Lots of people want to judge machine intelligence based on human intelligence. It dates back to Turing who proposed his eponymous Turing test: can machines “pass” as human beings? Turing, being clever, was aware of how biased this test was:
I expect that we will eventually outgrow our anthropocentrism and view what machines really offer: a new kind of intelligence.
In any case, from an economics perspective, it matters a great deal whether machines can do exactly what human beings can do. Calum Chace has published a new book on this topic: The Economic Singularity, Artificial intelligence and the death of capitalism. Chace’s excellent book in the latest in a stream of books hinting that we may soon all be unemployable simply because machines are better than us at most jobs.
To replace human beings at most jobs, machines need to exhibit what we intuitively call “common sense”. For example, if someone just bought a toaster… you do not try to sell them another toaster (as so many online ad systems do today).
Common sense is basic knowledge about how the world of human beings works. It is not rule-based. It is not entirely logical. It is a set of heuristics almost all human beings quickly acquire. If computers could be granted a generous measure of common sense, many believe that they could make better employees than human beings. Whatever one might think about economics, there is an interesting objective question… can machines achieve “common sense” in the near future?
It seems that Geoff Hinton, a famous computer scientist, predicted that within a decade, we would build computers with common sense. These are not computers that are smarter than all of us at all tasks. These are not computers with a soul. They are merely computers with a working knowledge of the world of human beings… computers that know our conventions, they know that stoves are hot, that people don’t usually own twelve toasters and so forth.
Chace recently placed a bet with a famous economist, Robin Hanson, that Hinton is right at 50-to-1 odds. This means that Hanson is very confident that computers will be unable to achieve common sense in the near future.
Hanson is not exactly a Luddite who believes that technology will stall. In fact, Hanson has also an excellent book, the Age of Ems that describes a world where brains have been replaced with digital computers. Our entire civilization is made of software. I have covered some of the content of Hanson’s book on my blog before… for example, Hanson believes that software grows old and becomes senile.
