Is humanity a superhuman AI?

[Locaha]

Serious question. No single human being can build a nuclear reactor, land on the moon or calculate pi to the billionth digit, but humanity can. Does it qualify?

[Shmi]

Let’s start small. Is an ant colony a super-formic intelligence?

[A1987dM]

It is. Is it an artificial intelligence?

[TheOtherDave]

Well, I’m inclined to call a termite mound an artificial construct created by termites, and a beehive an artificial construct created by bees. If an ant colony is an intelligence (which I’m not as confident of as you sound), it seems no more problematic to call it an artificial intelligence created by ants.

[A1987dM]

Well...

i think there’s a relevant sense of natural vs artificial by which Esperanto is artificial but English is natural: the latter arose from the interaction of a large number of parts each ‘thinking’ locally, without an intelligently designed plan for the whole. (Our hosts don’t like the E word but it seems warranted here.)

I dunno about termite mounds or beehives, but humanity doesn’t sound artificial to me in that sense.

[TheOtherDave]

Sure, in that sense of the word I agree. I’d say termite mounds and beehives are natural in that sense, as well. So is the pattern of graffiti on New York buildings.

[Kaj_Sotala]

It qualifies in some respects, but also fails in many of the respects that are usually assumed when people talk about superintelligences. E.g. Nick Bostrom:

By a “superintelligence” we mean an intellect that is much smarter than the best human brains in practically every field, including scientific creativity, general wisdom and social skills. This definition leaves open how the superintelligence is implemented: it could be a digital computer, an ensemble of networked computers, cultured cortical tissue or what have you. It also leaves open whether the superintelligence is conscious and has subjective experiences.

Entities such as companies or the scientific community are not superintelligences according to this definition. Although they can perform a number of tasks of which no individual human is capable, they are not intellects and there are many fields in which they perform much worse than a human brain—for example, you can’t have real-time conversation with “the scientific community”.

Or me:

Bach (2010) argues that like AGIs, human organizations such as corporations, administrative and governmental bodies, churches and universities are intelligent agents that are more powerful than individual humans, and that the development of AGI would increase the power of organizations in a quantitative way but not cause a qualitative change.

Humans grouping into organizations are to some degree capable of taking advantage of increased parallel (but not serial) speed by adding more individuals. While organizations can institute guidelines such as peer review that help combat bias, working in an organization can introduce biases of its own, such as groupthink (Esser 1998). They cannot design new mental modules or benefit from any of the co-operative advantages digital minds may enjoy. Possibly their largest shortcoming is their reduced efficiency as the size of the organization grows and their general susceptibility to having their original goals hijacked by smaller interest groups within the organization (Olson 1965).

[moridinamael]

I get the point, but the last paragraph is kind of excessively reductive. It’s simply untrue that the only advantage accrued by putting multiple minds to work on a problem is a “parallel” one. Experts complement one another’s functions. The aggregation of optimization power can be extremely nonlinear.

Take a geologist, a geophysicist, and a petroleum engineer. Assume that they’re all experienced experts. Together these three people stand a good chance of economically finding and producing some oil. Remove any one of the three and the odds of success crater. Add more experts and productivity goes up, but there is a threshold number past which efficiency goes down—too many engineers on the same project end up impeding one another.

Another example would be pair coding. A coding team of two is at least allegedly better than having two individual coders. The advantage of cooperation is not merely parallel.

[drethelin]

No single human can build the pyramids but a single human can design them. Humaniy is superhumanly capable but not superhumanly intelligent.

[Locaha]

I disagree. You can design a pyramid only by using a lot of knowledge that other people made for you.

I think a good example of a “single human” is a feral child.

[drethelin]

knowledge-base does not equal intelligence. a 30 year old is usually more capable than a 20 year old because they have a lot more knowledge. This does not mean they are superintelligent. Humanity has a lot more knowledge than a human.

Also: Humans do not come by themselves. A feral child is no more a prototypical example of single human than a single bee is of a beehive.

[[deleted]]

If humanity (I might have said ‘language’ or ‘culture’) is any sort of artificial intelligence at all, this is a marvelous occurrence. It doesn’t have to be a superhuman AI (as in better than not just outside of) , or even a benevolent AI. It’s an intelligence that isn’t of our species, and that’s great. The way we’ve interacted with wolves to the point that now some of them are dogs, and some dogs are about as smart as a human child—that’s another non-human AI that I’m all in favor of. If humanity is as smart as any of us, even the lesser smart of us, it’s still someone to talk to. If a human /​ porpoise translation machine were invented tomorrow and it turned out they mostly wanted to talk about eating fish and swimming fast, I wouldn’t say turn the machine off.

No single human being can bloody the killing fields of Cambodia, carry out centuries of Islamic beheadings or own nations as slaves. Humanity can. Does it qualify?

[Armok_GoB]

Of topic, but a hot tip if you’re interested in exactly this kind of thing is to look up Tulpas and find someone on IRC with one. Here’s a sorta related link I hapened to have open: http://​​www.reddit.com/​​r/​​Tulpas/​​

[Thomas]

It qualifies by my book also.

[Armok_GoB]

Is humanity superhuman? Yes obviously, for the reasons you mentioned.

Is humanity an intelligence? Well, by the standard definition used here, it is since it’s clearly an optimization process.

Is humanity artificial? Nope.

[BaconServ]

The raw information processing abilities of the collective sum of all human intelligence certainty forms a cohesive intelligence. The internet is allowing information to spread ever more rapidly, and within a few decades, we’re liable to start seeing incredible shifts in the way business and research are conducted. The question is what structures exist in the fabric of this being’s mind, what its limits are, its ability to act independently of its parts, and in general how it can be made to be useful to us to be aware of. These are non-trivial questions that I will not pretend to know the answer to. It may require primitive machine intelligence to properly catalog the data needed to answer these questions, effectively giving that being control over the collective superintelligence of humanity. For example, it could utilize existing facilities to create nanomachine factories. This wouldn’t be grey goo that destroyed everything, it would be an intelligently designed program to enhance the AIs exploitation of the existing superintelligence it finds itself confronted with. It has the advantage simply because it is sufficiently self-aware. As a superorganism, we are nowhere near as organized as ant colonies.

[ikrase]

I would not consider it as one, but gradual and natural evolution (Cultural and tech evolution, not genetics and natural selection) might make it one in about a century , mostly through closer coordination and hiveminding.

I do think that many ideas about AI can generalize to groups of people though, such as friendliness.