Re: Meatbag pride hurt - meatbag spit dummy
*"...There are always a lot of sniffy 'Yes, but it's not *real* intelligence' posts whenever AI comes up on El Reg..."*
I don't think it's begrudgery. We [the nay-sayers] are just taking a broader view of what constitutes "intelligence".
Does anyone remember the Guinness Book of Records and Roy Castle's accompanying Record breakers TV programme? That was full of people who spent ages training to hold the World Record for 'balancing pencils on their ears', 'saying the word "eek" the most times in a day', 'pointing at magnets for the longest time', etc, etc. Did that make those people Super-Human in any way?
Are the people who win Mastermind super-intelligent beings? Again, I don't think so. They may have a greater than average 'general knowledge' [required for the General Knowledge round], but most of their winning scores come from painstakingly remembering trivia about [often] very narrow subject areas.
Likewise it's [relatively!] easy to programme a computer to perform one set task very well. Is that a sign of "intelligence" [artificial] or otherwise? I don't think so. In fact, I'd suggest one of the signs of true "intelligence" would be for the computer to decide it didn't want to play Go any more, as it was too easy and challenged its opponent to a game of <something else> instead or, as someone else has said, decided Go was boring and started inventing a new game to play with the pieces.
I'll hail our AI Overlords when one of them decides to do something completely different to what it was programmed for, or ignores the rules to produce a good result by following a procedure it was trained to 'think' wouldn't work.
In both humans and computers, breaking your programming, going your own way and [dare I say] "thinking different" is the sign of Intelligence –and the thing that has given us most of the great artistic and scientific breakthroughs. Doing something the previous guy did, but a wee bit faster and a wee bit more efficiently ain't quite the same thing.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
