Agreed on this. Mostly, shifting away from using “intelligence” directly removes us from the philosophical morass that term invites, such as “is it really intelligence if the thing that invented the super nanotech that is paperclipping you isn’t conscious or self-aware enough to possess intentionality?”. No need to debate functionalism—robot tigers tear you up just as well as real tigers do!
There’s also a fundamental (IMO, very stupid) proxy war being fought over this in which some humanities-oriented people really want to stress that they think STEM people are too self-important and absorbed with their own form of intelligence, and want to make it clear that other kinds of intelligence aren’t any lesser, and thus attach to AI the kind of intelligence of its creators. The problem being that maybe there was a Japanese poet who alone had the sensitivity and empathy to finally grasp the essence of life; but if he was in Hiroshima in August 1945, he got vaporized along with thousands of others by Dr. Oppenheimer & co.’s invention, and that doesn’t mean that one kind of intelligence is superior to the other, but it makes abundantly clear which kind of intelligence is more dangerous, and that’s really what we’re worried about.
(and yeah, of course, social intelligence as exhibited by con-men is also terribly dangerous; short term, probably more than scientific capabilities! And that’s just a third kind of thing that both camps tend to see as low status and downplay)
Agreed on this. Mostly, shifting away from using “intelligence” directly removes us from the philosophical morass that term invites, such as “is it really intelligence if the thing that invented the super nanotech that is paperclipping you isn’t conscious or self-aware enough to possess intentionality?”. No need to debate functionalism—robot tigers tear you up just as well as real tigers do!
There’s also a fundamental (IMO, very stupid) proxy war being fought over this in which some humanities-oriented people really want to stress that they think STEM people are too self-important and absorbed with their own form of intelligence, and want to make it clear that other kinds of intelligence aren’t any lesser, and thus attach to AI the kind of intelligence of its creators. The problem being that maybe there was a Japanese poet who alone had the sensitivity and empathy to finally grasp the essence of life; but if he was in Hiroshima in August 1945, he got vaporized along with thousands of others by Dr. Oppenheimer & co.’s invention, and that doesn’t mean that one kind of intelligence is superior to the other, but it makes abundantly clear which kind of intelligence is more dangerous, and that’s really what we’re worried about.
(and yeah, of course, social intelligence as exhibited by con-men is also terribly dangerous; short term, probably more than scientific capabilities! And that’s just a third kind of thing that both camps tend to see as low status and downplay)