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Comment by eagsalazar2 | Hacker News Reader

(1) It is likely to be very very different from our own intelligence in nature and (2) if through self-play it manages to achieve our level of intelligence it would be extremely surprising if it didn't continue to evolve at a rapid rate beyond our capacities, possibly orders of magnitude more intelligent.

something we don't understand + something inhuman in nature + something incredibly smart = a very very bad idea.

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It would also possibly be something we could not communicate with.

EO Wilson, the father of behavioral biology, once said that if a lion could speak we wouldn't understand it.

I disagree, on the basis that its mind runs on an infrastructure closely related to our own, and structure and function are intimately interrelated.

But he'd be damned right in saying it about AI.

Seems unlikely with any sapient intelligence. If the intelligence understands mathematics then some form of communication will be possible. Consider:

  0 1 2 3 4 5 ...
  0 + 0 = 0
  0 + 1 = 1
  1 + 1 = 2
  1 + 2 = 3

There are only so many ways that you can express these ideas. With any kind of written language, or spoken language that can be identified as speech, it seems quite likely that we’d be able to discern the meaning of mathematical truths and statements like these - no matter how different the intelligence is from humans. Regardless of the symbols used or writing system, there will be certain commonalities that make it possible to find the meaning.

I would contend that for any human-level intelligence with a written mathematical language, if the intelligence wrote down their expression of the mathematical ideas above, we would be able to identify them and understand them.

I could see this being difficult if we don’t recognize speech or writing for what it is, though. But once we do I think the meaning of mathematics at least will be self-evident with study.

If I've understood you correctly, you're discussing translation. Wilson was discussing the fact that we may simply have wildly different /types/ of thought.

This idea is explored a bit in the Ender's Game universe [1], it definitely seems pretty compelling that non-human intelligence might be so utterly incompatible with our own thoughts that even beginning to communicate might be entirely impossible.

[1] http://enderverse.wikia.com/wiki/Hierarchy_of_Foreignness

For a fictional exploration of different experiences with apparently sentient creatures, Peter Watts' "blindsight" is some of the best sci-fi I've ever had the pleasure of reading.

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