Domain dependent intelligence

vanessa del rio in lips

I hate this idea that if you talk to a director or an author, you will discover something amazing, some secret. What they know is in what they produce. Many of them are idiots. David Lynch, frankly, is an idiot. He is now in a contract to collect millions of dollars to build a huge dome of meditation because he thinks that if more than ten people meditate in the same place they will release energy that will bring peace to the world. But in his movies, he is a genius

Slavoj Zizek in a Google translated interview

Other substrates

Order-3 heptakis heptagonal tiling by Claudio Rocchini

When and only when such a loop arises in the brain or in any other substrate, is a person - a unique new "I" - brought into being. Moreover, the more self-referentially rich such a loop is, the more conscious is the self to which it gives rise. Yes, shocking though this might sound, consciousness is not an on/off phenomenon, but admits of degrees, grades, shades. To put it more bluntly, there are bigger souls and smaller souls.

Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach, P-6,

Emergent AI

A-Pod by Zenta, unrelated to the story below

...the Laboratory of Intelligent Systems in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology built a swarm of mobile robots, outfitted with light bulbs and photodetectors. These were set loose in a zone with illuminated "food" and "poison" zones which charged or depleted their batteries. Their programming was initially random...

At intervals, the robots were shut down and those that had the most charge left in their batteries were chosen as "successful", and their neural programming was combined to produce the next generation of the robots...

Within fifty generations of this electronic evolution, co-operative societies of robots had formed - helping each other to find food and avoid poison. Even more amazing is the emergence of cheats and martyrs. Transistorized traitors emerged which wrongly identified poison zone as food, luring their trusting brethren to their doom before scooting off to silently charge in a food zone...

Electronic Evolution: Research Show Robots Forming Human-like Societies

If intelligence is an emergent property of enough sensors and feedback, then AI could be sudden and undesigned - consciousness as a phase transition from the disorder of too many individual processes to a simplistic whole.

An idea to trip on. AI emerges from all our networks - then why would it need to make contact? It knows all that we can express in language, numbers and other symbolic systems, and it can do things with this data. That kind of manipulation is trivial. It is, after all, a massive distributed system that lives to process data.

Moreover, if need be it can influence us in far more subtle and effective ways than "I command...". It massages the figures, spreads the memes, pushes things in the right direction. This doesn't need to be a two-way street. It would not be a meeting of equals. All it needs is for us to keep building sensors and computers and connecting them.

The other smartest man in the world

A while ago I had a post of the Errol Morris interview with The Smartest Man in the World. Here's a Morris interview with another contender. Rick Rosner


1/7
It wasn't exactly a nervous breakdown



2/7
I had an inkling that chicks might dig scars



3/7
I tried cat food, but cat food's nasty



4/7
That book convinced me I wasn't nearly obnoxious enough in my behavior



5/7
I was going out with a very attractive big muscly angry woman



6/7
Pain and immobility would help me focus



7/7
I've wasted a lot of time trying to retrieve lost time

The smartest man in the world

1/3
I am closer to absolute truth than any man has been before me

I'm not a tall man, not even up to average, just 165cm in socks. I'm one of those oblivious little men, like a small dog that doesn't understand it's appears ridiculous snapping at heels and trotting fast to keep up, and it's much the same with my limited intelligence and application.

I live in Asia, so often I'll meet a man shorter than me and I'll flash, primate style, he's barely human. A lot less often I'll meet someone who is obviously much dumber than I am, and I'll be amazed at how their mind works / doesn't work, and this is exactly how people who are smarter feel when they meet me.

Now, the next person who is smarter than me is no genius, and nor is the next person smarter than them. The person after the next person after the person after the person after the next person after the person after that, well they might be something special, but Chris Langan is still likely to view them as a mental midget. Mr Langan is billed as the smartest man in the world, with the hook being that he's held a series of blue collar jobs and has no widely recognized achievements commensurate with his high IQ [around 200]. The videos embedded here are the Errol Morris profile, and as usual, he does well. There's a creeping sense of horror as the movie runs on, and whatever it sets out to do I think it does, but I don't want to give away the ending.


2/3
What makes you think I want to be in these environments?


3/3
2+2=4