Steven Pinker and Scott Aaronson have a lovely debate about AI, hosted on Scott Aaronson’s  blog, which turns out to be centrally about how “simpl

Is Human Intelligence Simple? Part 3: Disambiguating Types of Simplicity

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2022-07-06 19:30:08

Steven Pinker and Scott Aaronson have a lovely debate about AI, hosted on Scott Aaronson’s blog, which turns out to be centrally about how “simple” intelligence is.

I think the concept of “general intelligence” is meaningless.  (I’m not referring to the psychometric variable g, also called “general intelligence,” namely the principal component of correlated variation across IQ subtests.  This is  a variable that aggregates many contributors to the brain’s efficiency such as cortical thickness and neural transmission speed, but it is not a mechanism (just as “horsepower” is a meaningful variable, but it doesn’t explain how cars move.)  I find most characterizations of AGI to be either circular (such as “smarter than humans in every way,” begging the question of what “smarter” means) or mystical—a kind of omniscient, omnipotent, and clairvoyant power to solve any problem.  No logician has ever outlined a normative model of what general intelligence would consist of, and even Turing swapped it out for the problem of fooling an observer, which spawned 70 years of unhelpful reminders of how easy it is to fool an observer.

If we do try to define “intelligence” in terms of mechanism rather than magic, it seems to me it would be something like “ the ability to use information to attain a goal in an environment.”  (“Use information” is shorthand for performing computations that embody laws that govern the world, namely logic, cause and effect, and statistical regularities.  “Attain a goal” is shorthand for optimizing the attainment of multiple goals, since different goals trade off.)  Specifying the goal is critical to any definition of intelligence: a given strategy in basketball will be intelligent if you’re trying to win a game and stupid if you’re trying to throw it.  So is the environment: a given strategy can be smart under NBA rules and stupid under college rules.

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