Artificial Intelligence

[JuliaL]

What the heck is 'general intelligence' and how is it measured?

Hard for the youngsters to grasp, but at one time being able to play chess well was seen as indicative of high intelligence.

Saying that a generally intelligent individual should be able to find creative and novel solutions to difficult problems begs the question of what is a problem.  Ability to solve a problem implies that there is a framework of valuation under which the problem can be said to be solved or not solved.  There have to be goals.

If the goal is the accumulation and coordination of data, then mechanical means have long since surpassed human ability.  Scientists can't work without libraries, publications and other databases.

The question of whether conscious machines can be made is more interesting.  Certainly they can be made self aware in a limited fashion.  Any PC that keeps a register updated with CPU temperature or fan speed does that.  But one that has enough  power to keep tabs on itself and its surroundings...One with effectors to give it the ability to affect its environment and a payoff matrix where its own homeostasis is weighted as the highest utility...that we haven't seen.  It would take a lot of selection to give a trojan or virus or worm the ability to take over the power plant on which it depends for continued existence.  That's the bad boy that Elon Musk fears.  Humans could get wiped out in an ill conceived optimization.

Though I'm not conversant on the current state of affairs of computer hardware and the hard limits to Moore's law.  I'll stay agnostic on how far it is likely to go.
I wouldn't want to be remembered for a quotation like that attributed to Lord Kelvin, "There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now, All that remains is more and more precise measurement."  Supposedly said in 1900, five years before Einstein's annus mirabilis.

I voted 'good' because only our robot overlords will be disinterested enough in the kind of petty human power grabbing that stratifies society, destroys all other life for its own gain and causes endless human suffering. Maybe they'll keep us as pets.
And it's the only way that consciousness will ever life extend long enough to get off of this rock and go out to explore the rest of the galaxy.

Edit---General intelligence. OK, I read the wikipedia. It's what humans do. Kinda anthropocentric isn't it?
I mean really, 'the coffee test???' Someone isn't intelligent if they can't go into a house and make coffee? Nobody outside of Yemen was intelligent before the 16th century?

Coffee cultivation first took place in Southern Arabia.[5] The earliest credible evidence of coffee-drinking appears in the middle of the 15th century in the Sufi shrines of Yemen.

[Excited Penguin]

What the heck is 'general intelligence' and how is it measured?

I don't know much, but if it helps, I mean the kind of intelligence we know of from sci-fi movies. I am definitely talking about something far greater than human intelligence.
For obvious reasons I can't go into details.
This is how I got interested in the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JybXEp7k7XU

[luka]

I learned a little from this video. Maybe you will too.

[bennyboy]

I love his definition of general intelligence-- that something has a preference, and a method of evaluation.

[BrokenQuill92]

http://youtu.be/hlHrvQ7D5OU

[Minimalist]

[BrokenQuill92]

What's the pic

[Minimalist]

A church sign which says "artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity."

[JuliaL]

I could only stand Sam Harris for ~15 minutes.  The paranoia was too vague to assess.

Computerphile was much more interesting and had what I'd consider the most telling statement.
Early in his video:
"If we have a general intelligence, we have to make sure that its preferences are aligned with ours."

This is what I'd say is the crux of the biscuit- motivation, goal direction.  Yes, a general intelligence like the one postulated could kill us all by accident. 
If one existed.  There is some sort of assumption here that as soon as enough computing power is available, it will immediately, recursively optimize itself into godlike power and break away from human control and understanding.  There never is any explanation of how or why it could do this.
See Lawnmower Man or Colossus, the Forbin Project.

I'm much more worried about some central banker or DARPA will give direction to a very powerful but not godlike computing device to use it as a tool to economic or military world domination.  I doubt we'll ever get that far.  Ecological with resulting societal collapse from miscalculations made during the industrial age is more likely to land us back in the neolithic or early bronze age.

[davidMC1982]

It's hard to talk about AI without conflating the argument with arguments about conciousness and free will.

There are areas where human intelligence is vastly superior to AI; recognising people we know being one. We can recognise people from images of their face from most angles. We can recognise people from their gait. I would imagine AI has the advantage when it comes to recognising potential facial matches within a crowd, but I'm fairly sure that we have a higher success rate, given enough time. Generally speaking, object recognition is something we're much better than AI at. However, there's no reason to believe this will always be the case. The fact that we can already implement some rudimentary AI equivalent of everything we do is indicative of that.

The wider understanding of intelligence incorporates learning, decision making, desires, fears and goals amongst other things. Again, there's no reason to think these couldn't be artificially generated. After all, we can trace our roots back to simple bacteria (or further to basic chemistry) which, with a few simple rules and many iterations, came to form us. There's no doubting that iterating generations in a synthetic form will be faster than in a biological one and hence, given the necessary starting conditions, an ability to replicate, and enough randomness, would result in an intelligence like our own.