Artificial Intelligence

[Scott NC]

  He was so smashed he probably didn't know what hit him.  Still can't slither in a sssstraight line.

[Frosty]

Think three dimensionally Scott, He(?) has attained the straight vertical slither. It really broadened his(?) skill sets.

Frosty The Lucky.

[Irondragon Forge ClayWorks]

A copperhead was in the wrong place at the wrong time yesterday. He was laying on the landing of our deck with his head hanging down over the edge. Oakley the hound was the first one to spot him. Oakley was getting close, then jumping back, seems he doesn't like snakes or sticks that look like snakes (smart dog). Being the copperhead was a good size, I decided he should loose his head. Whacked it off with a large chef's knife. Don't believe the old wives tale a snake won't die till sundown.

I can't control the wind, all I can do is adjust my sails. ~ Semper Paratus

[Purple Bullet]

13 hours ago, Irondragon ForgeClay Works said:

Don't believe the old wives tale a snake won't die till sundown.

I guess it depends on what you mean by "die". When I was a kid, I'd walk down beside a canal that ran out to the "plarie" (local term for marsh) and nail moccasins in the head with my BB gun. I had to aim two inches high and to the right, but soon the snake would quit rolling in the water and I could fish it out with a stick and pile it in my straw hat. Once back to the house I'd pull out my dissection kit and cut him open to investigate. I found the heart still beating hours after their supposed demise. In the words of the doctor in Princess Bride, he was only "mostly dead".

[Scott NC]

  IT looked pretty two dimensional to me.

[Scott NC]

 " The AI program has a high level accuracy when translating formal Akkadian texts such as royal decrees or omens that follow a certain pattern. More literary and poetic texts, such as letters from priests or tracts, were more likely to have “hallucinations” – an AI term meaning that the machine generated a result completely unrelated to the text provided."

  You have to wonder.

"weaponry that is motorized like a small tank with automatic machine guns. The weapon operates without any human intervention and can decide friend or foe and engage the target. Now that's scary."

  Introducing, AI "hallucinations"....

[JHCC]

Saw something over the weekend that said, "Artificial Intelligence can't replace you if you're not intelligent."

Well, that's a relief.

[Scott NC]

  Did they say if there was an IQ cut off?  I'm probably safe.

[JHCC]

If you think IQ scores accurately measure intelligence, then you're probably safe!

[Scott NC]

  Thank heavens.  I know there are all kinds of intelligence.  I was pretty much joking as usual, but I detect an underlying learning experience.  Care to explain?

[JHCC]

In short, IQ testing looks at a set of certain abilities, calls that "intelligence", and tries to create a test that quantifies those abilities. The problem is that, as you note, there are all kinds of intelligence, and most of those are unquantifiable or have no quantifiable proxies that can be tested. Even a hypothetically accurate IQ test would only measure what the test creator considers to be "intelligence".

With any test, it's important to ask, "What is this test actually evaluating?" If that's different from what the test claims to represent, you have to pay very close attention to what's really going on.

(For example, in higher education, we hear a lot of blather about the US News & World Report college rankings. Anyone who's actually looked at how colleges are ranked knows that it all boils down to "How much is this college like Yale?" That tells you nothing about whether the courses offered or the teaching style or anything else will be a good fit for a potential student, but that doesn't sell magazines.)

[Frosty]

Good description of how IQ testing is done and the inadequacies of it. There is a better method for estimating intelligence but it doesn't quantify it so is of little interest to the "professionals." When I was in basic therapy after the accident, learning to talk, walk, etc. to a "functional" level I discovered definite changes in my own thinking. I scored high on a couple different IQ tests and pretty low on another. I was in the midst of reading on the subject of TBIs, strokes, etc. to get a handle on things myself and had some surprisingly deep conversations with the speech therapist when I expressed some confusion regarding IQ testing.

I'd known tests were subjective as you say to the tester and various paradigms. Intellectually anyway, KNOWING is something else. IQ tests are at best indications of a person's abilities to cope with given sets of tasks. Some are basic functions, say object / pattern recognition and such, things necessary to say safely cross the street etc. 

What the therapists and other brain menders I met and dealt with said was a more realistic method for estimating intelligence was by talking. 3-4 or more "pros" comparing impressions and notes is about as close to judging IQ. as it gets

Anyway, that's my 2 Kopeks.

Frosty The  Lucky.

 

[Scott NC]

    I don't admire people by how smart they are or seem to be.  I don't value IQ tests, it was an easy thing to toss into the conversation when talking about AI.  I wouldn't want to be judged that way.  Everybody has something to offer and I like to look for it.

[George N. M.]

Agreed that the various IQ or other tests are imperfect proxies to measure "intelligence."  There are a LOT of ways to be "intelligent" and some of them seem to be mutually exclusive.  We have probably all known someone who was very smart in an intellectual sense but extremely impractical at navigating the real world.  There is one person I know who is like this and if it were raining soup he'd go outside with a fork.  And creativity is pretty much impossible to measure except by how something you create is recieved by other people.  And being able to deal with other people, particularly dysfunctional ones, takes a kind of skill and intelligence that people who don't have that skill can never understand.

One type of intelligence that I admire and strive for myself is broadness on knowledge.  Thomas was a good example.

And some people can be either very good or very bad at taking formal tests.  I have known very good lawyers who struggled with the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) and the bar exam.

On the other side of the coin there are a lot of folk out there who I have to wonder about how they get through life.  The term "room temperature IQ" is a real thing.  They may be perfectly fice folk but really struggle with a lot of basic concepts.  The truth is that half the folk out there are of below average intelligence no matter how you measure it.fffff

And I do have to say that in my years of reading IFI posts I would say the average intelligence of blacksmiths is above average.  They may be a half bubble off plumb in other ways but they are generally pretty smart.

"By hammer and hand all arts do stand."

[JHCC]

One of the complicating factors in all of this is that the human mind has some degree of plasticity to it, and what gets measured as "intelligence" can change over time. I got really good SAT scores when I was in high school, which some might take as a mark of intelligence, but I doubt very much that I'd do so well now, when I'm focused on other things than test-taking.

12 hours ago, George N. M. said:

One type of intelligence that I admire and strive for myself is broadness on knowledge.  Thomas was a good example.

This is very true, especially in the ability to make connections between different fields of knowledge. I would also say that another important type could be described as open-mindedness (of which Thomas was also a good example), where one is conscious of the limits of one's knowledge, works continually to expand those limits, and has the humility to adapt one's understanding to accommodate new information.

[Frosty]

The human brain has a surprising degree of physical plasticity, it not only heals it makes new physical connections internally. If you've ever developed a headache while thinking hard about something new or difficult you're experiencing your brain redirecting blood to the parts that contain the necessary information and "skills". Do it often and the headaches stop because your brain makes the paths, blood and neural shorter, wider and more permanent. Stop doing a think and the paths get repurposed.

Knowledge and ability are two different things the "genius"  who can't change a lightbulb just can't apply his knowledge, just like the person who can figure things out but can hardly spell is the same thing from a different direction. You can  learn either, you may not have much talent at them but you CAN learn.

A big part of doing is associating knowledge and analytical talents. Mother and I are strong at association, we used to drive folks crazy with running puns. Think of it like oh adjusting a carburetor, a cutting torch and applying it to tuning a home built burner. I think it's at base pattern recognition but I could be wrong.

Personally I "think" the only reliable metric for intelligence is results. Someone who's good at many things is near the top of my rating system, Thomas was a considerable polymath. If he wasn't good at a thing he taught himself to be. I hardly ever had a conversation with him that he didn't push my limits

Frosty The Lucky.