They mourn, they can paint, they save people from drowning, they take the trash out. I've seen so many videos of elephants behaving in a way that shows some form of consciousness and reflection on the world. They are clearly intelligent beings.
Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value.
Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.
There's a video I saw a while back of these Indian women who knitted sweaters for the elephants because there was a very cold winter that year. The elephants, normally aloof, heard them singing at the edge of the woods, saw the elephant sized clothes, came up and let the women put giant sweaters on them and left.
I guess my view of consciousness is different -- all living beings having consciousness, but perhaps not specifically in the form of the human mind or intellect.
These are ancient ideas. Maybe this century will validate some of those.
I know that word, and it is one way of describing what I was talking about, but it is not what I meant. My actual worldview is a superset of "all living beings are conscious". For example, I don't necessarily think that consciousness emerges from biology or complex interaction of matter.
Umwelt is a good step outside of anthropocentric view of consciousness and the world though.
Neither I believe that consciousness emerges from biology or other things. I believe it is the other way around: it is from consciousness that emerges everything.
Sadly, we somehow confuse consciousness with the identity or individuality (ego). I believe the ego is just one modality (or subset) of consciousness.
for everything our logic is, it's not our main way of creating value. it's the one way we survive, hand in hand with a lot of ignorance. this planet has far more patience for us than we have for ourselves.
If they can paint, then so can I. And it took me years to learn how to do decent stickmen!
Either way, we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime, let alone elephants. Don't mean to condemn them but sapio-genesis is often oversold as being too easy. We are nowhere near being capable of ourselves, we have just learned how to process things similarly to how brains do it, at a fraction of the efficacy and ten trillion times the cost.
> we are not going to see intelligent computers in our lifetime
My dad was born before the first transistor was built, and died in 2014.
When he was born, reasonable people thought they'd never see a nuclear chain reaction, never see supersonic flight, never see space flight, never have men walking on the moon.
In his lifetime, even after the invention of the computer, reasonable people thought they would never in their lifetime have a machine beat the best human chess player. One of his specific anecdotes was about "fitting all of Shakespeare's works on a ball bearing".
Even as late as 2004, the script writers for "I, Robot" considered it sensible to have that memetic Will Smith line "Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?" — my dad never saw Stable Diffusion or ChatGPT, but he would have if he'd lived the average life expectancy.
No matter what exactly it is that you mean by "intelligent" such that it excludes what computers already demonstrate, a lifetime is a long time, and a lot can change.
A lot of the velocity you listed was not as quick as it seems.
Supersonic flight is a question of manufacturing processes more than anything; we could always scale engines to make more power, just that making them light while being producible to a specific degree of accuracy was difficult.
Nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 and implemented successfully in 1945. Of course nobody would have thought of it - just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one. It's a question of looking at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings. We didn't put a stupid amount of effort into nuclear fission relative to how much it changed the world - I'm willing to bet that more cost has been put into r&d for office furniture than for the nuclear bomb.
Chess is a simple game of calculation, not a sign of intelligence. It merely reflects the ability to calculate, which is the strength of scalable computers. It just so happens that we came up with computers and they work well in this space - there's no telling of things we haven't discovered because we haven't thought to implement anything to do with them.
Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.
I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.
These things were all called "impossible" — and in some cases "unthinkable" — when my dad was born; supersonic simply looks like "a question of manufacturing processes" because we here in 2024 already know (as a society if not as individuals) how to make a jet engine that doesn't melt itself during operation and a rocket that doesn't explode. Going to the moon was itself the metaphor for "you can't do that thing". Rutherford famously dismissed the idea of extracting useful energy from nuclear reactions as talking "moonshine".
Before Deep Blue, sensible people insisted that Chess "required" the human intellect and couldn't be reduced to mere calculation. When it turned out to the contrary, then the goalposts moved to Go because that game was too complex to explore the state space and you can't even write a simple function to estimate how good a move was the way you can add up piece point values in chess. And then Go fell, and people suddenly decided it wasn't special after all, and "what really matters is emotional intelligence, which machines will never replicate":
If it is sufficient to look "at the fundamental laws and materials of matter, finding their inner workings and theorizing more useful ways of using these inner workings", then that would also suffice for intelligence, because we are existence proofs that it's possible to make a ~1.5kg, 20 watt, human-level chemical intelligence.
Everything we've done with A.I. since the field began, has been theory and testing of attempts to replicate various aspects of our intelligence.
> Sure, computers can write symphonies, but they are very far away from inventing something like a symphony. Which I would describe as something close to sapiogenesis.
If you shift the goalposts like that, then you would fail any single human, and only have sapience for the species as a whole super-organism. The word has meant a variety of different concepts before reaching its current meaning, as the economic and technological milieu, as well as the existing body of works that they were expected to be familiar with and innovate on (but only a bit because too much change all at once makes people hate you*) all continuously changed the composer's capacities for grandeur. No single composer created the modern form ex nihilo, nor even any single step towards it from the ancient Greek σύμφωνος (harmony), each step was building piece-by-piece on those who came before.
But again, this is to miss the point. The people in 2004 who wrote that script, didn't have Del Spooner say "Sure, we all know robots can write a symphony or turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece, but can they invent the concept of symphony if we never told it to them?"
To put it another way, using your own words:
> just like how I would never have thought of a ladder if I never saw one and never had a need for one
And yet, about 20 years later, never mind the 77 since the transistor or the 80.7 years of average UK life expectancy? The path the scriptwriters went for was to have the character of Sonny respond "Can you?", pointing out that most humans can't compose or paint either, not by making Sonny create works faster than most printers can actually print them — a thing which is already possible for high end systems today, which those script writers couldn't conceive of.
And not just script writers: between graduation (2006) and the actual release of these models, I've had conversations with co-workers, software engineers, who didn't think that what these models do was possible.
> I maintain that intelligence won't be cracked in my lifetime, knowing that I could look silly doing so. We can't even quantify what intelligence is, let alone begin to work towards it.
But we absolutely can quantify intelligence, that's what IQ tests are and we've had them for ages, the problem right now is that we're not sure if there's a single "general" thing or lots of small skills in different areas. Humans seem to have a G-factor, but the machines keep passing all our tests almost as fast as we can fill in the gaps in this sentence: "sure, they can ${old test}, but they won't be intelligent until they can ${new test}".
Last century saw us enter the age of information, where logic and manipulating data became our main way of creating value.
Maybe this century will be about understanding the shape of our intelligence. We've clearly already got a machine intelligence that we don't understand well. (see Chess, Go, LLMs). Now there are hundreds of species that are likely to have intelligence close enough that we could communicate with. Hopefully we will come up with ways to get there.