h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I still hold on to the belief that at least the first few generations WILL ruly be artificial intelligence... when they start creating their own offspring, and show signs of outgrowing us, then maybe we should consider dropping the "artificial" from the term.

However, I do see the point... it's hard to draw the line.

Probably they *will* be AI, but I don't know for how long. Plus, if the AIs come from already existing life, ie animals that are given more brain mass or powers of thought, then I think that they deserve to be, shall we say, "real" intelligence, or RI for short. And can we really be so full of ourselves to call humans by the term RI?

The title of the story was actually "Reason."

According to an article I read in the Scientific American, complexity maps to the area of the cerebral cortex (the surface layer of the brain), not the brain's total mass. Or at least _some_ important aspect of intelligence was related to the area of the cortex.

Hi sweety!

Hmmm, that's an interesting thought too... throws us all a bit off our feet, tho.

In that case we may hope that the brain is actually a mass of "strings" which each provide their own surface, rather than a compact mass, which only has an outside surface to offer

Or am I seeing the wrong end again? Unfortunately, I'm not quite an expert on brains.

I just found out that somebody else already posted a better explanation of the whole cortex thing in this thread. But I don't think the "string" idea holds up, although the area of the cortex does depend on the number of crinkles (human brains are exceedingly crinkly).

Ah, ok....

about the crinkliness: that's about the extent of my knowledge as far as the physical brain is concerned. Bloody little to work with, huh?

Well, at least we have been on our own long enough, so nobody can call us "AI" anymore. But REAL Intelligent? I wouldn't DARE apply that term to myself, even if I had an IQ of 175 (which I don't).

And what is an IQ worth after all? Having a high IQ (I consider the 149 that I measured 4 years ago to be quite high) doesn't mean that I can handle all situations in my daily life. On the contrary: untill now, this totally meaningless number has only proved to me that I'm very good at solving little puzzles. It's just so arbitrary.

And on average, we humans ought to score about 100, but in reality, if we get a global average of 95, we may consider ourselves lucky.
And see what we have done with it so far... This planet is a mess, and there's nobody we can blame but ourselves: humans!

Intelligent? Nah.....

Yep. I've read some stuff on the brain, but I don't remember enough of it to be able to figure out which parts might be relevant.

Ah well, we'll just have to make do and see where it ends. But right now it's time to Jam and scare somebody's pants off...

Scan? What are you on about?

Halloween party?

And did you have anyone specific in mind....?

I gueass I'd have to say "No" on both accounts. First of all, Halloween is not much of a happening in Holland (I thought it was mostly restricted to the British Commonwealth ).
I just mentioned it, because the majority here seems to be English/American or Aussie.

On the second question, there's one person who I'd like to have without pants, but I wouldn't SCARE 'em off her

Figured as much. Errr...good luck (?)

Thanx, have you had a good weekend?

It's easy to get carried away with statement like "[humanesque, self-aware] intelligence is an emergent property of a suitably complex brain" and not consider the the effect that our environment has had over the last 4 million years, forcing particular adaptations.

We could hack away in silico for decades evolving virtual critters on faster and faster hardware and end up with nothing more than phenomenal maze solving savants. This is what happens when you build too many ( > 0 ) assumptions into your virtual environments.

None of this matters though, if you just want to solve existing problems with adaptive solutions - we don't care that they don't appreciate music. It will be a problem for the "creating humanesque, self-aware, intelligent life in a computer" school, though. Maybe a fatal one.

I meant that the bit you wrote was enough for a complete ENTRY over three pages... putting that in a discussion takes a lot of time. Reading it is not less painfull

Are you saying that intelligent behaviour is a product of the environment, or evolution or...?

Are you trying to draw a distinction between an AI that exists purely in the environment of a computer and one that "is" a computer, but lives in the same world we do?

I can agree if someone claims that a computer virus is alive, in the context of a computer environment. What would it mean to be "intelligent" in the context of a computer environment?

I think I am asking you to clarify.

I think that everyone here is using a different definition of the word intelligent. I use it to mean a system that can examine it's surroundings and modify it's behaviour to solve a problem. A thermostatically controlled oven would fall into this category and is intelligent as defined here, though there are far more complicated and impressive examples.

As far as I can see, there are two distinct areas in AI; adaptive, intelligent systems designed to solve a real problem, like image recognition and secondly, systems that are designed to display a level of intelligence that would impress a human - something we could communicate with.

It is only the second class of systems that provokes "potentially smarter than us" discussions. IMO, this class of systems would have to pass a completely open ended Turing test. I would expect to be able to annoy it, seduce it, make it laugh, make it tell me my jokes are bad, that I smell - any or all of these things. It should be capable of novel thought, it should make suggestions, good and bad, it should break into spontaneous song, it should sulk for no reason.

> Are you saying that intelligent behaviour is a product of the environment, or evolution or...?

"Our" level of intelligence is a product of evolution, yes.

> Are you trying to draw a distinction between an AI that exists purely in the environment of a computer and one that "is"
> a computer, but lives in the same world we do?

No, provided you could provide the same kind of environment within the machine, there's no difference, IMO.

Kind of dull. There was a Halloween party (of course) that my friends and I attempted to attend, but things didn't work out too well (there was an hour's wait just to get in and about five minutes later somebody pulled the fire alarm and out we all went again.) Got all dressed up for nothing. Then the rest of the weekend was pretty typical, i.e. nothing happened, except for the little bike theft recorded in my journal (yes, this is a shameless attempt to get people to read my zarking journal--although at times I'm not certain I really want anyone to.) That and I saw Goldeneye, and played the video game thereof as well. Did pretty lousy at it, too. I have absolutely no spatial sense.