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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Why do you think it requires general intelligence? The parent and I aren't being obtuse here: the history of artificial intelligence research is littered with examples of humans confidently declaring that task X requires general intelligence, then getting humiliated by a neural network doing task X better than humans a few years later. See Go, driving, art (you can complain about the quality of AI art, but it's winning competitions with human judges), etc.

A priori I'm not sure why you would think being a PM at a FAANG, deciding what color the login button should be, is any different.

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I think AI wins against people when we start using KPIs in an industrial view of software like defects / LOC, decomposability, etc), or possibly even maintainability / understandability of a codebase. Gosh, even since the 1980s expert systems were already out-performing entire doctors' boards in diagnosing issues in patients so clearly technical performance in KPIs isn't the only measure by which we adopt technology in society.

When it comes to judgment calls for technical decisions, a lot of interesting innovations appear to come from rejecting conventions / averages in favor of a different set of constraints as a trade-off because we challenge the assumptions we make about the demands being asked of a solution / product. I'm thinking in the constellation of the apocryphal Steve Jobs quote about rejecting asking horse riders what they want because if we asked them they'd ask for a more reliable horse.

I'm not entirely sure "general" intelligence is a meaningful concept but I take judgement to mean something like "the ability to make decisions under uncertainty without direct feedback." People seem to be able to do this using a lot of context and tacit knowledge. It's not really clear how you hill-climb to that capability through RL.

> the history of artificial intelligence research is littered with examples of humans confidently declaring that task X requires general intelligence, then getting humiliated by a neural network doing task X better than humans a few years later

True, but the history of AI research is also littered with AI researchers confidently predicting X job will be replaced by AI and being completely wrong because they don't actually understand what those jobs actually are. See Geoff Hinton predicting that Radiologists would be obsolete by ~2020, or predictions that truck drivers would all be replaced by self-driving tech.

Hence my saying.

We will never prove AI is intelligence.

We'll only prove humans are not.

I mean I could believe that there are some tasks which can't be done at acceptable performance until AI resembles something like Commander Data, I just don't think being a software PM is one of them.

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