mathemajician comments on Stupid Questions Open Thread - Less Wrong

42 Post author: Costanza 29 December 2011 11:23PM

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Comment author: mathemajician 30 December 2011 03:24:46PM 2 points [-]

Machine learning and AI algorithms typically display the opposite of this, i.e. sub-linear scaling. In many cases there are hard mathematical results that show that this cannot be improved to linear, let alone super-linear.

This suggest that if a singularity were to occur, we might be faced with an intelligence implosion rather than explosion.

Comment author: faul_sname 31 December 2011 12:01:23AM 0 points [-]

If intelligence=optimization power/resources used, this might well be the case. Nonetheless, this "intelligence implosion" would still involve entities with increasing resources and thus increasing optimization power. A stupid agent with a lot of optimization power (Clippy) is still dangerous.

Comment author: mathemajician 31 December 2011 01:06:48AM 3 points [-]

I agree that it would be dangerous.

What I'm arguing is that dividing by resource consumption is an odd way to define intelligence. For example, under this definition is a mouse more intelligent than an ant? Clearly a mouse has much more optimisation power, but it also has a vastly larger brain. So once you divide out the resource difference, maybe ants are more intelligent than mice? It's not at all clear. That this could even be a possibility runs strongly counter to the everyday meaning of intelligence, as well as definitions given by psychologists (as Tim Tyler pointed out above).