> Intelligence is all about coping under failure. It is a lot more like, 'acting safely when you dont have the answers you need' than 'answering questions correctly'.
This is the first time I see this definition of intelligence.
My first impression is that this is a relevant aspect of intelligence, but very far from "all about". (other aspects being things like "abstract thought", world knowledge, agency, ...)
> That latter impulse resigns the whole field to cheap mimicry
AIs are inherently non-human intelligence. (I like the shoggoth-comparison [1]). AI companies go to great length to make them behave more human-like. If you look at earlier AIs (e.g. when they play games against humans), you will find that human experts (e.g. the people they play against) they will often note, that the AI behaves very unhuman and un-understandable in certain aspects (e.g. they make a move that seems utter non-sense at first, but will be very important 40 moves latter in the game). (I should note, that the opposite is true as well: sometimes the AI surprises the expert by exhibiting very human-like behavior)
I wouldnt count AI as intelligent. I have a definition grounded in empirical observations of actually intelligent systems -- start there, and generalise very carefully.
The reason intelligence has evolved in animals is because we do not have the answers. All of modern AI is focused on how to extract behaviour from answers -- rather than how to cope when they arent present.
Intelligence is the solution to the problem that evolution cannot adapt life fast enough. Evolution is the kind of 'intelligence' AI has: delete the failures; know the answers.
The intelligence of interest, in animals, is live adaption to one's environment. It's ecological rationality brought about by sensory-motor adaption.
This is why we find the NN-type solutions to problems deeply unsatisfying. We arent missing something: there is no "there" there. It's just a compression of the answer space.
This is really disappointing: the intelligent solution is the interesting one! Modern AI finds ways of solving problems without intelligence.
This is the first time I see this definition of intelligence.
My first impression is that this is a relevant aspect of intelligence, but very far from "all about". (other aspects being things like "abstract thought", world knowledge, agency, ...)
> That latter impulse resigns the whole field to cheap mimicry
AIs are inherently non-human intelligence. (I like the shoggoth-comparison [1]). AI companies go to great length to make them behave more human-like. If you look at earlier AIs (e.g. when they play games against humans), you will find that human experts (e.g. the people they play against) they will often note, that the AI behaves very unhuman and un-understandable in certain aspects (e.g. they make a move that seems utter non-sense at first, but will be very important 40 moves latter in the game). (I should note, that the opposite is true as well: sometimes the AI surprises the expert by exhibiting very human-like behavior)
[1] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/janus-simulators