First, I'd like to make sure that you understand I'm trying to explicate a hypothesis that seems to me like it could be true or false that seems to be considered "almost certainly false" in this community. I'm arguing for wider error bars on this subject, not a reversal of position, and also suggesting that a different set of conceptual tools (more focused on the world and less focused on "generic cognitive efficacy") are relevant.
Second: yes that is somewhat closer to the point of my objection and it also includes a wonderfully specific prediction which I suspect is false.
So to me, belief in a general intelligence that could give AIs an advantage is just the antiprediction that the things that kept being true up until about IQ 100 still continue to be true after that bar.
My current leading hypothesis here this that this is false in two ways, although one of those ways might be a contingent fact about the nature of the world at the present time.
Keep in mind that the studies that show IQ to be correlated with adaptive life outcomes (like income and longevity and so on) are mostly based on the middle of the curve. It appears to just be more helpful for people to have an IQ of 110 instead of 90 and there are lots of such people to run the stats to determine this. The upper edge is harder to study for lack of data but that's what we're trying to make inferences about. I suspect that either of us could be shown to be in error here by a good solid empirical investigation in the future.
Given that limitation, my current median expectation, based primarily on summaries of a reanalysis of the Terman Study, is that above about 135 for men (and 125 for women), high IQ tends to contingently lead to social dysfunction due to loneliness and greater potential for the development of misanthropy. Basically it seems to produce difficulties "playing well with others" rather than superior performance from within an integrated social network, simply because there are so many less intelligent people functioning as an isolating buffer, incapable of understanding things that seem obvious to the high IQ person. This is a contingent problem in the sense that if dumb people were all "upgraded" to equivalent levels of functioning then a lot of the problem would go away and you might then see people with an IQ of 160 not having these problems.
(For the record, so far as I can tell I'm not one of the super-brains... I just have sympathy for them, because the people I've met who are in this range seem to have hard lives. One of the things that makes their lives hard is that most people can't tell them apart from people like me who are dancing on the edge of this zone.)
The second reason high IQ may not be very useful is much deeper and follows on issues similar to the concept of the value of information. Simply put, "IQ" can be glossed as "the speed with which useful mindware and information can be acquired and deployed", and there may be diminishing returns in mindware just as their are diminishing returns in simpler information. Quoting Grady Towers quoting Hollingworth:
A second adjustment problem faced by all gifted persons is due to their uncommon versatility. Hollingworth says:
Another problem of development with reference to occupation grows out of the versatility of these children. So far from being one-sided in ability and interest, they are typically capable of so many different kinds of success that they may have difficulty in confining themselves to a reasonable number of enterprises. Some of them are lost to usefulness through spreading their available time and energy over such a wide array of projects that nothing can be finished or done perfectly. After all, time and space are limited for the gifted as for others, and the life-span is probably not much longer for them than for others. A choice must be made among the numerous possibilities, since modern life calls for specialization [3, p. 259].
In your comment you wrote:
Just as we expect a human to be able to beat a dog at chess (even if we could get the dog to move pieces with its nose or something), and we would use the word "intelligence" to explain why, so I would expect Omega to be able to beat a human for the same reason.
Chess is a beautiful example, because it is a full information deterministic zero sum game, which means there "exists" (ie there mathematically exists) a way for both sides to play perfectly. The final state of the game that results from perfect play is just a mathematical fact about which we are currently ignorant: it will either be a win for white, a win for black, or a tie. Checkers has been weakly solved and, with perfect play, it is a tie. If its ever fully solved then a person with an internet connection, some google-fu, and trivial system admin and software usage skills would be able to tie Omega. Its not a fact about my brain that I would be able to tie Omega that way, its a fact about checkers. That's just how checkers is. Perhaps they could even use Anki and some structured practice to internalize the checkers solution so that they could just tie Omega directly.
So what if a given occupation, or more broadly "dealing with reality in general" is similar to chess in this respect? What if reality admits of something like "perfect play" and perfect play turns out to not be all that complicated? A bit of tit-for-tat, some operations research, a 3D physics simulator for manual dexterity, and so on with various skills, but a finite list of basically prosaic knowledge and mindware. It is almost certain that a teachable version of such a strategy has not been developed and delivered to kids in modern public schools, and even a pedagogically optimized version of it might not fit in our heads without some way of augmenting our brains to a greater or lesser extent.
The fact that a bright person can master a profession swiftly enough to get bored and switch to some other profession may indicate that humans were not incredibly far from this state already.
I'm not saying there's nothing to IQ/intelligence/whatever. I'm just saying that it may be the case that the really interesting thing is "what optimal play looks like" and then you only need enough mindware loading and deploying ability to learn it and apply it. If this is the case, and everyone is obsessing over "learning and deployment speed", and we're not actually talking much about what optimal strategy looks like even though we don't have it nailed down yet, then that seems to me like it would be an important thing to be aware of. Like maybe really important.
And practically speaking, the answer seems like it might not be found by studying brains or algorithms. My tendency (and I might be off track here) is to look for the answer somewhere in the shape of the world itself. Does it admit of optimal play or not? Can we put bounds on a given strategy we actually have at hand to say that this strategy is X far away from optimal?
And more generally but more personally, my biggest fear for the singularity is that "world bots" (analogous to "chess bots") won't actually be that hard to develop, and they'll win against humans because we don't execute very well and we keep dying and having to re-learn the boring basics over and over every generation, and that will be that. No glorious mind children. No flowering of art and soulfulness as humans are eventually out competed by things of vastly greater spiritual and mental depth. Just unreflective algorithms grinding out a sort of "optimal buildout strategy" in a silent and mindless universe. Forever.
That's my current default vision for the singularity and its why I'm still hanging out on this website. If we can get something humanly better than that, even if it slows down the buildout, then that would be good. So far, this website seems like the place where I'd meet people who want to do that.
If someone knows of a better place for such work please PM me. I see XiXiDu as paying attention to the larger game as well... and getting down voted for it... and I find this a little bit distressing... and so I'm writing about it here in the hopes of either learning (or teaching) something useful :-)
...Given that limitation, my current median expectation, based primarily on summaries of a reanalysis of the Terman Study, is that above about 135 for men (and 125 for women), high IQ tends to contingently lead to social dysfunction due to loneliness and greater potential for the development of misanthropy. Basically it seems to produce difficulties "playing well with others" rather than superior performance from within an integrated social network, simply because there are so many less intelligent people functioning as an isolating buffer, incapab
The failures of phlogiston and vitalism are historical hindsight. Dare I step out on a limb, and name some current theory which I deem analogously flawed?
I name artificial intelligence or thinking machines - usually defined as the study of systems whose high-level behaviors arise from "thinking" or the interaction of many low-level elements. (R. J. Sternberg quoted in a paper by Shane Legg: “Viewed narrowly, there seem to be almost as many definitions of intelligence as there were experts asked to define it.”) Taken literally, that allows for infinitely many degrees of intelligence to fit every phenomenon in our universe above the level of individual quarks, which is part of the problem. Imagine pointing to a chess computer and saying "It's not a stone!" Does that feel like an explanation? No? Then neither should saying "It's a thinking machine!"
It's the noun "intelligence" that I protest, rather than to "evoke a dynamic state sequence from a machine by computing an algorithm". There's nothing wrong with saying "X computes algorithm Y", where Y is some specific, detailed flowchart that represents an algorithm or process. "Thinking about" is another legitimate phrase that means exactly the same thing: The machine is thinking about a problem, according to an specific algorithm. The machine is thinking about how to put elements of a list in a certain order, according to the a specific algorithm called quicksort.
Now suppose I should say that a problem is explained by "thinking" or that the order of elements in a list is the result of a "thinking machine", and claim that as my explanation.
The phrase "evoke a dynamic state sequence from a machine by computing an algorithm" is acceptable, just like "thinking about" or "is caused by" are acceptable, if the phrase precedes some specification to be judged on its own merits.
However, this is not the way "intelligence" is commonly used. "Intelligence" is commonly used as an explanation in its own right.
I have lost track of how many times I have heard people say, "an artificial general intelligence would have a genuine intelligence advantage" as if that explained its advantage. This usage fits all the checklist items for a mysterious answer to a mysterious question. What do you know, after you have said that its "advantage" is "intelligence"? You can make no new predictions. You do not know anything about the behavior of real-world artificial general intelligence that you did not know before. It feels like you believe a new fact, but you don't anticipate any different outcomes. Your curiosity feels sated, but it has not been fed. The hypothesis has no moving parts - there's no detailed internal model to manipulate. Those who proffer the hypothesis of "intelligence" confess their ignorance of the internals, and take pride in it; they contrast the science of "artificial general intelligence" to other sciences merely mundane.
And even after the answer of "How? Intelligence!" is given, the practical realization is still a mystery and possesses the same sacred impenetrability it had at the start.
A fun exercise is to eliminate the explanation "intelligence" from any sentence in which it appears, and see if the sentence says anything different:
Another fun exercise is to replace "intelligence" with "magic", the explanation that people had to use before the idea of an intelligence explosion was invented:
Does not each statement convey exactly the same amount of knowledge about the phenomenon's behavior? Does not each hypothesis fit exactly the same set of outcomes?
"Intelligence" has become very popular, just as saying "magic" used to be very popular. "Intelligence" has the same deep appeal to human psychology, for the same reason. "Intelligence" is such a wonderfully easy explanation, and it feels good to say it; it gives you a sacred mystery to worship. Intelligence is popular because it is the junk food of curiosity. You can explain anything using intelligence , and so people do just that; for it feels so wonderful to explain things. Humans are still humans, even if they've taken a few science classes in college. Once they find a way to escape the shackles of settled science, they get up to the same shenanigans as their ancestors, dressed up in the literary genre of "science" but still the same species psychology.