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I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at.

In a sense language models appear to be doing the same thing again, one step down the scale. They're doing a human-specific thing, but missing whatever it is that non-human vertebrates do, and mammals do pretty well. I believe that this is the vast majority of human cognition, too. We just don't talk about it because when we talk about thinking, we're talking, and confuse the two.

These language models have done jaw-dropping things, and also make it abundantly clear that there's some fundamental thing that they've completely missed. It's plausible that that "thing" could emerge all by itself, using a mechanism entirely different from vertebrate cognition and yet somehow sufficient. Or it could be like the chess engines, doing something amazing and yet ultimately limited and of minimum utility.

> I'm reminded of the early days of "AI" when that consisted of building chess engines, because chess is what "intelligent" people do. They quickly realized that they were solving the wrong problem, doing the thing that humans are bad at and computers are good at.

Is this really true? Because a lot of effort was spent on making computers as good at chess as human experts. It was considered a pretty big breakthrough when it happened and it definitely didn't happen early in the history of AI.

There were chess playing engines circa 1980 on 8 bit micros (e.g. Sargon) that were a good match for ‘average’ players, Deep Blue beat Kasparov in 1997 with a large amount of custom hardware, Stockfish has been very strong on a powerful but ordinary PC since 2008 or so.

Yes people have been trying to make chess "AI" since the very beginning of the computer. A chess engine is an obvious thing to build with a computer because the rules of chess are uniquely suited to automation: there's enough possible moves per turn to make calculation difficult for humans, but not so many that it's difficult for computers too (as with Go).

Early AI researchers did try to solve other problems, they just generally failed miserably.

By the time they were trying to defeat the world champion, they didn't really think of it as an AI project any more. They often used the term "expert system", which had a much narrower scope. It had become a challenge unto itself, but they didn't expect it to lead to any kind of generalized intelligence.

It came rather out of nowhere when neural-net-type engines suddenly swept back into dominance. Even after becoming the world chess champion, nobody expected Go to be solved any time soon.

> but they didn't expect it to lead to any kind of generalized intelligence.

Do experts really expect any stream of AI research to lead to generalized intelligence (except in the very long term)? I was under the impression we really have no idea how to get there.

"Carmack sees a 60% chance of achieving initial success in AGI by 2030. Here’s how, and why, he’s working independently to make it happen."

https://dallasinnovates.com/exclusive-qa-john-carmacks-diffe...

Right now it's an open question. But they realized fairly soon that chess was a matter of minimax plus expert heuristics plus brute force. It was pretty clear that it was more effective than an expert system approach, which remained viable for another few decades.

Humans, collectively, almost have broken the barrier of qualia by now!

I just had a chat with my kindergartner about humans being a kind of mammal, and out of some dark, musty recess of my brain crawled the sound of "You are a human animal"[1]

    You are a human animal  
    You are a very special breed
    For you are the only animal
    Who can think,
    Who can reason,
    Who can read.

    Now all your pets are smart, that's true!
    But none of them can add up 2 and 2
    Because the only thinking animal
    Is You! You! You!

I thought about it for a minute and declined to share that with my son, because I don't think it's true and would cause confusion at this stage. Many animals have more than enough number sense to add 2 and 2, many can recognize cards with nothing but words on them, and "think" and "reason" have to be pretty narrowly defined if you want to exclude smart animals.

I think culture has shifted significantly in the last 30-60 years since that song was written towards recognizing theory of mind in animals. I'm not sure how Jimmie Dodd could convince himself that animals couldn't think, especially because the average person today has reduced exposure to animals: 150 years ago, most people would know that horses had that kind of social interaction, because most people lived around horses. They'd know that pigs and cows are as intelligent as their family pets. But today, most people interact with pigs and cows via shrink-wrapped styrofoam at the grocery store. My personal theory is that when people were constantly surrounded by animals they had to kill and eat, they were far more likely to build up rationalizations and cultural assumptions to fend off the dangerous idea to their psyche that these animals could suffer and they were participating in an unavoidable horror of massive proportions.

[1]: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/You_Are_a_Human_Animal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren%C3%A9_Descartes#On_animals

I recall reading that pointing is something that only a few animals, including us, do and understand.

If I get my cats' attention and point at something, they're more interested in the tip of my finger than the direction I'm pointing at.

Now, my cats will occasionally meow to get my attention and then walk over to where the problem is - an empty food dish, an empty water bowl, the bed that they expect us to be in because hello, it's bedtime according to my internal cat-clock - but they never engage in pointing behavior.

Anyway, time to cite some stuff, instead of dropping anecdotes into a bucket:

- https://www.wired.co.uk/article/elephant-pointing

> A study by researchers from the University St Andrews has found that elephants are the only wild animals that can understand human pointing without being trained. > Pointing in humans is a behaviour that develops at a very early age -- usually before a child reaches 12 months – as it is an immediate way of controlling the attention of others. "Most other animals do not point, nor do they understand pointing when others do it," says Professor Richard Byrne, one of the authors of the study. "Even our closest relatives, the great apes, typically fail to understand pointing when it's done for them by human carers; in contrast, the domestic dog, adapted to working with humans over many thousands of years and sometimes selectively bred to follow pointing, is able to follow human pointing -- a skill the dogs probably learn from repeated, one-to-one interactions with their owners."

- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/7531526_A_comparati...

> If the distance between the tip of the indexﬁnger and the object was greater than 50 cm, subjects per-formed poorly in contrast to trials where the pointing ﬁngeralmost touched the baited box. We should also note that insome trials/experiments the pointers also turned their headand looked in the same direction thereby enhancing thecommunicative effect of the gesture but even so the differ-ence did not disappear. Even after training, chimpanzees in Povinellietal’s (1997) experiment were just able to master the task.

By "pointing" I don't mean pointing your finger, the universal version of "pointing" involves your eyes, shoulders and the rest of your body. (Think of a how a hunting dog points... Plenty of times I've seen cats point out things to other cats not to mention to me.)

Those behaviors could be better described as "looking" and "facing", couldn't they? Pointing means something pretty specific to humans, especially when we're talking about human-animal interactions.

I'd agree with GP here - pointing with a finger is a very specific variant, that's arguably cultural in nature. More fundamentally, pointing is about communicating to the other being they should focus their attention elsewhere, and where that elsewhere is. "Looking"/"facing" and associated body language is a more common form of doing this, and humans too do it and recognize it, even if no fingers are being moved.

From an evolutionary/physiology standpoint, human bipedal locomotion freed up our forelimbs/arms such that "limb assisted pointing" became possible/practical. Perhaps why elephants seem to grasp human pointing is because their trunks serve as a similarly "free" limb that they can use to point at things. Sort of like convergent evolution, but behavioral rather than morphological...

> "When they detect something alarming, they characteristically face towards it and raise their trunk above their head with the tip of the trunk pointed to [the danger]," Byrne said. "We've always thought they were sniffing the breeze, but maybe they're also pointing; our results suggest that's more than possible."

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/131010-el...

Your post is a perfect demonstration of what Frans de Waal gets at in "Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Are?"

Many dogs will look at what you're pointing at and not your finger. It depends on the dog.

And there are dogs that are literally bred to point...but they're usually pointing at game.

There are dogs that will literally drag you to what they're trying to show you. And many (most?) dogs will bring you a toy to you that they want you to play with. I've never actually seen a cat do that, but I presume there must be a few.

Dogs can also tell you're pointing with your attention, if they're paying attention.

Just a side note: I have two carts and one of them rarely follows where I am pointing. The other one aways does. And he seems to recognize a good 100 words.

You’ll get massively varying levels of “intelligence” from most anything it seems

Theory of mind is a popular research topic in animals. There is no controversy in the idea that the attribution of mental states occurs in animals.

“ My belief, based on experiences with domestic and wild animals is that there is nothing uniquely human about "theory of mind". “

This belief might simply arise from the human ability to try to understand events through pattern matching. Certainly humans are very different than any other animals when it comes to thinking and problem solving.

What does it mean that my cats 100% understand what container their treats are kept in? I can not leave the container on the counter or they will knock it onto the floor and tear the lid off to get inside.

I am conviced they understand something is hidden in a box. Object permanence is something humans and cats both learn and understand.

I’m talking about the ability to write down thoughts.