Artificial Intelligence

[I_am_not_mafia]

Human intelligence doesn't -require- the scale of architecture we're born with, we can do a great deal with much less (and a great deal less than that would satisfy any useful definition of intelligence).  We -know- that biological implementations are inefficient, wasteful, and relatively slow.   

We don't know that.

In terms of wattage the processing power of the brain is extremely efficient compared to an equivalent super computer which will require megawatts of electricity instead of about a hundred watts.

The size of our brains comes at quite an evolutionary cost in terms of difficulty of childbirth and an extremely high metabolic requirement. If we couldn't make use of our brains or didn't need them then evolution would have selected for smaller brains rather than larger ones.

It's true that you can achieve a lot with very little. But if you want intelligence to scale and to be able to adapt to a wider variety of environments then you need more.

"Human AI" might not be as complicated as we give it, and it's difficult to establish that one type of intelligence is "trickery, smart computing" while the other is the real deal

There are many different definitions of intelligence, some more useful than others. My own working definition is that it allows adaptation to an unknown environment. I believe that a formal definition is possible based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics and I am currently developing models to try and demonstrate this.

Most so called AI is trickery because it tries to simulate the effect rather than to have it arise endogenously. It's like creating a function and labelling it "anger" and writing it to produce a  sudden arm movement in a robot if it senses loud noise. That's not anger, that's a function that produces a sudden arm movement if it senses a loud noise. It's us anthropomorphising it that sees it producing anger. But it doesn't scale. What about hitting the robot with a hammer? That should produce anger as well.

My favourite paper in AI discusses this Artificial Intelligence meets natural stupidity

If we're going to have no true Scotsman, and say that only human beings have big-I "Intelligence," because intelligence means being human, then okay. 

I never said that. Animals are intelligent as well. What I said is that the agent has to be situated within the same environment that they are being intelligent about. The whole field of New A.I and Artificial Life is based on this premise. This can be a virtual environment, or a completely abstract one, but they need to be a part of it, sensing it and acting within it and changing it for it to be intelligent. Only in this way will anything actually mean anything to an AI, otherwise it's like trying to describe red to a blind man.

But that doesn't change the fact that computers already play chess better than people, have superior facial and pattern recognition skills, etc. right now, today.  The google translate program for sure knows more about world languages than humans do.  And all these skills are adaptible.

You say this because you don't really know how these programs work, you just see what they can do and compare them to what a human can do. Using your reasoning I could argue that a telephone directory is more intelligent than a human because it knows more telephone numbers.

Chess playing computers, facial recognition and google translate are not actually adaptable. Google do use deep learning techniques for their machine translation but they use them offline and could just as easily use other statistical methods. A chess program only works because the problem domain is highly constricted and can be exhaustively searched. These techniques are exhaustively mapping out a space in the same way that a telephone directory lists out all the telephone numbers. Chess is far easier for a computer program than Go for example which is played on a much larger board and requires both chess like abilities and pattern recognition of large areas of territory. But still, neither are comparable to a human even if they outperform him or her. Why? Change the rules a bit or make it 3D chess and the player will be able to relearn and adapt whereas the computer will just fail without reprogramming.

In other words, these smart programs don't scale. This has been the bane of Artificial Intelligence since its inception and it's why GOFAI (Good old Fashioned AI) or classical AI failed.

If you actually try to create truely scalable AI that adapts regardless of the environment without being told what to do, then you'll find that it is insanely difficult. Simple things that we can easily write a conventional computer program to do are just not yet possible with a self organising system (e.g. plan out a sequence of actions). But that computer program will quickly fail in a noisy real world environment if it is not heavily constrained and you do not take into account every eventuality.