Reflections on Intelligence
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About this ebook
A lot of people are talking about "superintelligent AI" these days. But what are they talking about? Indeed, what is "intelligence" in the first place? This question is often left unanswered in discussions about the perils and promises of artificial intelligence. Magnus Vinding argues that greater clarity about the meaning and nature of "intelligence" is needed if we are to think clearly about the future of AI.
Magnus Vinding
Magnus Vinding is the author of Speciesism: Why It Is Wrong and the Implications of Rejecting It (2015), Reflections on Intelligence (2016), You Are Them (2017), Effective Altruism: How Can We Best Help Others? (2018), Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications (2020), Reasoned Politics (2022), and Essays on Suffering-Focused Ethics (2022).He is blogging at magnusvinding.com
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Reflections on Intelligence - Magnus Vinding
Recommended Reading:
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http://hplusmagazine.com/2010/11/11/top-five-reasons-singularity-misnomer/
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2010/02/is-the-city-ularity-near.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2011/06/the-betterness-explosion.html
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2014/07/30855.html
http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/
http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/parable.html
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. What Is Intelligence?
2. Goal Achieving – Its Distributed and Many-Faceted Nature
3. When Machines Improve Machines
4. Consciousness – Orthogonal or Crucial?
5. A Brief Note on Goals
6. The Unpredictability of the Future of Intelligence
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix — Chimps, Humans, and AI: A Deceptive Analogy
Bibliography
Introduction
––––––––
A lot of people are talking about superintelligent AI
these days. But what are they talking about? Indeed, what is intelligence
in the first place? I think this is a timely question, as it is generally left unanswered, even unasked, in discussions about the peril and promise of artificial intelligence, which tends to make these discussions more confusing than enlightening. More clarity and skepticism about this term intelligence
is desperately needed. Hence this book.
Contemporary debates about intelligence explosions
and singularities
tend to get confused because a simple word is being used to refer to something highly complex, something that is in fact many different things. The simple word is, of course, intelligence
. Strong claims are often made about it without definition or qualification – A sufficiently high level of intelligence could solve all our problems! Or it could destroy the world!
This sure sounds like a substantive and urgent claim. Yet how is intelligence
defined in this context. Is it the ability to solve problems
? If so, all that is being said above is that a sufficiently great ability to solve problems could solve all our problems – or destroy the world, should that be the problem of choice. This is pretty much just a tautology.
What I wish to do in this book is to look deeper into the concept of intelligence
, and to question common assumptions about the phenomenon, or rather phenomena, that we refer to with the word intelligence
. Based on such an examination, I will proceed to criticize some of the views and ideas commonly discussed in relation to the future of artificial intelligence.
1. What Is Intelligence?
––––––––
Discussions about intelligence are often rather confused. For example, writers on the subject will often acknowledge that intelligence has been defined in many different ways, but then still proceed to refer to intelligence as though it were a single, well-defined thing, and to ponder questions like "is IQ a good measure of intelligence? – a question whose answer obviously depends on which definition of
intelligence" we adopt.
This is an all too common mistake: we tend to talk about intelligence as though it were well-defined, and as though it were some kind of substance – a substance that examinations such as IQ tests may or may not be able to measure. This mistake is even found in academic discussions of so-called theories
of intelligence (e.g. theory of multiple intelligences
, triarchic theory of intelligence
, primary mental abilities
, etc.), which at first glance can seem like different, mutually disagreeing theories about the same underlying phenomenon – intelligence
– rather than what they in fact are: different ways of defining intelligence
.
There is no clear, widely agreed-upon definition of intelligence
, and our failure to realize this is the cause of much confusion. If we are to think clearly and have meaningful discussions about intelligence
, we must clarify what we mean by this term.
Origin and Common Use of the Term
The origin of the word intelligence
can be traced back to the Latin verb intelligere, which means to understand
, and the associated noun intellectus, understanding
. This is an interesting fact, since the term intelligence
, as we use it today, usually refers to something related to, yet still distinct from, understanding. Understanding is something we can often easily gain as we acquire new information, and hence something we can improve rapidly, whereas the term intelligence
tends to refer to something that is more rigid, at least in humans, and not something that we can easily increase as we gain new information. Intelligence, as we use the word most of the time, is rather talent for acquiring understanding. And yet our everyday use of the word intelligence
is a bit more specific still, since understanding
can be very broad, in that we can understand a great variety of things and phenomena in the world, from non-Euclidian geometry to the minds of other individuals, and we do not seem to describe an aptitude for understanding the perspective of others with the word intelligence
as readily as we do a talent for understanding non-Euclidean geometry. Both are, however, talents for equally valid, and immensely useful, forms of understanding, which reveals just how fuzzy our everyday conception and use of intelligence
in fact is, and further underscores the need for making clear exactly what we mean by this term. "A talent for acquiring understanding, but especially some poorly demarcated forms of understanding" is not a good definition to base a discussion