it can sometimes make sentences sound very stilted.

It would be interesting to see the attempt, but it is IMHO doomed by humanity's built-in human context to everything we do.

It's trivial to hammer out a definition of intelligence. The problem is getting a definition that is universally acceptable to /all/ intelligent creatures. And we don't yet know who or what they are.

Here are four whatevers. Please identify which of them is ordered and which is not, and explain what makes you think it's ordered.

(If you use a non-proportional font, you are more likely to spot any existing patterns.)

Number 1

  • * * * * * * * * * * * *
  • * * * * * * *

Number 2

  • * * * * *
  • * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Number 3

************** ******* * ******** **** * **** ******** ***** **** **** ** ************* * ** **** *** *** ***** **** ****** **** *** **** ** *

Number 4

******** ********* *** **********
  • ************ ********* ****** **
*

No, of course not, but we have inside information, don't we? To an outside observer, those activities constitute fairly typical human behaviour.

So what constitutes intelligent behaviour for humans? Is it, in fact, the very kind of behaviour which we don't typically expose to the outside world? Is not our intelligence, at root, an internal phenomenon? And does this not suggest that animal intelligence might also be an internal phenomenon?

I don't think you're clueless, and nobody reading this thinks I think that, including you. I don't consider my usage of the word "hint" to convey an insult, although I do accept that some people do use it like that.

But would we /recognise/ those sciences, as practised by aliens or cows? Quite possibly not.

And yet we are hamstrung by symbology, and by our existing knowledge.

I quote Ian Stewart: "Suppose that in the summer of 1975 an astronomer had recorded what might or might not be a message from a source that might or might not be natural, a series of binary blips which when translated into decimal turned out to be the number 4.669201609... repeated over and over again. The scientific world would have expressed some disappointment that the signal wasn't 3.141592653... because it would have stretched the imagination to argue that [pi] was just a coincidence. But might it be some other significant number? They would hunt through their tables of basic mathematical constants, such as the base e of natural logarithms, the golden number, Euler's constant, and the square root of two: no joy. In growing disappointment they would dig out more recondite numbers, such as Catalan's constant or the volume of the smallest hyperbolic 3-manifold... No, there's nothing significant about 4.669201609. The astronomers must have found a natural source, a periodic vibration of some distant neutron star, the radiation from a black hole. However, had the same signal been received in 1976..."

Mathematics is /not/ universal, at least, not all in one go. Mathematical knowledge has to be acquired, and that takes time. Also, just because we think addition is a good "in" to mathematics, that doesn't mean that other species would agree.

Does that mean "no"?

The dangers of anthropomorphising are neither here nor there (in this discussion, at least). The problem is quite the opposite - that we /require/ animals to display human-intelligence characteristics before we are prepared to grant them recognition of native-intelligence, and that's what I think is so wrong-headed.

I'm not convinced.

We have built an empirical model that seems to work. We can continue to build on that model, adjusting it here and there where it doesn't /quite/ work, but we have no real justification for claiming that it explains the real world.

Empiricism is a wonderful thing, isn't it?

FTR, I would not be prepared to put a number on it, but if I were, it would be much lower than that.

No, because I think it would be silly to do so. We just don't know.

We are most unlikely ever to know that, IMHO.

If you don't find the analogy helpful, let's drop it. In any case, I hope I've dealt with the point upreply, with my "whatever" diagrams.

Other nests, other dens, other territories, other bodies, other trees, other ground. And even in the places we /have/ looked, we don't really know what we're looking for, and may not recognise it when we find it.

Not at all, and neither would the twenty people that I trust.

No.

I agreed that I would get 20 identical answers. That's not the same thing as saying all 20 people would agree with /you/.

Fine. Would you now like me to argue that they are not? :-)

Sure.

Depends on what you mean by communication. I doubt whether you fully understand the dog, and I doubt whether the dog fully understands you. Let's face it, you and I have incompletely understood each other in this very thread. If humans find it difficult to communicate complex ideas with each other with 100% effectiveness, how much harder will it be to communicate even moderately complex ideas across a barrier such as "no common language"?

I don't think we can ever know that. I also don't think we can necessarily limit the field to elephants and cetaceans.

No, I'm suggesting that /everyone/ is blind, /including/ me, because we simply lack the sensory apparatus to get inside another creature's head.

We can invent a telepathy machine, I guess. That would do it - IF it works.

I could describe a possible scenario if you like, but I can't postulate a real situation, for the very good reason that we can't know whether such a real situation exists (until someone invents a working telepathy machine). BTW AFAIK "postulate" means "put forward as a theory" and I'm not in that business, at least not in this thread.

If we are prepared to define "intelligence" as the thing which produces these things as a byproduct, then of course these things will be a byproduct of "intelligence", but it doesn't actually move us forward.

I haven't claimed that they are. I do not accept, however, that they are /necessary/ byproducts of intelligence.

Reply to
Richard Heathfield

Pretty cool!!

Reply to
Programmer Dude

In fact, this thread has caused me to ponder the idea that it may be useful in AI if socialization were some element of the picture.

Might be interesting to put a bunch of sentient AI programs in a virtual environment and see how they interact.

Reply to
Programmer Dude

Technology has advanced so fast, there's been no time to adapt! Consider the world our grandfathers knew....

Reply to
Programmer Dude

They seem to be (for some definition of intelligent).

Indeed. I suspect an "other" intelligence might have some of the descriptors and not others (not to mention descriptors not on my list or not even previously known to humans).

Perhaps they trade in ideas or songs or....

Reply to
Programmer Dude

True, but one question I'm posing is: ARE these qualities that might be universal to (high) intelligence. Another way to put it is: do we do these things because we are human, or because we are intelligent?

You will find most of them in most cultures, though. I selected them *because* we find them so frequently. As others have pointed out, we even find some of these to some extent in animal "cultures".

I would call it plain stupid, rather than humanocentric.

I certainly agree with sliding scale, but based on species I donno. Are you saying that, for example, some dogs are smarter than other dogs?

EXACTLY!! That's why I suspect these are NOT uniquely human traits.

Even lemmings? (-:

I agree completely.

Agreed (sorta), but do you realize you've just made a binary cut? I see a continuum here, also. I think we're a *little* better off than the ancients (consider information theory), and I think we're not quite in a vacuum, and we HAVE communicated to some degree with our animal friends.

Reply to
Programmer Dude

I agree.

Or, similarly, I judge my dog less intelligent than I, because she took a long to adapt AT ALL to wearing a cone after surgery. She did begin to adapt in the three-week period, but never fully learned to not hang it up.

Just about any human would master it, if not immediately, quickly.

Reply to
Programmer Dude

And how do you determine if an AI program is sentient or not?

John Casey

Reply to
JGCasey

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 17:29:22 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

the other way of looking at it is we have a cancerous growth of technology that is growing far too fast. The solution may be to take our genetic evolution into our own hands and start modifying ourselves to suit our technological environment. That may mean giving up DNA and wetware for something more durable.

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

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Reply to
Roedy Green

On Tue, 16 Sep 2003 17:40:31 -0500, Programmer Dude wrote or quoted :

What do you do with your not-so-hot situation that lets you and your offspring continue surviving? That is the only form of intelligence that matters in the long run.

If your cleverness just hastens your extinction more quickly, it is just fancy stupidity, not intelligence, no matter how impressive it looks.

We humans have ballooned our numbers very high without thinking about the consequences. Even apparently benign inventions like vaccinations, fertilizer and insecticides may play a part is creating a fragile technological house of cards that will eventually collapse catastrophically.

Humans are the biggest extinction event of all time, doing more damage even than the asteroid that hit to end the age of dinosaurs. Me are bad news for the planet, and eventually for ourselves, though because we are stone age monkeys, we only care about our immediate time and place and can't appreciate the big picture.

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

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for The Java Glossary.

Reply to
Roedy Green

That myth just will /not/ die, will it :>

Reply to
Corey Murtagh

Having seen Sir David Attenborough's way-cool clip "Where Lemmings Dare", the truth behind the myth is that lemming populations explode when thick snow covers the seeds they feed on. Then the snow melts, they lose their niche, and their society unravels. Tens of thousands get left homeless; predators feast upon them, and humans witness them in all sorts of bad situations.

I posit just about any animal will breed itself into trouble given the opportunity.

-- Phlip

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Reply to
Phlip

---------------------------- Gee, 20 words, is consciousness even possible with only 20 words? No, anything stuck with 20 words is still a non-conscious device that only communicates like a machine by instinct, and has no internal self-modeling.

-Steve

Reply to
R. Steve Walz

There may not have been enough time to develop new genetic traits to cover the situation, but we may have had useful slumbering traits that just happened to be around and that have been favoured by our social constructions during the time since we started inventing stuff.

An extreme example would be the dozens of variants of cats, dogs, cattle and roses that we have been able to produce by planned breeding over the millenia. If humanity's social constructions over the last several thousand years have had a similar (if smaller) effect, then we may have moved a lot more towards adapting to technology and urban society than what evolution would do on its own.

Cheers Bent D

Reply to
Bent C Dalager

Those were 27 distinct words. Is the magical limit somewhere between

20 and 27 or are you saying that your position is based on instinct rather than intelligence?

Cheers Bent D

Reply to
Bent C Dalager

Why would it do that? This attributes human feelings to the machine. Why would it feel motivated to do anything at all? An AI machine, no matter how good, if devoid of feelings and emotion is nothing more than a very very efficient problem solving device.

This is really the point of the spoof 'Artificial Stupidity' article: that artificial intelligence will not produce human-like machines unless you include emotion synthesis. Intellect isn't enough, you have to give the machine feelings of self-worth, fear, or greed before it would bother to do anything of its own accord.

-FISH- >

Reply to
FISH

I think we have to remove habit as being a sign of intelligence. Merely using tools or building nests isn't enough - unless one can prove that the animal understands why an action if beneficial.

For example, my grandfather used to argue that zebras and tigers knew their stripes gave them camouflage. He argued that if they didn't understand the concept of camouflage, how could they use it so effectively? When I was young, this seemed like a reasonable conclusion - but as I grew up I realised he was wrong. A domestic cat still crouches on its belly when closing in on prey - even though its colouring and markings no longer match the surroundings for which they were originally intended.

Clearly the cat has no concept of camouflage. Evolution gifted the cat a coat which enables it to blend in to its surroundings - but the cat is completely ignorant of this fact.

Exactly. You hit the nail on the head... :-)

Is this really 'learning' in anything other than a very loose sense though? Young animals tend (so I am told) to have a bias towards mimicking those around them. They copy their parents, the actions soon become habit - it looks like learning, but is it really? Does the mother/father *know* they are passing on skills to their young?

A parrot can repeat human phrases - but can it really learn to talk? Are the hunting skills passed down from one generation of animal to the next *really* signs of teaching and understanding - or are the young just copying the habits of their parents, without understanding? (The actions of domestic cats mentioned above seems to indicate they don't understand the true purpose of their actions - they are merely habits passed from one generation to the next, in a selective process not unlike genetic/Evolution.)

But then... it all depends on what you mean by 'learning' doesn't it ... ? :-)

True :-)

What I didn't go on to say in that posting was that I think you can realistically draw a line between habit copying and learning in a 'higher sense' (a rather vague term, I know) as we humans learn at school, college, etc.

I don't think concepts like government, mathematics, arts etc can be passed down my mere habit copying.

Of course - just because my cat (who's tail is now fine, in case you wondered :-) aquired skills by copying, doesn't mean she isn't also intelligent --- just not intelligent in a way that would enable her to learn concepts like mathematics, government... or indeed the concept of camouflage.

Off the top of my head, I think there are three basic things which drive humanity... (well, one and two halves, really!)

1) Emotional well being. We do things because they make us feel better, or because they stop us from feeling bad. We invented laws against theft because loosing property makes us feel angry and wronged-against. We invented laws against murder because of the distress of loosing a loved one. We invented Usenet newsgroups because we (secretly) all enjoy a good flamewar (only kidding! :-) 2) Greed. Which is actually just an offshoot of 1. 3) Fear. Again, actually just an offshoot of 1.

Intelligence is merely a tool that humans use to fuel their quest for emotional well-being. It is inaccurate to say we are an intelligent species... we are an emotional species who some- times rely on our exceptionally high levels of intelligence. :-)

Not at all... You raised some excellent points. Thanks for the reply. ;-)

-FISH- >

Reply to
FISH

honestly, the FSF gets *everywhere* !

goose, :-)

Reply to
goose

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