From: Party of Citizens (citizens@vcn.bc.ca)
Date: Sat Oct 05 2002 - 17:42:24 MDT
What if intelligence is really a matter of debits and credits rather than
a single bi-polar scale? Thus there would be an Intelligence Quotient as
well as a Stupidity Quotient and the NET is what would count. Maybe Alien
machine-intelligences are afraid that Human Stupidity will run amok over
the cosmos.
Ack, ack!
POC
On Sat, 5 Oct 2002, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> Lee Corbin wrote:
> >
> > Here is an imaginary discussion with the (by now great) mathematician
> > who has "understood" the result of his trillion year inquiry.
> >
> > Us: What do you know? What was it about?
> >
> > Him: I now know when X implies Y under a huge variety
> > of possible conditions.
>
> Apparently the human has chunked two high-level regularities in the
> process being simulated, with these regularities known as "X" and "Y".
> Suppose that the regularities are chunkable but not humanly chunkable?
> For example, suppose that X and Y both exceed the simultaneous
> representation capacity of the human brain, while nonetheless being highly
> compressible relative to the system being simulated? Suppose that an SI
> manipulated the concepts describing X and Y with easy facility, tinkering
> with them, recombining them, seeing them as a part of a whole and a whole
> made of parts, where to a human X and Y are not even conceivable as
> concepts, even though the human can (given infinite time and paper) stand
> in as a CPU in a system simulating a mind which understands those concepts?
>
> That is my reply to your discussion: you are giving a case where the human
> *does* understand high-level regularities of the result, and I am replying
> with a case where the human does not and cannot understand high-level
> regularities of the result that are readily comprehensible to an SI.
>
> > Us: Can you tell us anything about X and Y?
> >
> > Him: Of course, practically my whole brain is packed with
> > chunking information about X and Y. X is that under
> > conditions A, B, C, D, E, and quite a few more that
> > I'd have to look at my notes about, X is the case.
> > Y little more complicated. And if you ask me about
> > A, or B, etc., you will find that my understanding
> > recurses to a degree unimaginable to one of Earth's
> > finest historians or mathematicians of your era.
>
> Again, you are giving an example of a situation where the entire project,
> no matter how huge, happens to have a holistic structure consisting of
> human-sized concepts broken down into a humanly comprehensible number of
> humanly comprehensible concepts, and so on, turtles all the way down.
> Yes, this *specific* type of inordinately huge simulation is
> comprehensible to a human with infinite swap space. But this seems to me
> to characterize an infinitesimal proportion of the space of possibilities.
>
> > Us: Well, just out of curiosity, how long did it take the
> > the SIs to get the result, historically? And how do
> > you answer the charge that your trillion-year project
> > was not challenging enough? Aren't there *other*
> > things that they know but that you don't have the
> > capacity to even state, let alone *ever* know the
> > proofs of?
> >
> > Him: An SI in 2061 determined the result that X implies Y.
> > As for more difficult projects, I'm eager to begin,
> > of course, but in principle there are no projects
> > *beyond* me, and for this reason: Those things that
> > the SIs know that I cannot understand are not, in
> > essence, understandable by them either. Those are
> > things that just "work", like that old chess puzzle
> > of K+R+B vs. K+N+N, or the weather. Now, one of my
> > SI friends can tell you the weather almost instantly
> > on an Earth-like planet given some initial conditions
> > ---he basically just simulates it---and often in my
> > discussions with them, it *does* feel like they
> > "understand" things that I cannot.
> >
> > But hell, they don't *understand* the chess solution
> > or exactly how my brain tells my arm to move any
> > better than I do.
>
> And here, again, we see a very carefully selected scenario. Let's suppose
> that there are no regularities in KRB vs. KNN. I'd bet you're wrong,
> actually, and that an SI going over the solution, or, heck, an ordinary
> seed AI, would readily perceive regularities in the solution. Whether a
> human would be able to understand these regularities, if the AI explained
> them, is an interesting question; I'd bet on some, but not all.
>
> But let's suppose the solution were incompressible. Let's also suppose
> that this solution pattern is, itself, a regularity in another problem.
> Let's suppose that it's one of an ecology of, say, 1,000,000 similar
> regularities in that problem set which the SI has found convenient to
> chunk, out of an explosive combinatorial space of, say, 300! possible
> regularities. I submit to you that a human being simulating an SI
> exploring that problem set will:
>
> 1) Never independently chunk all the regularities that the SI perceives;
> 2) Never independently chunk even a single one of those regularities;
> 3) Be similarly unable to chunk the SI's *perception* of the regularity
> by examining the SI's low-level bit state, even given infinite time.
>
> Why? Because the individual elements of the SI's cognitive process are
> simply too large for a human to understand, not just as a single concept,
> but even using the full power of human abstract understanding. Stack
> overflow.
>
> >>Can humans explicitly understand arbitrary high-level
> >>regularities in complex processes? No. Some regularities
> >>will be neurally incompressible by human cognitive processes,
> >>will exceed the limits of cognitive workspace, or both.
> >
> > Here is where I hope that my dialog above addressed your point.
> > I say that so long as the ideas are chunkable, all the human
> > needs is a lot of paper, patience, time, energy, and motivation.
>
> I reply that the class of systems humanly chunkable into human-sized
> sub-regularities arranged in a holonic structure of humanly understandable
> combinatorial complexity, is a tiny subset of the set of possible systems
> with chunkable regularity, holonic structure, and compressible
> combinatorial complexity.
>
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
>
>
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