An interesting thesis, but I think your optimism about people’s learning capacities comes from lack of experience; and I don’t think the hardware analogy gets us far.
″ There don’t really seem to be humans who tower above us in terms of their ability to soak up new information and process it.” — this has not been shown for people in general.
“My understanding was just based on my own experience, which is probably biased.” Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that you have not spent much time with people who have difficulty learning to read, or to add up, or to remember what they seemed to learn yesterday. Trying to learn calculus is worlds away from them — not because of lack of exposure, but because even much simpler things are very very hard for them.
I suppose you can cast them as having ‘broken parts’, but I don’t think that helps. They are people. They have much lower abilities to learn. Therefore, humans have a wide range of abilities to learn.
Trying to understand human thought by looking at AI — and vice versa — is interesting. But the map is not the territory, in either case.
We do not know in what ways people’s ‘hardware’ differs. It is not hardware + software as we understand those things — it is wetware, and most of how intelligence, and learning, emerge from that are unknown. So we cannot say that the ‘same’ hardware produces different results: we do not have a useful way of defining “the same”.
I should point out that the comment I made about being optimistic was a minor part of my post—a footnote in fact. The reason why many people have trouble learning is because learning disorders are common and more generally people have numerous difficulties with grasping material (lack of focus, direction, motivation, getting distracted easily, aversion to the material, low curiosity, innumeracy etc.).
I suppose you can cast them as having ‘broken parts’, but I don’t think that helps. They are people.
Having broken parts is not a moral judgement. In the next sentences I showed how I have similar difficulties.
Regardless, the main point of my first explanation was less of saying that everyone has a similar ability to learn, and more of saying that previous analysis didn’t take into account that differences in abilities can be explained by accounting for differences in training. This is a very important point to make. Measuring performance on Go, Chess and other games like that misses the point—and for the very reason I outlined.
ETA: Maybe it helps if we restrict ourselves to the group of people who are college educated and have no mental difficulties focusing on hard intellectual work. That way we can see more clearly the claim that “There don’t really seem to be humans who tower above us in terms of their ability to soak up new information and process it.”
An interesting thesis, but I think your optimism about people’s learning capacities comes from lack of experience; and I don’t think the hardware analogy gets us far.
″ There don’t really seem to be humans who tower above us in terms of their ability to soak up new information and process it.” — this has not been shown for people in general.
“My understanding was just based on my own experience, which is probably biased.” Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that you have not spent much time with people who have difficulty learning to read, or to add up, or to remember what they seemed to learn yesterday. Trying to learn calculus is worlds away from them — not because of lack of exposure, but because even much simpler things are very very hard for them.
I suppose you can cast them as having ‘broken parts’, but I don’t think that helps. They are people. They have much lower abilities to learn. Therefore, humans have a wide range of abilities to learn.
Trying to understand human thought by looking at AI — and vice versa — is interesting. But the map is not the territory, in either case.
We do not know in what ways people’s ‘hardware’ differs. It is not hardware + software as we understand those things — it is wetware, and most of how intelligence, and learning, emerge from that are unknown. So we cannot say that the ‘same’ hardware produces different results: we do not have a useful way of defining “the same”.
I should point out that the comment I made about being optimistic was a minor part of my post—a footnote in fact. The reason why many people have trouble learning is because learning disorders are common and more generally people have numerous difficulties with grasping material (lack of focus, direction, motivation, getting distracted easily, aversion to the material, low curiosity, innumeracy etc.).
Having broken parts is not a moral judgement. In the next sentences I showed how I have similar difficulties.
Regardless, the main point of my first explanation was less of saying that everyone has a similar ability to learn, and more of saying that previous analysis didn’t take into account that differences in abilities can be explained by accounting for differences in training. This is a very important point to make. Measuring performance on Go, Chess and other games like that misses the point—and for the very reason I outlined.
ETA: Maybe it helps if we restrict ourselves to the group of people who are college educated and have no mental difficulties focusing on hard intellectual work. That way we can see more clearly the claim that “There don’t really seem to be humans who tower above us in terms of their ability to soak up new information and process it.”