No, the process of human evolution is a tale of organisms adapting to their environment. There is no guarantee that human beings will evolve into something more intelligent.
If the average person is granted the ability to manufacture their own reality without any need for earthy concerns, one might think evolutionary forces would push people into becoming marginally intelligent beings focused on decadence.
No there is no guarantee. However in the past it is safe to say that, on average, the human evolutionary path involved an increase in intelligence. Whether that is 'the tale' I will leave to poetic license. I did this to disprove the notion that beings could not produce beings of greater intelligence in the parent post. To disprove a general statement you only have to show one contrary instance.
That was my point. That there exists a process (evolution) where greater intelligence can spring from lesser intelligence. I agree the mechanism is quite different but it demonstrates there is no fundamental obstacle to the process of increasing intelligence.
Perhaps this is one of the mental leaps that creationists are not able/willing to make. Their belief in an ultimate intelligence producing lesser intelligences is at least logically consistent.
>Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.
Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.
That's ok for chess - it has well defined rules, and more importantly a fitness function. That's where all the work is - define a function to tell you if your permutation was a good one.
But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.
> Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.
It is also possible that each individual neuron in the brain is stupid! They don't have any idea of whatever task is being processed, human intelligence is just the result of random connections being made and reinforced by positive feedback.
> But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.
I think it would accurate to say that the fitness functions are more difficult to define and perhaps they are not available at on such a constant basis. But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.
I general I think that whenever a decision making process is automated it tends to lose it's mystic and people then view it less as intelligence and more as a dumb process. Yes chess is just a baby step but it does demonstrate that something that humans used to think of as a significant indicator of intelligence can be achieved.
>But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.
What I'm saying is that to evaluate AI you need I (artificial or otherwise).
So I don't think random permutations will ever get you there, because if we ever manage to write the fitness function, we are almost there anyway. (And no one knows how to do that.)
Maybe one day all of humanity will take part in the great AI race, and every person will help evaluate AI's to find the best one. I'm not sure it'll be enough though, you simply need far far too many permutations for it to ever work.
It would be interesting to use say WoW as a test bed for AI, make sure it always joins a team and see how good you can make it (emphasize the helping other members of the team part). Then send it to second life.
But, I still don't think it'll ever be enough. In particular it'll never be able to design for creativity.
With all the searching and interactions on the internet these days I think there will be plenty of feedback from humans to develop AI if it can be done.
I know about the Turing test, but it will never be able to test for creativity. Only basic speech - and that's not enough to launch the singularity which require a machine that can invent.
It isn't just basic speech. It is whatever is required to convince the examiner that the subject is a human. You could ask the subject for some creative input on a particular topic. That is allowed under the Turing test.
I think that creativity in solving a task is actually quite amenable to automation for a Turing-passing program. Generate a whole bunch of 'ideas' by combining existing concepts in different ways and then test them for usefulness. (Now imagine doing this with a million different Turing processes on your desktop computer - I think there would be some pretty creative ideas generated.) If the program can't tell if an idea is good or at least OK then it is never going to pass the Turing test.
If you are talking about creative in the sense of 'amuses humans' like music or art then the computer is of course at a huge, unfair and pointless disadvantage.
If a program can complete the Turing test then it is likely it will already be a lot smarter than the examiner.
I think his chief exception is the timetable laid out. He is not saying he doesn't believe in evolution. He disagress with someone's extrapolation, that is all.
I was replying to a comment not the parent post. The one where the guy proposed that it would be impossible for humans to create anything smarter than ourselves. Sometimes the indentation on comments can be a little tough to keep up with.
Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.