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> General intelligence is an ability to cope, adapt and thrive in an ecology: to start from a limited set of capabilities, and via exploration, acquire a rich competence. To develop conceptualisations, techniques of coordination and control, to form novel goals and strategies to realise them, and so on. One thing I've learned over the past few years is that _nobody_ knows what intelligence is, and it may not even exist as a genuinely measurable attribute. What you've described is certainly _a thing_ that is worth describing and thinking about, but it doesn't encompass everything that we think of as intelligence, and ascribes intelligence to processes which most of us don't think of as intelligent (ie, evolution and plant life). The problem we have is that for the entire history of humanity, there has been a single example of something that "thinks like us" and our conception of what it means to be "intelligent" or to have "reason" or to "think" is just inextricably tied with all the other attributes that make us human. I'm not at all sure that intelligence _must_ arise out of a process of evolution and natural selection, and i think that it may be possible to create an intelligent entity which completely lacks the ability to survive in an ecology on its own. On the other hand, it's often said that while humans domesticated plants and animals, those same plants and animals also domesticated _us_. Human life rearranged itself around the requirements of farming and animal husbandry, and just in terms of pure biomass and range of habitat, becoming "domesticated" was a tremendously successful evolutionary strategy for the animals that we domesticated. Human society is now _again_ re-arranging itself in order to take advantage of AI, and we're spending a lot of money and labor building these systems and maintaining them. It's hard to say that they haven't adapted themselves to surviving in an ecology, it's just a more abstract ecology than the sort of blood and claw ecology that we evolved in. In some sense, these AIs are the ultimate expression of "memetic evolution" -- ideas that are able to spawn new ideas, without having any meaningful embodiment at all. |
FYI: SoTA AIs can think and reason. They're far far away from mere memorization & retrieval. They aren't human yet, nor do we expect them to be. They'll just keep getting ever better in their own ways, and become super duper useful for practically everything as computer buddies first, agents next, robots next next.
The "intelligence professors" I'm hoping will at some point shut up and accept that "functional/universal approximation" is all you need, which is abundantly done by neural nets of today.