Re: Intelligence - one of degree?

A human, will almost always qualify its reply to a question.
We say things like, "Well usually" or "Under normal circumstances" or
"I think that this is the case"
whereas computers, are expected to answer a question directly...
"2 degrees right rudder" or "if you do this, that will happen"

a computer which said, "well, under normal circumstances, if you invest
that amount of money, you will see a return of X percent per anum"
would give a person a nervous stomach. We tend to want our computers to
say, "based on the data, if you invest that amount of money, according
to this equasion, you will see this rate of return"

A human, will be cautious, where a computer just follows the equasion
provided.

A human, may know the equasion, for the rate of return on that
investment, but will still be careful not to commit itself, when giving
advice.

A normal personal computer, just basically works with yes or no.

In the case of where it is unsure, it prompts the user, "Continue, yes
or no" or "are you sure you want to do this, yes or no"

Yet the human mind, is equally concered with maybe.

The computer does not deal in maybes. It deals in hard facts and data.

And that is the fundamental difference between computers and the human
mind.

The human mind knows that if something can go wrong, it will, and at
the worst possible moment.

In a computer program, the human programmer, is expected to think of
the possible scenarios in advance, and program in those possible
outcomes, while working on a budget, and with a deadline. So he or she
doesn't go very deep, into what might happen if. They just expect to
catch those instances during debugging. Rather than try to think of all
possible outcomes, they use real world real time testing, and handle
the ones that come up.

The difference is that we as humans, have a whole set of tools, we use
to handle things that might go wrong, and before we do anything, we
make sure we at least have our tools ready.
Like we are ready to run, if it goes supercritical. Or we are ready to
shield our eyes, if it blows. In heated debate, we are ready with our
set of comebacks, and diatribes.
A computer without that set of tools for handling deviations from the
norm, just crashes.

But programmers are lazy by nature. They do not have 20 years, to write
a program.
Yet it may take a human, 20 years, to learn a subject sufficiently, to
be proficient enough to be useful in answering questions on that
subject.

And you cannot pass 20 years of learning over to another, in a
paragraph, or even a lecture series. You can compress the information,
give the main points, but it will still take a person years of study,
to get a PhD for instance. And first they have to learn to speak, then
read and write, and so on, and every aspect of that experience is drawn
upon.

So we tend to look for shortcuts when trying to make a thinking
computer.
We think just create a neural net, and it will think.

Rather, if we were to give it enough, meaningful data, organized
properly, it would think.

Would a child, who was not taught, learn? It would learn by what it
saw, to imitate behavior, and then use that to imitate behavior when
necessary in other circumstances. It would apply that to emulate
others.

We have natural inclinations also, that machines do not have.

We have stages of life, that we go through, that are tied in to how we
learn.

For example a child looks up to a person he or she admires, chooses to
emulate that behavior. Based on what? Looks perhaps, kinship, kindness
shown, etc.

So teaching a computer is not as easy as programming in instructions.
And if we expect it to learn on its own, we have to program in that
ability.

We have to give it the means to learn. So we need to in a sense emulate
the reasons a child learns. To avoid pain, to get rewards.

It almost needs senses itself, just to be able to learn, otherwise what
will determine, if it should feel pain, and if it should feel pleasure?

How rudimentary, our present attempts appear to me to be, when compared
to real thinking.

We flatter ourselves to no end, with fanciful words, strung together,
to gain admonition from others, such as 'backward chaining inference
engine". And yes, it sounds important, and sounds intelligent, and it
sounds like the inner workings of the mind!
But it is a far cry from actually all the work of getting and sorting
data and building relationships between the information and indexing
the data, and all the grunt work, that an actual mind goes through, as
if gets input, and stores input and sorts input, even in its sleep,
over a period of years.


If you take the most common argument against a thinking machine, it is
that there is some quality to the mind that is mysterious, and if we
could just get at that key, then hey, the machine would think.

We just want that small equasion, that theory of everything, becuase
the alternative is just too daunting a task, to do things as the mind
does, one step at a time over the years, in all manner of
circumstances.

.

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