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Comment by xz0r | Hacker News Reader

Correlation is not causation. It feels more like smarter automation to me.

> It feels more like smarter automation to me.

Yep. Elevators used to be proof that machines can think. Then compilers, and chess, and go, and search, and …

The problem with AI is that as soon as it works, we stop thinking about it as “artificial intelligence” and it becomes “just automation”. Then AI moves to the next goalpost.

The problem seems to be with defining good tests for intelligence. FWIW, because GPT4 answers have a detectable pattern, they should presumably fail the Turing test.

At some level, intelligence requires logic, rationality, and conceptualization, all of which are topics which have evaded clear definition despite millennia of philosophy directly addressing the issues.

Humans also answer in predictable ways so if you place such criteria for a turing test humans will fail to pass it too

I suppose it's a bit of a scotsman argument, but the turing test is to see whether an observer can correctly guess whether the interlocutor is _human_, so by definition the test would pass if the other correspondent was human.

To the point underneath, humans do not answer in as predictable a way as ChatGPT. Your answer, for example, I am confident does not come from ChatGPT.

Edit: if I've horribly mangled the Turing test definition, please let me know

I just imagined we could look at the oldest example of intelligence in human history. In contrast with AI, our chauvinism has us tend to pretend even the earliest monkey had it, fish?, insects? etc If it can rub 2 sticks together it gets the diploma.

Turing test is easy, I had 2 chat bots talk about other users in the channel while besides some trigger words ignoring what those other users had to say. The human subjects got angry successfully which means it was important to them.

When you say we need ‘good’ tests for intelligence, you mean ‘tests that humans can pass but machines can’t’.

You’re demanding this because you aren’t comfortable with the implication that a computer can pass our existing tests for intelligence, so you rationalize that with the comforting thought that those tests were not meant to identify intelligence. Tests like the SAT or the bar exam or AP English. Or tests for theory of mind or common sense or logic. Those tests aren’t testing for ‘intelligence’ - they can’t be. Because a computer passed them.

It’s okay. We can make new tests.

Those are a lot of leaps to make about my motivations!

But compilers, chess, go and search are all proof that computers could think. We've been discovering as we scale up the hardware that those things appear to be converging to human intelligence with minor tweaks (turns out tree search for chess needed to be combined with matrices and we're most of the way there). ChatGPT can out-reason many people I know and can out-argue a fair number of comments I see on the internet.

If we took this comment at face value we're ending up with a definition of "think" that can't reason, play games or recall information - or it would be outdone by machines. Thinking obviously isn't very important!

> Thinking obviously isn't very important!

This is not obvious in the least. Thinking was required to produce the thing that could achieve the outcome that was defined by thought.

I could just as easily say that AI, as currently implemented, is really just another muscle.

>Elevators used to be proof that machines can think

Did they? When? By who?

Early elevators used to need professional human operators (you sometimes see them in old movies). Stopping at a selected floor was something a machine was unable to do on its own. Until it was and elevator operators lost their jobs and we just took it for granted that machines could do it.

I had someone on HN state stockfish is intelligent. If that is your definition of intelligence sure GPT is also intelligent. I do not think that's a common definition though!

Point is that we move the bar every time computers reach it. At least in part because we want to keep feeling special. And in part because we go “Well that can’t have been the bar then”

I suspect even full AGI will be considered “just a machine” for many decades, even centuries, before it gains the same rights as humans. We love to find reasons we’re special. Look how long it took us to admit animals are intelligent.

For many humans, computers definitionally can’t be intelligent. It’s important to recognize that.

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