Previously in series: Efficient Cross-Domain Optimization

Once you demystify "intelligence" far enough to think of it as searching possible chains of causality, across learned domains, in order to find actions leading to a future ranked high in a preference ordering...

...then it no longer sounds quite as strange, to think of building something "smarter" than yourself.

There's a popular conception of AI as a tape-recorder-of-thought, which only plays back knowledge given to it by the programmers - I deconstructed this in Artificial Addition, giving the example of the machine that stores the expert knowledge Plus-Of(Seven, Six) = Thirteen instead of having a CPU that does binary arithmetic.

There's multiple sources supporting this misconception:

The stereotype "intelligence as book smarts", where you memorize disconnected "facts" in class and repeat them back.

The idea that "machines do only what they are told to do", which confuses the idea of a system whose abstract laws you designed, with your exerting moment-by-moment detailed control over the system's output.

And various reductionist confusions - a computer is "mere transistors" or "only remixes what's already there" (just as Shakespeare merely regurgitated what his teachers taught him: the alphabet of English letters - all his plays are merely that).

Since the workings of human intelligence are still to some extent unknown, and will seem very mysterious indeed to one who has not studied much cognitive science, it will seem impossible for the one to imagine that a machine could contain the generators of knowledge.

The knowledge-generators and behavior-generators are black boxes, or even invisible background frameworks. So tasking the imagination to visualize "Artificial Intelligence" only shows specific answers, specific beliefs, specific behaviors, impressed into a "machine" like being stamped into clay. The frozen outputs of human intelligence, divorced of their generator and not capable of change or improvement.

You can't build Deep Blue by programming a good chess move for every possible position. First and foremost, you don't know exactly which chess positions the AI will encounter. You would have to record a specific move for zillions of positions, more than you could consider in a lifetim...

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