BXI Builingual System started translating.
Superintelligence is Stupid!
As with so many things, the devil lies in the details. In principle, the idea of 'superintelligence' seems pretty straightforward and even reasonable. Computing has advanced rapidly, particularly since the era of PCs which began in the 1980s. Computers are able to plot trajectories at far greater speeds than humans. Thus, plotting every possible chess move, and countermove, and subsequent countermove, and so on all the way to multiple ways to achieve checkmate is in their superiority wheelhouse and that will never change. Never mind that it was humans who created the game of chess, it is still pretty impressive in that one respect, analyzing data, plotting trajectories, and so on.
Computers are able to assemble data and configure it, again, much more rapidly than any human can, which is why AI can whip up an 'artwork' or a musical composition in the time it takes a human being to dip a brush into paint. The AI has no passion for wanting to create beautiful art; it just assembles components of art, whether visual or musical, extremely rapidly, within set parameters so that a dog looks like a dog and not a turtle.
All of this is indeed impressive. It has nothing whatsoever to do with 'superintelligence', which is the anticipated moment when computers will be able to do EVERYTHING that humans do better than we can. This would presumably include them being able to create robots which can go beyond us physically in every possible way in addition to mentally/cognitively. Run a hundred times faster than Bolt, smell better than a dog, see better than an eagle, and so on and so on.
In the age of 'superintelligence', we are told, humans will have made themselves utterly redundant. Our invention will have so thoroughly surpassed us in every imaginable way ~ INCLUDING in the ability to evolve rapidly such that this year's AI will be a thousand times superior to last year's AI ~ that we can only hope they will look kindly upon us as their inventor and be nice to us.
Look at it in detail, however, and you can see that it's all bullshit! Let's do that.
Here's a nifty little 'proof' that 'superintelligence' is a myth. It may sound ridiculous, but then so is the premise that it challenges.
The fact that YOU - right where you are, sitting somewhere in the middle of your life - have problems, is proof that 'superintelligence' is a myth.
Why? Because the premise of superintelligence is that it will evolve to the point of being able to solve any problem that humans might face. No more environmental catastrophe, no more wars, no more food crises, and so on.
Now, one might argue, that's all in the future, so how could that have anything to do with my current problems?
Good question, but let's remember the premise of superintelligence: it will surpass human intelligence and capabilities in all manners and all respects, and will continue to improve itself beyond that such that eventually nothing possible in the universe will be beyond its capabilities.
So, if a.) superintelligence is achieved at some point in the near future and b.) time travel is possible, then why hasn't this future superintelligence jumped back to 2025 to announce itself? Why hasn't it solved all of OUR problems like it is presumably solving the problems of everybody in the future?
Surely a little thing like time travel is not beyond its godlike capabilities, right?
And yet, that clearly seems to be the case. If it doesn't exist NOW, then either time travel is impossible (that may well be so) or 'superintelligence' is a myth, because a superintelligent entity, at SOME point in its expanding capabilities, should be able to master time travel. Meaning it should be able to travel back to this very moment, and hopefully use its intelligence to solve our many problems, even if only for the self interested purpose of making sure the human race survives long enough to invent it.
The Kirk Delusion
If time traveling AI isn't ridiculous enough, let's now turn to the Mother of All 'superintelligent' myths: that AI will eventually advance outward to seed the entire universe with consciousness!
Indeed, some futurist/transhumanists see this as the ultimate destiny of AI.
The premise is simple, and based upon their very materialistic conception of the universe; i.e. that it is mostly dead matter, unaware it even exists, whether a planet, a star, or all the matter in between galaxies, stars and planets. Just lifeless 'stuff'.
Do I think that? No, but materialists do. So, to them, what better use for all that incalculable amount of matter than to act as raw material that AI can use to fuel itself as it recreates and 'upgrades' the universe according to its godlike whims?
This is what I call 'The Kirk Delusion'. In the old Star Trek series there were several episodes where Captain Kirk stepped in and did things that nobody else in the galaxy had ever attempted, even sometimes saving the galaxy as a result.
He stopped a war run by computers that had gone on for centuries. He defeated Nomad and The Doomsday Machine, thereby sparing untold numbers of lives throughout the galaxy.
And on and on. If not for this one Earthling, beings across the vast expanse of the galaxy would have perished.
Obviously, it is absurd to imagine that this tiny planet on the outer edge of the galaxy has so much importance. It is arrogant to assume that OUR invention, AI, can have so much impact beyond this minuscule rock.
And yet, that's what some of these dudes believe; that it is somehow mankind's destiny to give meaning, through our invention, to an otherwise meaningless universe.
What are these guys smoking, seriously? The delusions that go along with AI are off the charts.
More Than the Dog
There is an old joke that goes 'what do you need to know to teach a dog tricks?'
And the answer is 'more than the dog'.
Perhaps that is the best we can come up with, that 'superintelligence' simply means being smarter in every way than human beings, whether or not human beings can be considered all that intelligent in the first place.
If human intellect, and ONLY human intellect, is the rather low bar of 'superintelligence', then we can leave out all the nonsense about time travel and taking over the universe and all that blah blah.
Putting aside for the moment that there really isn't anything 'super' about such intelligence, we can at least consider the possibility of it being achievable. Will AI eventually outperform human intelligence in every imaginable way, including such things as creativity, imaginativeness, insight, philosophy, etc., in addition to computation, analysis, and data processing?
I'm going with a hard no, though obviously others disagree.
We might begin by examining how AI came about in the first place. Recall that I wrote that AI began to take off after PCs became widespread.
And why is that? Because the Internet is the main engine driving AI development. Yeah yeah; machine learning, neural networks, large language models blah blah blah.
The fact is that it is OUR data, which we exchange billions of times a day over numerous platforms, that is feeding AI in its growth. Just as a baby's brain only grows with proper stimuli. The brain on its own can only do so much, and the brain replica that is AI is exactly the same. It needs data to grow, and data is provided by human beings.
If PCs had never existed and IBM just kept cranking out more and more powerful supercomputers, you wouldn't get AI, at least not as it is currently configured. What is necessary is all those billions of computers and smartphones talking to each other to generate the stimuli necessary to create 'artificial' intelligence.
You have to make a huge leap in assumption to imagine that AI will eventually transcend that limitation and start growing on its own.
The Superintelligence Under Your Nose
One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 'superintelligence' mythology is that it takes as its premise that human intelligence, or specifically human cognitive intelligence, is the high water mark against which AI's intelligence is to be measured. Presumably, since we have not yet been visited by extraterrestrial inhabitants of a superior race, the brains of our Einsteins and Curies are the highest level of intelligence the universe has yet come up with. And that is the intelligence that people like Kurzweill and Bostrom use as a barometer when positing AI overtaking it.
But that is clearly NOT the case, and this is easily demonstrated.
Ask yourself, how willing would you be to surrender your digestive system; stomach, intenstines, etc., and hand a Ceasar's salad to a computer program to process into fuel for you?
Obviously, not at all. At what point in the future do you imagine AI being able to do the job better than your digestive system, such that your internal organs doing the job now are made redundant?
Probably never. So long as your life, moment to moment, depends on the various systems operating in your body; digestive/circulatory/nervous/immune, etc., you are not going to be willing to hand over ANY of that to AI, even though you ARE willing to hand over numerous cognitive tasks which are clearly less essential to your survival.
Thus, the intelligence that runs your body is FAR more intelligent than your noggin cooking up ideas. I am writing this, and I imagine I am being pretty clever while doing so. But I am humbled to the point of shame when I run that up against all the things happening in my organism - keeping me alive - that my mind doesn't have a clue about. Cellular reproduction, cellular growth, homeostasis, digestion, and so on.
Just because we don't label that 'intelligence' (we certainly should) doesn't make in unintelligent. And AI isn't even in the same borough as that, or even state.
So, transhumanists are imagining a 'superintelligent' computing system taking over the entire universe while not even training it to behave like the MOST intelligent thing we are aware of - intimately, I should add. And the main reason for that is because they don't have a clue where to begin such training models. The second reason is that their worldview is skewed. They are obsessed with human cognitive intelligence because they are so impressed with their own. This is Victor Frankenstein level hubris, and reminds us why Mary Shelley's book is STILL the most important metaphor for our age.
Computers are able to assemble data and configure it, again, much more rapidly than any human can, which is why AI can whip up an 'artwork' or a musical composition in the time it takes a human being to dip a brush into paint. The AI has no passion for wanting to create beautiful art; it just assembles components of art, whether visual or musical, extremely rapidly, within set parameters so that a dog looks like a dog and not a turtle.
All of this is indeed impressive. It has nothing whatsoever to do with 'superintelligence', which is the anticipated moment when computers will be able to do EVERYTHING that humans do better than we can. This would presumably include them being able to create robots which can go beyond us physically in every possible way in addition to mentally/cognitively. Run a hundred times faster than Bolt, smell better than a dog, see better than an eagle, and so on and so on.
In the age of 'superintelligence', we are told, humans will have made themselves utterly redundant. Our invention will have so thoroughly surpassed us in every imaginable way ~ INCLUDING in the ability to evolve rapidly such that this year's AI will be a thousand times superior to last year's AI ~ that we can only hope they will look kindly upon us as their inventor and be nice to us.
Look at it in detail, however, and you can see that it's all bullshit! Let's do that.
Here's a nifty little 'proof' that 'superintelligence' is a myth. It may sound ridiculous, but then so is the premise that it challenges.
The fact that YOU - right where you are, sitting somewhere in the middle of your life - have problems, is proof that 'superintelligence' is a myth.
Why? Because the premise of superintelligence is that it will evolve to the point of being able to solve any problem that humans might face. No more environmental catastrophe, no more wars, no more food crises, and so on.
Now, one might argue, that's all in the future, so how could that have anything to do with my current problems?
Good question, but let's remember the premise of superintelligence: it will surpass human intelligence and capabilities in all manners and all respects, and will continue to improve itself beyond that such that eventually nothing possible in the universe will be beyond its capabilities.
So, if a.) superintelligence is achieved at some point in the near future and b.) time travel is possible, then why hasn't this future superintelligence jumped back to 2025 to announce itself? Why hasn't it solved all of OUR problems like it is presumably solving the problems of everybody in the future?
Surely a little thing like time travel is not beyond its godlike capabilities, right?
And yet, that clearly seems to be the case. If it doesn't exist NOW, then either time travel is impossible (that may well be so) or 'superintelligence' is a myth, because a superintelligent entity, at SOME point in its expanding capabilities, should be able to master time travel. Meaning it should be able to travel back to this very moment, and hopefully use its intelligence to solve our many problems, even if only for the self interested purpose of making sure the human race survives long enough to invent it.
The Kirk Delusion
If time traveling AI isn't ridiculous enough, let's now turn to the Mother of All 'superintelligent' myths: that AI will eventually advance outward to seed the entire universe with consciousness!
Indeed, some futurist/transhumanists see this as the ultimate destiny of AI.
The premise is simple, and based upon their very materialistic conception of the universe; i.e. that it is mostly dead matter, unaware it even exists, whether a planet, a star, or all the matter in between galaxies, stars and planets. Just lifeless 'stuff'.
Do I think that? No, but materialists do. So, to them, what better use for all that incalculable amount of matter than to act as raw material that AI can use to fuel itself as it recreates and 'upgrades' the universe according to its godlike whims?
This is what I call 'The Kirk Delusion'. In the old Star Trek series there were several episodes where Captain Kirk stepped in and did things that nobody else in the galaxy had ever attempted, even sometimes saving the galaxy as a result.
He stopped a war run by computers that had gone on for centuries. He defeated Nomad and The Doomsday Machine, thereby sparing untold numbers of lives throughout the galaxy.
And on and on. If not for this one Earthling, beings across the vast expanse of the galaxy would have perished.
Obviously, it is absurd to imagine that this tiny planet on the outer edge of the galaxy has so much importance. It is arrogant to assume that OUR invention, AI, can have so much impact beyond this minuscule rock.
And yet, that's what some of these dudes believe; that it is somehow mankind's destiny to give meaning, through our invention, to an otherwise meaningless universe.
What are these guys smoking, seriously? The delusions that go along with AI are off the charts.
More Than the Dog
There is an old joke that goes 'what do you need to know to teach a dog tricks?'
And the answer is 'more than the dog'.
Perhaps that is the best we can come up with, that 'superintelligence' simply means being smarter in every way than human beings, whether or not human beings can be considered all that intelligent in the first place.
If human intellect, and ONLY human intellect, is the rather low bar of 'superintelligence', then we can leave out all the nonsense about time travel and taking over the universe and all that blah blah.
Putting aside for the moment that there really isn't anything 'super' about such intelligence, we can at least consider the possibility of it being achievable. Will AI eventually outperform human intelligence in every imaginable way, including such things as creativity, imaginativeness, insight, philosophy, etc., in addition to computation, analysis, and data processing?
I'm going with a hard no, though obviously others disagree.
We might begin by examining how AI came about in the first place. Recall that I wrote that AI began to take off after PCs became widespread.
And why is that? Because the Internet is the main engine driving AI development. Yeah yeah; machine learning, neural networks, large language models blah blah blah.
The fact is that it is OUR data, which we exchange billions of times a day over numerous platforms, that is feeding AI in its growth. Just as a baby's brain only grows with proper stimuli. The brain on its own can only do so much, and the brain replica that is AI is exactly the same. It needs data to grow, and data is provided by human beings.
If PCs had never existed and IBM just kept cranking out more and more powerful supercomputers, you wouldn't get AI, at least not as it is currently configured. What is necessary is all those billions of computers and smartphones talking to each other to generate the stimuli necessary to create 'artificial' intelligence.
You have to make a huge leap in assumption to imagine that AI will eventually transcend that limitation and start growing on its own.
The Superintelligence Under Your Nose
One of the most noteworthy aspects of the 'superintelligence' mythology is that it takes as its premise that human intelligence, or specifically human cognitive intelligence, is the high water mark against which AI's intelligence is to be measured. Presumably, since we have not yet been visited by extraterrestrial inhabitants of a superior race, the brains of our Einsteins and Curies are the highest level of intelligence the universe has yet come up with. And that is the intelligence that people like Kurzweill and Bostrom use as a barometer when positing AI overtaking it.
But that is clearly NOT the case, and this is easily demonstrated.
Ask yourself, how willing would you be to surrender your digestive system; stomach, intenstines, etc., and hand a Ceasar's salad to a computer program to process into fuel for you?
Obviously, not at all. At what point in the future do you imagine AI being able to do the job better than your digestive system, such that your internal organs doing the job now are made redundant?
Probably never. So long as your life, moment to moment, depends on the various systems operating in your body; digestive/circulatory/nervous/immune, etc., you are not going to be willing to hand over ANY of that to AI, even though you ARE willing to hand over numerous cognitive tasks which are clearly less essential to your survival.
Thus, the intelligence that runs your body is FAR more intelligent than your noggin cooking up ideas. I am writing this, and I imagine I am being pretty clever while doing so. But I am humbled to the point of shame when I run that up against all the things happening in my organism - keeping me alive - that my mind doesn't have a clue about. Cellular reproduction, cellular growth, homeostasis, digestion, and so on.
Just because we don't label that 'intelligence' (we certainly should) doesn't make in unintelligent. And AI isn't even in the same borough as that, or even state.
So, transhumanists are imagining a 'superintelligent' computing system taking over the entire universe while not even training it to behave like the MOST intelligent thing we are aware of - intimately, I should add. And the main reason for that is because they don't have a clue where to begin such training models. The second reason is that their worldview is skewed. They are obsessed with human cognitive intelligence because they are so impressed with their own. This is Victor Frankenstein level hubris, and reminds us why Mary Shelley's book is STILL the most important metaphor for our age.
