http://boingboing.net/2015/11/16/our-generation-ships-will-sink.html

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of the new scifi novel Aurora and back in the day the Mars trilogy, on how the notion of interstellar colonization and terraforming is really fantasy and we shouldnt let it color our perceptions of the actual reality we have, and the notion of diminishing returns on technology.

He doesnt condemn the genre but tries to provide a reality check for those who take their science fiction literally.

While this post is meant as a parody / reductio, I think the idea that "there is no such thing as strength" is not entirely invalid. This has of course nothing to do with strength being culturally constructed or some such nonsense but with "strength" - as it is used colloquially- being highly multidimensional.

Thus there is no unambiguous way to say my strenght is [number] [unit]. You can of course devise a strenght test and define a strength quotient as the output of this test. And if the test is any good of course this strength quotient will corelate with different abilities and outcomes such as digging ditches or carrying stones or the probability of having back pain. But this does not mean that "your strenght" as measured by the strenght test behaves like a physical unit.

It may for example (depending on the exact nature of the test) not be meaningful to ask how a non human like an ant or a zebra or an excavator would rate on the test for example because the test may involve handling dumbbells (what neither ant nor zebra can) or involve endurance tests (what the excavator can do until the fuel tank is empty or not at all). I hope the parallel to AI is obvious. On the other hand if I do measure a dimension of strength this problem goes away. If muscle x at max tension applies a torque of y to joint z this does behave as a physical unit and can easily be applied to any system with joints, be it ant, zebra or excavator.

Furthermore the strength test is to a certain degree arbitrary. You could do a slightly different test with slightly different correlations and stil call it "strength". This is not the case with a single dimension of strength. That muscle x at max tension does apply a torque of y to joint z is an objective fact about the world which can be ascertatined with a host of different methods all of which will yield the same result (at least theoretically).

Concerning intelligence we unfortunately do not know the onedimensional subcomponents. I think this is the propper steelman for "there is no such thing as intelligence".

Formalizations can simultaneously be simple and useful. I'm reminded of things like Chapter 4 of Superintelligence and Bostrom's GCR model. These are relatively simple models, but they make very explicit things that we previously had only considered in natural language. Attention is a limited resource, and things like this allow us to focus our attention on this model's inputs, that is, what observations we should be making in the empirical case, and allow us to focus on other things to formalize in the theoretical case. Technological strategy cannot be discussed in natural language forever if we are to make substantial progress, and now we have a better idea of what to measure.