According to that logic reading a physics book is "dumb", I should derive all physics knowledge myself. Reading a book is precomputed knowledge, and that's no different from precomputed chess strategies. If I'm allowed to use books as a foundation for my intelligence, then computers are allowed precomputed knowledge also. They're just better at retaining it. Good for them.
The problem with your definition is that you can have a humanoid who speaks a dozen languages fluently, is great at math and physics, can answer any history question, can correctly understand and act in different social situations and despite all those things, is still classified as dumb.
You can define intelligence as the capacity of learning, taking knowledge completely out of consideration. It does not, however, match the definition of intelligence in common language. It also means that when you have a robot that knows everything it is by definition dumb, because there's nothing left to learn.
> But they are all at heart still simply ways to manipulate numbers, basic arithmetic if you want.
And humans are just a bunch of atoms. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form nucleic acids and other building blocks. You can build things of immense complexity with primitive primitives. That something as complex as a human can consist of a few elements is pretty hard to grasp. But if I accept that, then why can't it be simulated with bits?
Art created by computers is primitive, sure. But human art started out pretty primitive too. I see this as a difference in complexity, not as some magic line computers have to cross for their output to become art-worthy.
Reading a physics book is dumb, but understanding a physics book is not. You could - given enough time and intelligence - derive all of physics yourself.
Pretty much everybody alive has at some point in his time come up with some rule or law in principle that somebody else had already codified, there is nothing special about that, other than that we seem to have this generalization capability built in at a very deep level.
Your intelligence is what allows you to use the book, I can store the book in a computer but it will not get one tiny little bit smarter because of it. There not being any intelligence present to understand the deeper meaning of the string of symbols that make up the book.
Intelligence in common language is often confused with 'smart', you are either intelligent or you are not. But even the most stupid human is intelligent, and all computers are not.
I can see what you're getting at with the argument that if both humans and computers are built up out of atoms that in theory we could both be equivalent in intelligence.
But there are some very subtle differences between humans and computers. For one we operate in a mostly analog world, and computers are digital. That's a small difference at first sight, because after all if you add enough bits to your floats eventually the steps will be so small that it won't matter any more. Or does it ?
Even a small step is still a step, a thresholding operation.
Simulating a chemical soup, all the effects of things like quantum mechanics, including brownian motion and so on might some day yield an intelligence.
But simply assuming that more computer power will give us something that is intelligent is simply not plausible, more data does not mean you are smarter, just that you have more data at your disposal, a larger computer does not mean thinking in a different way, it merely means following programs and manipulating data at a higher speed.
If intelligence is a continuum between '0' (for a rock) and '1' for a human being with basic intelligence then we have departed a little bit along this axis away from the '0', but we are infinitely closer to the 0 end than we are to the '1' end.
And we seem to disagree on whether or not a computer has ever created art, but that's fine. A computer does not express itself in any way that it has not been programmed to do, and in those cases that it does we reach for the debugger.
According to that logic reading a physics book is "dumb", I should derive all physics knowledge myself. Reading a book is precomputed knowledge, and that's no different from precomputed chess strategies. If I'm allowed to use books as a foundation for my intelligence, then computers are allowed precomputed knowledge also. They're just better at retaining it. Good for them.
The problem with your definition is that you can have a humanoid who speaks a dozen languages fluently, is great at math and physics, can answer any history question, can correctly understand and act in different social situations and despite all those things, is still classified as dumb.
You can define intelligence as the capacity of learning, taking knowledge completely out of consideration. It does not, however, match the definition of intelligence in common language. It also means that when you have a robot that knows everything it is by definition dumb, because there's nothing left to learn.
> But they are all at heart still simply ways to manipulate numbers, basic arithmetic if you want.
And humans are just a bunch of atoms. Atoms form molecules. Molecules form nucleic acids and other building blocks. You can build things of immense complexity with primitive primitives. That something as complex as a human can consist of a few elements is pretty hard to grasp. But if I accept that, then why can't it be simulated with bits?
Art created by computers is primitive, sure. But human art started out pretty primitive too. I see this as a difference in complexity, not as some magic line computers have to cross for their output to become art-worthy.