I have been thinking about the argument of the singularity in general. This proposition that an intellect sufficiently advanced can / will change the world by introducing technology that is literally beyond comprehension. I guess my question is this, is there some level of intelligence such that there are no possibilities that it can’t imagine even if it can’t actually go and do them.
Are humans past that mark? We can imagine things literally all the way past what is physically possible and or constrained to realistic energy levels.
A difficult question to answer, because many elements are not precisely defined. But let’s just say for a moment that ‘intellect’ is conflated with ‘universal Turing machine’ and ‘thinking’ with ‘processing a program’. There are of course limits for any finite UTM: on one side, you cannot ‘probe’ thoughts too deeply because of constraints on memory/energy/time, on the other side there are thoughts that are simply too complex. So no, an AI could never imagine anything that is too complex or too expensive for it to think. For us humans the situation is even worse, because our brains are no computers, and we are very capable of imagining incoherent things.
I have been thinking about the argument of the singularity in general. This proposition that an intellect sufficiently advanced can / will change the world by introducing technology that is literally beyond comprehension. I guess my question is this, is there some level of intelligence such that there are no possibilities that it can’t imagine even if it can’t actually go and do them.
Are humans past that mark? We can imagine things literally all the way past what is physically possible and or constrained to realistic energy levels.
A difficult question to answer, because many elements are not precisely defined. But let’s just say for a moment that ‘intellect’ is conflated with ‘universal Turing machine’ and ‘thinking’ with ‘processing a program’.
There are of course limits for any finite UTM: on one side, you cannot ‘probe’ thoughts too deeply because of constraints on memory/energy/time, on the other side there are thoughts that are simply too complex. So no, an AI could never imagine anything that is too complex or too expensive for it to think.
For us humans the situation is even worse, because our brains are no computers, and we are very capable of imagining incoherent things.