5-Minute Singularity Intro

…human beings all have the same cognitive architecture. We all have a prefrontal cortex and limbic system and so on. If you imagine a space of all possible minds, then all human beings are packed into one small dot in mind design space. And then Artificial Intelligence is literally everything else. “AI” just means “a mind that does not work like we do”.

Source: Yudkowsky, E. (2007). 5-Minute Singularity Intro.

I forgot where I read this but the quote is “There are lots of ways of being smart that aren’t smart like us”. We have a tendency to measure AI progress against a standard and you’d think it makes sense that we’d use ourselves as representing the limits of that standard. But when you think about it there’s absolutely no reason that human intelligence should be the measure of AI progress. A pocket calculator from the 1960s was already superhuman with respect to performing basic mathematical operations so to think that assessing machine intelligence against our own cognitive levels doesn’t really make much sense.

There are two awesome posts on Wait, but why (1, 2) that go into more detail. Here’s my favourite part: