

The Illusion of Intelligence - sharmanaetor
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/the_illusion_of_intelligence/

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mattfenwick
Starts out funny, but gets painful when the author starts trying to defend his
claim.

The article as a whole never defines what "human intelligence" is -- which
enables the author to use the "no true Scotsman fallacy" whenever a
counterexample is brought up (see the comments).

> "science knows that we make decisions before the rational parts of our
> brains activate"

How true is this? Always? Sometimes? Who did this study? What were the
controls?

> math skills are real, for example. But a computer can do math.

Doesn't cover all math skills -- just the easy ones. Using math != creating
math. Could a computer create, say, set theory or proof theory?

> Language skills are real too, but a computer can understand words and
> sentence structure.

Again, the example doesn't cover all human language skills -- just the easy
ones.

Maybe the biggest problem is the implicit assumption the author makes that
everything that humans do depends on human intelligence. If you make that
assumption, and it turns out to be false -- if humans do lots of things that
don't require human intelligence -- then, obviously, it's very easy to cherry-
pick examples of things humans do that don't require human intelligence. But
that doesn't have anything to do with whether human intelligence exists or
not, or whether we can duplicate it with computers.

------
daveslash
I've long held this belief, although I have not phrased it with such enjoyable
humor.

When I heard people say things similar to " 'they' say that in 20 years,
computers will be smarter than people - do you think that's true?" I reply
with "they're already 'smarter', and artificial intelligence already exists".

I follow up with the assertion that when AI is, if it's not _already_ , a
fully developed reality it won't take the form we're expecting, much in the
same way that "artificial flight" did not take the form of humans flying like
birds.

~~~
DarkTree
I still think that when claiming computers are 'smarter' than people, you are
side-stepping the fundamental problem with which this article revolves around,
and that is the problem of properly defining 'intelligence'. Can computers
write a classic novel? Can computers compose a masterpiece? Can computers
perform in a ballet? Sure, they can replicate automated tasks and calculate
much faster than humans, but that does not make them inherently smarter,
especially when you consider that humans created computers, not the other way
around.

~~~
daveslash
Yes, I absolutely agree with you! In _they 're already 'smarter'_, I had
smarter in single quotes - which I imagined myself saying with finger-air
quotes. Computers are "smarter" than us in a _very narrowly_ defined way only.
As you pointed out, properly defining intelligence is very difficult.

