Via social media, I received a frank and pithy comment on my previous post (Machine intelligence: Scary? Necessary.):
Machine Intelligence? Dream on. Machines can only really appear intelligent to humans who are not.
In pondering how to respond, I realized I was a bit intellectually lazy when I implied that there might be some “threshold of intelligence.” To the contrary, intelligence is, to my mind, a continuum. Any system (including biological systems) that exhibits any sort of variable behavior in response to variable data (including stimuli) has non-zero intelligence. An earthworm, for example, is obviously very “stupid” in comparison with many creatures – but it is capable of cognition, as a function of its evolutionary “programming”. The algorithms which govern its behaviour are sophisticated and cannot be easily deconstructed – nor (yet) duplicated by human programmers of non-biological systems (“robotic worms”, if such things existed).
I also want to avoid depicting intelligence as a scalar quantity. To try to measure the conventional IQ of a computer system – or any non-human system – is folly. (The value of IQ has been challenged even as a measure of relative human intelligence – but that’s another discussion.) When we think of an intellect – that of a worm, a person, or a cybernetic system – as a “shape” having at least two dimensions – let’s call them breadth and depth – we arrive at a somewhat more vivid and meaningful basis for comparison. IBM Watson (as the example from my previous post) exhibits an impressive breadth of intellect, given that it is designed to process text in the English language that might relate to any topic. In depth, however, it reveals its “stupidity”. For example, Watson is not designed to be original or creative, whatsoever; it is designed to play Jeopardy, to which originality would be, if anything, a disadvantage. Watson’s “knowledge” of any particular subtopic will be revealed to be woefully inconsistent and brittle, upon probing. It’s quite possible – even likely – that Watson will answer several advanced questions on a given topic, successfully – but then come up clueless on what human experts would agree is a basic question. Of course, that’s because Watson is incapable of recognizing and assimilating the core body of knowledge on a topic, distinguishing the fundamental laws from the “esoterica”. It has no deep understanding of any topic, and grasps no themes or theories that might allow it to come up with an answer by extension or analogy. We could quite aptly characterize Watson’s intellect as “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
For an example of an information system having quite the opposite “intellectual dimensions” as IBM Watson – that is, an extremely limited breadth, but significant (and, I find, impressive) depth – see Copycat, designed by the Fluid Analogies Research Group, headed by Douglas R. Hofstadter, at the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, University of Indiana, Bloomingdale. Copycat is a system designed to generate solutions to a certain kind of analogy-based problem, and to do it in a way that resembles the human process (as self-reported by human solvers). Here’s an example of Copycat being “smart”:
A man performs sexual acts depends on certain factors, such as physiology, hormonal secretions, lifestyle, secretworldchronicle.com levitra samples health issues, medications, psychological issues and marital or family problems. Herbal products have become very popular in canada viagra buy recent years. Even if this exercise only delays your eating or shortens it- It is buy generic cialis still a win! We aren’t looking for perfection, we are looking for small changes for the better. cialis generico 5mg http://secretworldchronicle.com/2018/05/02/ A team with proper equipment and vehicles will pick it from your yard. Human “says” (via coded terms): “I turn the string abc into abd. Copycat, you do the same with xyz.”
Copycat “answers”: “I turn xyz into wyz.” [Like most humans, Copycat “prefers” this answer to wxz, or any other.]
As a final example (or class of examples), let’s consider “crowdsourced” knowledge bases. Arguably, these systems are highly intelligent (by the terms laid out, herein), able to marry the capabilities of data/knowledge management software to store and index a comprehensive library of facts (breadth) with the “wisdom of the crowd”, inherent in aspects of human intelligence, intuition and social interaction – providing depth. One could convincingly argue that the overwhelming lion’s share of such a system’s intellect is due to the contribution of the crowd of humans – but then, the “one” making that argument would presumably be a human, and subject to bias. Suffice it to say that the results (outputs) of such a system – assuming the non-human elements are cleverly designed – are likely to be far “smarter” than the results of a crowd of humans thrown together in a room and asked to draw conclusions on a given topic, absent any “machine augmentation” of their collective intellect.
To sum up my reply to my critic: It doesn’t matter so much whether a given system is relatively “smart” or “stupid”, as it matters that systems can possess intelligence – and that not all systems possessing intelligence are 100% biological.
Next topic: So-called “Business Intelligence” (in capitals, no less!). Stay tuned!