[extropy-chat] Extreme Intelligence

[Russell Wallace]

On 8/3/06, Lee Corbin <lcorbin at tsoft.com> wrote:
>
> Could an intelligence exist using our basic human architecture
> that could rapidly solve problems far harder than anyone can
> solve today?


What do you mean by "basic human architecture"? Hardware or software?

Here is what I have in mind: suppose first that there is a
> canonical way to extend the IQ scale.


But the IQ scale itself isn't canonical. Even among humans, who all have
basically the same hardware and software architecture, there isn't a single
measure - IQ is, for example, a notoriously bad predictor of things like
wisdom and social skills.

Then would it be possible
> for a set of atoms to exist, human in form, such that using our
> same sense organs and with a brain less than twice as large as
> ours it would have an IQ high enough to in one week flat
> accomplish any of the following?
>
>   * figure out how a fusion energy reactor could be designed,
>     and write up specifications sufficiently detailed so that
>     the rest of us could build the thing
>
>   * provide a specific outline of how an AGI could be coded-
>     up following the outline/design by a good software team
>     in six months
>
>   * be able to understand at about normal reading speed any
>     book ever written, much as you can easily understand and
>     absorb everything being conveyed by a Dick-and-Jane book


No. The above tasks would require _knowledge_ - whether a particular CAD
design would make a viable fusion reactor, for example, is a fact about the
real world, not about symbols shuffled inside the mind. And to ascertain
that fact will require more than a week of work, irrespective of how fast
the mind proposing the design thinks.

The fantasy roleplaying game 'Dungeons and Dragons' measures the physical
attractiveness of characters in the game on a numeric scale, where 10 is
average and 18 is the maximum possible for any human.

Inevitably given the game's subject matter, this was then extended with
supplemental rules for fantastic beings, for example the goddess Venus would
have a score of 20-something. Of course, once you have a number, the obvious
thing to postulate is continual increases in that number. If I recall
correctly, somewhere in the many volumes of D&D supplemental rules is one
that states that an entity with attractiveness score of 30 or higher, when
perceived by a human of the appropriate sexual orientation, can cause the
hapless human to instantly drop dead of a heart attack.

In this case we can all immediately see how unrealistic it is. We all know
of course that while it may sometimes be convenient to assign a numerical
rating to attractiveness, that's a fiction; attractiveness isn't actually a
mathematical function.

The same is true of intelligence; it simply isn't a mathematical function of
an information processing system. There just isn't any quantity of which an
increase will enable a system to deliver answers to arbitrary problems. (You
can use one of the measures based on Kolmogorov complexity that have been
proposed, but if you do you'll find it doesn't correlate well with
performance at real world tasks.)

There ain't no such thing as a free lunch... or even, alas, a budget-price
one.
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