Author: Amir Ban
Date: 23:57:50 01/27/98
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On January 27, 1998 at 20:26:23, Fernando Villegas wrote: >I wonder how much intelligent an average and concrete guy -and so the >kind of human that must be used to define general attributes of "human >being"- is in all the aspects that people here think so important to >define "intelligence". Is not only speed calculation what common people >seem to lack, but also logic, even simple clear judgements and of course >what you meet in them 99 times of 100 is a very poor if at all existent >creativity. Is a kind of joke that obstinate insistence in "creativity" >as a clue of human intelligence when in fact creativity is the most >difficult element to find in an average brain. What I want to say is >that a good standard of intelligence cannot be stablished so easily and >calmly using our poor intelligence. If we put aside people really smart >-say, people beyond 140 IQ-, what rest is very humble and the fact that >this poverty is capable to express himself in a wide range of things >does not mean nothing in his favour. Yes, we are stupid in a great scope >of matters. That does not make us intelligent at all, but only increases >the numbers of mistakes we can do. Or are we stablish as an standard of >"human intelligence" the intelligence of people that in fact is far >beyond the average standard of intelligence? If we take a sample from >common folk and then we take his intellectual perfomances as a measure >of what that famous Human Intelligence is, you begin to think much >better would be not to do that sad exercize at all an even a hand >calculator begins to seems a lot smarter. Or in another words: would you >take a sample of paraplexic people to evaluate what an artificial >android could do in a 100 meters race? I'm not sure what point you are making but it sounds as if you believe that while programs are still inferior in intelligence to the best of the human race, they are superior to the average mass of humans. If this is what you say, it is entirely wrong. Every human, even one classed as a moron, has the ability to understand natural language, to recognize a familiar face (in a fraction of a second), to isolate the sound of a bird singing and understand its significance from the sea of soundwaves hitting his ears when he steps out in the morning, to recognize letters or sign (such as the sign of the cross) in whatever size, font, colour, lighting, background and perspective it appears, and many more examples of this type. There's really no need to talk about humans, because all higher animals have these capabilities. In fact, even insects, who experts agree have a significantly simpler nervous system and cannot be described as intelligent, have these capabilities to some degree (note I'm talking about abstract intellectual ability, not about the ability to fly or reproduce which is beside the point). These abilities are the basic building blocks of cognition, and there's no way to be intelligent without possessing them. Programs are not even close to being there. Work on this is in the basic research stage, and has remained so for the past 30 years. Researchers usually find that in whatever way they phrase their target, it turns out to be too ambitious and they have to lower their expectations or change the research subject to something even more elementary. I'm sure this research will one day get positive results, and then we will be on track to achieving AI. Possibly once the basic cognition tasks are solved, the rest will be easy and programs will quickly match humans, I don't know. But for now I think computers would do very well just to match insect "intelligence". Amir
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