Matt Mahoney wrote:
--- Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
You must
demonstrate some reason why the collective net of dumb computers will be
intelligent: it is not enough to simply assert that they will, or
might, become intelligent.
The intelligence comes from an infrastructure that routes messages to the
right experts. I know it is hard to imagine because distributed search
engines haven't been built yet, but it is similar to the way that Google makes
people appear smarter. In my thesis I investigated whether distributed search
scales to large networks, and it does. http://cs.fit.edu/~mmahoney/thesis.html
Your analogy to people appearing smarter because they can use Google
simply does not apply to the case you propose.
You suggest that a collection of *sub-intelligent* (this is crucial)
computer programs can ad up to full intelligence just in virtue of their
existence.
This is not the same as a collection of *already-intelligent* humans
appearing more intelligent because they have access to a lot more
information than they did before.
[dumb machine] + Google = dumb machine.
[smart human] + Google = smarter human.
1) There is every reason to believe that a human intelligence could
become smarter as a result of having quick access to an internet
knowledgebase.
2) There is absolutely no reason to believe that a bunch of
sub-intelligent computers will get up over the threshold and become
intelligent, just because they have access to an internet knowledgebase.
You have work to do (a lot of work!) to persuade us to accept the idea
contained in (2).
This is similar to the machine-translation fiasco in the 1960s: they
believed that the only thing standing in the way of a full-up
translation system was lots of good dictionary lookup. It simply was
not true: a dictionary maketh not a mind.
As for you last comment that "The intelligence comes from an
infrastructure that routes messages to the right experts" .... this
simply begs the question. If the infrastructure were smart enough to
always know how to find the right expert, the infrastructure would BE
the intelligence, and the "experts" hat it finds would just be a bunch
of dictionaries or subcomponents. You are implicitly assuming
intelligence in that infrastructure, without showing where the
intelligence comes from. Certainly you give no reason why we should
believe that the infrastructure would spontaneously become intelligent
without us doing a lot of work.
If we knew how to put the intelligence into that "infrastructure" we
would know how to put it into other places, and then (once again) we are
back to the scenario that I discussed, where someone has explicitly
figured out how to build an intelligence, and then deliberately chooses
what to do with it (i.e., there is no accidental emergence, beyond human
control).
Richard Loosemore
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