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Daniel Speyer's avatar

I've often thought there's a difference between Recognition Intelligence and Planning Intelligence.

If you threaten a mouse, it will remember the safest place it can reach, plan a route, and run there. If you threaten an insect, it will find the safest place within immediate reach, go there and stay. This makes mice *way* better at escaping. Even though they're only slightly better at telling which spaces are safe.

I think fish, lizards, and gpt-3 variants are all in the insect category, though I've never had to chase those out of my kitchen.

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Victor Levoso's avatar

I think the point about complex intelligence implying gradual progress is not necesarily true.

Humans are able to do science, build a civilization and do lots of things our primate relatives can't.

Theres clearly some discontinuity in impact there whatever the source.

Even if it turned out that's a result of a combination of thousands of tricks that only work when you have all of them that doesn't seem like it would necesarily mean progress will be incremental.

Or at least it could be incremental but then at some point you get enough tricks to add up to being able to get culture and do science and basically you get a big discontinuous jump that in humans looked like going from not being able to take over the world to being able to.

Also it's posible there is some simple trick that makes it possible to generate all components of intelligence.

The world were human intelligence isn't simple is not necesarily the world were some simple algoritm like gradient descent can't assemble it's pieces, like evolution did.

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