A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community’s icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
Yes, but we have no strict or clear s ientific definition of what makes humans intelligent or what intelligence even is.
Humans are intelligent and machines are not “just because”
Yes, we don’t have a universal definition of intelligence but we in general everyone would agree that knowledge is not intelligence. Simply storing information does not make anything intelligent. Book is not intelligent, Wikipedia is not intelligent, hash map is not intelligent.
Yes, but we also have to draw a line somewhere. You could just as well turn any non-random based computer program into a huge hashtable, yet the intelligence arises from somewhere. There is no magic to human intelligence, unless you start believing in the soul or something.
Yes, that’s the whole point. You can turn substitute computer program by a hash map and the results would be the same but everyone in general agree that a hash map is not intelligent. Defining exactly why it’s not intelligent is tricky though. It comes down to some very basic concepts that we understand intuitively but are very hard precisely define like what it means to ‘know’ something or to ‘understand’ something. One famous example is a very good dictionary: let’s say some guy has a very good Chinese dictionary. A Chinese speaking person can write question down and give it to this guy. He will look up every symbol in the question, translate it to English, respond and translate the response back to Chinese using the same dictionary. Does he ‘speak’ Chinese? He can communicate in Chinese but obviously he does not speak it. Does he ‘understand’ Chinese? Again, not really, he can just look up symbols in a dictionary. Specifying the exact reason why we would not say that he can ‘speak’ Chinese is difficult thought. It’s the same with intelligence. We intuitively understand why a book is not intelligent but to say exactly why is tricky.
Yes but you are missing my point. We have no way of measuring if a human is intelligent. The whole intelligence might just as well be an illusion.