Vsauce: What Does it Mean to Be Intelligent? | AI Podcast Clip with Michael Stevens

11 thoughts on “Vsauce: What Does it Mean to Be Intelligent? | AI Podcast Clip with Michael Stevens”

1. AI is not sentience, Michael.

2. You sound like a murderer!

3. To get real qualia and sentience and all of that, it has to be an evolved solution to a real problem. I can give you the adaptive evolutionary algorithm that works at large scale, but It's really hard to imagine presenting it with a problem to which the correct solution is our kind of intelligence and consciousness. After all, we were one of millions of solutions to our problem. What distinguishes the problem that human intelligence solves from the problem that cat intelligence solves?

4. 'What it takes to build super-human of intelligence… '

   you'd tell us Lex 🙂 Do you think it'll be easy?

5. Intelligence is an example of a word that human beings use without really understanding what it means. Its use has evolved as a variety of human experiences had content that had some shared similarity to past uses of the world intelligence. Any successful attempt to get a better understanding of what the word means has to factor the experiences it labels into their varying specific content. The root of that content is in the animal ability to organize movement to achieve specific intentions. That ability is the central feature of animal life. It depends on biochemical mechanisms that are common throughout the animal kingdom. Those abilities include some kind of sensory system used to create some kind of biochemical representation of the environment. Intelligent responses to that representation include various kinds of movement that enable an animal to achieve various tasks like finding and consuming food or avoiding danger. Throughout the animal world those actions are achieved by organizing the movement of molecules of the protein myosin along filaments of the protein actin. The acorn worm already has a neural network with the same basic structure as the human brain. Primates have evolved the capability to continually build extremely complex representations of our immediate visual world. An extremely complex analysis is required to create each of those representations. Humans live with the illusion that seeing our visual world is simple because normal healthy human beings experience no difficulty in carrying out the task. Humans specifically have evolved an enhanced capability to form an high level representation of the lower level representations of our minds and to infer similar representations in other people's minds. Language plays a large part in this process because descriptions of the representations can be exchanged in words and because internal words are a large part of these representations. The evolution of language almost certainly started with the exchange of words that referred to objects and actions in a group of humans immediate visual world. The words were used to help organize group actions to achieve some kind of collective goal. However, humans have evolved the ability to exchange words without any immediate external connection for the words and without any exact understanding of how the words connect to external reality. This ability prepares the human mind to deal with future experience where the words actually connect to the experience's external content. A machine that could substitute for an human in this kind of activity could have some claim to the word intelligent. But, the connection of the words to the experiences of human life is the real core of the intelligence. Describing a machine that is not able to share those experiences and understand how words connect to them as intelligent reflects a very poor understanding of the meaning of the word. Another phenomenon of human evolution is a low frequency of deviant human beings who are unusually capable of achieving some specific kind of high level representation of the lower layers of their mind. The low frequency of these kinds of abilities leads to the illusion that some particularly difficult mental activity is involved. A much more plausible explanation is that these minds just spend more time on the kind of biochemical mental activity that carries out the particular kind of task. These tasks have no biological value in the biological world that humans emerged from. Often the people who excel at some talent of this kind are not particularly good at more basic biological activities. But, some of their talents have proven to be exceptionally important in the human world that has emerged over the last ten thousand years. The human mind is exceptionally good at the extremely complex process that is required to represent the objects, actions, and intentions in the four dimensions of the human visual world. The human mind is exceptionally good at organizing the human movements that are required for an human subject to carry out the manipulative actions required to achieve some immediate goal. But, the human mind is not particularly good at doing arithmetic, algebra, or calculus. Machines have been able to make superhuman achievements at these kinds of tasks for many decades. More recently AI techniques have succeeded in enabling machines to do better than humans at some carefully chosen subset of visual tasks that don't fit particularly well with human competence. But, AI systems still seem far from the human ability to fit patterns of biological significance for human beings to the visual data of the immediate visual world. There is no reason in principle why AI systems could not eventually gain the capabilities of mathematical analysis that are needed to achieve an human level representation of the objects and actions to manipulate those objects that are the typical content of the human visual world. The experiences of human biological life are a different story. The emotions and motivations of human experience come from our biology. That biology has a large random component that cannot be represented just from the visual data generated by human activity or the words that humans use to talk about them. Nor is there any obvious reason why human beings would want to create artificial human beings.

6. Roomba?! That killed me LMAO

7. I don't believe humans are intelligent whatsoever 🤔 look at all the things we've done and our behavior in "civilization"

8. Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.

   Intelligence is most often studied in humans but has also been observed in both non-human animals and in plants. Intelligence in machines is called artificial intelligence, which is commonly implemented in computer systems using programs and, sometimes, specialized hardware.

9. Knowledge that I've acquired tells me that the Klipsch is too close to the wall and should be pointed into the room. 😉

10. Is vsauce gay? Genuinely curious

11. I think what makes life precious is the sole fact of it existing. By the sole fact of being, it enriches the universe in a way inanimated matter does not. It's not like if a life form is not intelligent or doesn't moan it's ok (or pretty or progressive) to destroy it. I don't really know why Micheal went onto murdering to decide whether or not something would be intelligent. I'd say anything that would be capable of staying alive and capable of respecting other life forms deserves to be left alone, regardless of anything you may think of it.

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