From: hal@rain.org
Date: Wed Jan 27 1999 - 15:37:32 MST
Billy Brown, <bbrown@conemsco.com>, writes:
> Since there seems to be a fair amount of interest in the topic, I've decided
> to go ahead and post what I've got so far (in sections, of course). The
> final version of all of this will (hopefully) end up as a paper-length
> treatment of the topic, but it has a ways to go before its ready for that.
This looks like a great start.
> Now, intelligence in this sense is not a unitary entity. It is perfectly
> possible to be good at solving one class of problems, and do a poor job of
> solving others. There is a very large (possibly infinite) number of
> different problem domains in which an intelligent entity might have some
> ability. Some of these domains are related to each other, such that a high
> level of ability in one domain can be used to solve problems in the related
> domains. Other problem domains are independent of each other, and require
> completely different problem-solving approaches.
The nature of intelligence is somewhat controversial, tied in to the
dispute over whether intelligence is heritable, and whether different
races have differences in intelligence. As you say, there are a
number of different skills which can be identified as part of overall
"intelligence". One disputed point is whether there is correlation
among these abilities. Do people who are better at memorizing lists,
say, also tend to have better logical deduction skills? Are better
readers also better at math?
Apparently the statistical data is ambiguous enough that controversy
remains, although it is possible that the high political stakes are
enough to explain it. The hypothetical correlation factor is called "g",
the general intelligence. My impression is that most studies show that
there is such a factor, that broadly speaking people who are better at
some mental skills tend to be better at others, but there is definitely
considerable variation in abilities.
> The answer to this apparent contradiction is also the reason why so many
> people think of intelligence as a single ability. Picture a graph with
> different cognitive abilities along the X-axis, and increasing ability along
> the Y-axis, so that the graph depicts varying ability levels in different
> problem domains. What we commonly call 'intelligence' is the area under
> this curve, with various distortions based on our own ideas about which
> abilities are important. Different humans may have different levels of
> ability in each problem domain, but we expect the total area under the curve
> to fall within a given range.
This should be a bar (column) graph; I think the various cognitive skills
would be discrete rather than continuous. (Although this may be in part
an artifact of the factor analysis technique, which inherently identifies
discrete basis vectors.)
The difficult issue as you try to generalize this to super-intelligence
is how to scale the Y axis. With humans, we can test people and come
up with a range of scores which we can normalize with a desired mean and
standard deviation. However the nature of tests is such that there may be
no unambiguous way to extrapolate them beyond the range of abilities seen.
As a simple example, you can't do better than 100% on a test. A test
may not be able to produce meaningful data outside of a given range.
Even with open-ended tests, like how quickly something can be done, or
how many numbers you can remember, it is not clear how to measure an
ability which is beyond the human level, in quantitative terms. How
much better do you have to do on a test to have an IQ of 400 rather than
350? What would such values mean?
An interesting point this suggests is that a person, today, who is allowed
to "cheat" on an IQ test by having access to computers and other helpful
devices, could probably score very highly on some of the sub-tests.
He could "remember" sequences of virtually any length, for example.
(All he really needs is pencil and paper for that.) He could come
up with synonyms, and might be able to handle geometric problems more
easily as well. The standard formulas assemble the sub-tests into an
overall score, and his massively increased ability in some areas would
increase his apparent IQ, possibly significantly.
This leads to a couple of conclusions. First, such an "augmented"
person is effectivelly more intelligent than an ordinary human. This is
unsurprising; it is one reason our culture has advanced from caveman days.
But second, it shows that the tests don't always produce meaningful
results when taken outside their intended range. A test of memory is more
relevant when measuring brain capacity than paper capacity. Someone who
can memorize hundreds of digits on hearing them has an amazing mental
ability, and this would show up in his IQ score; but someone who can write
down hundreds of digits and read them back is just an ordinary person,
and he doesn't deserve to have his IQ score boosted by a formula created
with the intention of testing a purely mental ability.
> We can therefore say that an entity has human-equivalent intelligence if it
> meets the same criterion: its total ability in the relevant problem domains
> must fall within the same range as that of humans. A transhuman entity
> would be one whose total ability falls well beyond the human range, and an
> SI would be an entity with an astronomically large total ability.
What is an SI? A Super-Intelligence?
> <to be continued>
Looking forward to seeing more...
Hal
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