Homo Sapiens and/or Machina Sapiens: Intelligence vs. Stupidity: Homo Deus or Homo Stupidus
“Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I’m not too sure about the former.”
“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.” Einstein
"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity". M. King
"You can never underestimate the stupidity of the general public". S. Adams
"To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost". Gustave Flaubert
"We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet".
"Most of Our History Is "The History of Stupidity".? Stephen Hawking
Prologue
The Holy Grail of AI is General AI and ML, and this appears as the only real and true AI.
From the Greek myth of Talos to Frankenstein to Terminator, the possibility of creating an autonomous intelligent entity has long fascinated humanity.
The invention of machine intelligence with human-level and beyond capabilities often referred to as artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is an ultimate goal of the computer science and engineering, and, seemingly, of all human science and technology.
This high goal has been pursued by the largest technological companies in the world, as Alphabet/Google, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft/OpenAI, but with a fundamental misconception, as a Human-Like and Human-Level AI (HHAI), as imitating/replicating/emulating human brain/intelligence/cognition/behavior.
Some well-known businessmen and thinkers, such as Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or Stephen Hawking, have warned that a true AGI could quickly evolve into a “superintelligence” that would surpass and threaten the human race. However, myself with a few others have argued that a real superintelligence (RSI ) could help us solve the greatest problems and global risks facing humanity.?
However shocking, who is close to the truth, it is the mass media, with its news headlines making AGI a few years off, and Hollywood popularizing super-smart machines in their futuristic films. Think?of Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S., Samantha in the movie?Her, or Ava in the movie?Ex Machina.
My long-time but fully independent mono-, inter-, and trans-disciplinary research of machine/artificial/non-human intelligence has been recently completed with the innovation of Generalized AI and ML, as imitating/replicating/emulating/modeling/mapping/simulating reality/causality/mentality.
Such a General Machine Intelligence and Learning (GMIL) was designed as Transdisciplinary AI, Trans-AI, transcending and transgressing the limits of AI, ANI, ML, DL and General AI, and Human Intelligence, in the form of the Man-Machine Hyperintelligence.
[Trans-AI: How to Build True AI or Real Machine Intelligence and Learning ], See SUPPLEMENT.
In?Architects of Intelligence , futurist Martin Ford surveyed 23 of of the world’s foremost researchers and entrepreneurs working in AI and robotics today:
Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), Ray Kurzweil (Google), Geoffrey Hinton (Univ. of Toronto and Google), Rodney Brooks (Rethink Robotics), Yann LeCun (FaceBook) , Fei-Fei Li (Stanford and Google), Yoshua Bengio (Univ. of Montreal), Andrew Ng (AI Fund), Daphne Koller (Stanford), Stuart Russell (UC Berkeley), Nick Bostrom (Univ. of Oxford), Barbara Grosz (Harvard), David Ferrucci (Elemental Cognition), James Manyika (McKinsey), Judea Pearl (UCLA), Josh Tenenbaum (MIT), Rana el Kaliouby (Affectiva), Daniela Rus (MIT), Jeff Dean (Google), Cynthia Breazeal (MIT), Oren Etzioni (Allen Institute for AI), Gary Marcus (NYU), and Bryan Johnson (Kernel).
They have been asked how soon they thought research could produce a genuine AGI. “Researchers guess [that]?by 2099, there’s a 50 percent chance ?we’ll have built AGI.” The most extreme answers: Ray Kurzweil, a futurist and director of engineering at Google, suggested that by 2029, there would be a 50 percent chance of AGI being built, and Rodney Brooks, roboticist and co-founder of iRobot, went for 2200.?
Such a huge discrepancy of academic minds provoked me to focus on the human stupidity, its causes and effects, forms and types, influence and impact, scales and scopes, and how it interrelates with human intelligence and future development.
Below I share my general observations on the nature and impact of intelligence and stupidity, as orthogonal to each other, with the latter one being inherent and incurable. Specifically, how these mental phenomena interact and determine the human world, namely, a possible future development scenario of Homo sapiens, as Homo deus or Homo stupidus.
[To be politically correct, for those who dislike the term of stupidity, it could be mentally replaced by "nonintelligence", "unintelligence" or "lack of knowledge, understanding, intelligence or reasoning"].
Introduction
All my conscious life I have been studying intelligence, as "the power/ability/capacity to know and learn, understand and infer, decide and effectively interact with the world, at all its forms and levels".?
Of all existences in the world, intelligence is the most complex noumenon and phenomenon, being both a hidden/latent/intangible/independent variable and observable/tangible/measurable variables. The latent variables describes unobservable aspects of reality, physical, mental, social or digital. They could relate to abstract entities, like real-world/ontological categories and classes, mentality or machine intelligence, or data structures.
In human intelligence, the underlying causes of the observed variables is the?g?factor?(general intelligence,?general mental/cognitive ability?or?general intelligence factor), computed by the IQ. It is applied in psychometric investigations, experimental?cognitive psychology?and?mental chronometry, brain anatomy and physiology,?quantitative?and?molecular genetics, behavior generics, primate evolution and AGI.
Or, it is like with the Quality of life, a latent variable which cannot be measured directly. then observable variables are used to infer quality of life, like as?wealth, employment, environment, physical and mental health, education, recreation and leisure time, social belonging, etc.
The unprecedented complexity of intelligence is associated with its possible forms and types, nature, origin and mechanisms, and how intelligence interacts with reality, how it processes data, how is embedded in technology and human practice.
What is generally ignored is the lack/absence of intelligence, replaced by inherent biases, prejudices and misconceptions, which is known as stupidity. To complete the whole picture of intelligence, one needs to know stupidity, all its possible forms and types, its nature, origin and mechanisms, and how stupidity influences intelligence, as well as reality, data, technology and practice.
After all, human stupidity will resist to its end not to allow a real intelligence to win over.
The basic laws of human stupidity
In 1976,?professor Cipolla?published a 60-page essay describing the fundamental laws of the greatest existential threat to humanity:?stupidity. He postulated that stupidity is a common variable that remains constant in all populations and categories, class, sex, gender, ethnicity, nationality, education, income, etc.?
He divides humanity into four main categories: Intelligent, Bandit, Helpless, Stupid, with the following laws.
Law 1: Everyone always and inevitably underestimates the number of stupid people in circulation
Law 2: The probability that a person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or group of people when he or she does not benefit and may even suffer losses.
Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the destructive power of stupid individuals.
Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
And its direct consequence:?a stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.
How to measure humanity's stupidity
By the very nature, we are born unintelligent, call it "Natural Stupidity”, but with desire to know or believe, to understand and influence the environment and to explain and manipulate?phenomena, call it "Natural Intelligence". It is what has motivated humanity's development of?science,?technology, philosophy,?mythology,?religion.
The natural stupidity is our?constitutional lack of learning and knowledge, lack of memory, inability to think right and fast and to process too much data and information. All our social systems and technologies that we have in place are to provide tools to substitute these inherent human inabilities.
We like to repeat "to err is human", classifying ourself as Homo sapiens after Linnaeus, while really being Homo stupidus, name proposed by?Ernst Haeckel .
Stupidity has its pros and cons, like that it is useful or funny, expensive or sad, good or evil, a part of trial-and-error learning or a moment of human evolution.
As some stupidity psychologists have wisely noted it:
"Stupidity is not just stupid, it is extraordinarily useful, and even necessary (as well as extremely destructive). It maintains our medical, prison, criminal, legal, social work, media, advertizing, cosmetic, clothing and academic industries, as well as?politics?and economics; and it keeps large sectors of our population gainfully employed...
Lifestyles cause deathstyles. We are complicit in our own deaths to a huge degree by our unhealthy habits of eating, drinking, smoking?and lack of exercise; e.g. eating: anorexia, diabetes; drinking: liver disease; smoking: cancers of the lungs, throat and tongue; exercise: obesity, diabetes and heart attacks. Not to mention drugs, gambling, sex and high risk hobbies and occupations". Stupidity and Homo sapiens
Meantime, the foundational stupidity of humans is foundational in all the ancient mythologies and religions, be it Chinese, Indian, Persian, Greek or Judeo-Christian.
"...on Mother Earth there is none so miserable as man" [Homer, Iliad, a series of miseries or disastrous events]. As such, our biases and prejudices, as "systematic patterns of deviation from norm and/or rationality in judgment ", are so many that they are beyond of any rational classification.
But stupidity as intelligence is not just something personal, but rather a universal phenomenon with many dimensions, as in:
Commonly, "stupidity" defined as "unintelligence, lack of intelligence", "behaviour that shows a lack of good sense or?judgement" or "the quality of being stupid or?unintelligent".
Stupidity as an ordinal variables could range from super stupidity to full ignorance, attributed to any intelligent entities:
individual persons
human communities
legal, artificial, business entities
government entities
technological systems.
It is excluding any mental deficiency or superiority, what is above or below normal intelligence, dubbed as moron, imbecile and idiot, or the IQ classifications, from feeble-mindedness (< 70) to genius (>140).
It must be clear, there is no classification system for IQ/ST tests. If an IQ test tells you how intelligent you/your company/community/city/country are, an SQ test tells you how stupid you/your company/community/city/country are.
It is all evidenced by the wide research and practice of creating smart/green companies, smart/green communities, smart/green cities, smart/green countries, or the whole intelligent world (I-World ).
Here is how stupid we are. Of all 17,291 views of the I-World development strategy, there are only 3 persons who like or think to see our future world Intelligent, Innovative, Interconnected, Instrumented, Inclusive, Green WORLD, with Smart CONTINENTS, COUNTRIES, CITIES, AND COMMUNITIES.
Again, being stupid is not the opposite of being intelligent. These attributes are orthogonal to each other, following the Orthogonality rule that the stupidity and intelligence are independent of each other.
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You/your company/community/city/country can have a high IQ and still be quite ignorantly biased or prejudiced in its knowledge, reasoning, planning, decision, or actions, which is reflected by a high Stupidity Quotient (SQ) of you/your company/community/city/country or the whole humanity.
Traditionally, we still follow the obsolete Gardner’s list of the forms of multiple intelligences, relating to a human, as in:
?Moreover, while performing the IQ test, we give most attention to linguistic intelligence (Turing Test) and logical-mathematical intelligence, relative to the other aspects of intelligence.
So, we still tend to evaluate intelligence using a single measure, the IQ, partial and individual, intentionally ignoring the Stupidity Quotient (SQ), in its most general sense.
Meantime, there are stupid ideas and beliefs, errors of actions, omission or commission, confident ignorance (foolhardiness); lack of control (impulsiveness, obsessive or addictive behavior); absent-mindedness; lack of practicality, etc.?For example, one might believe that the earth is flat, the moon landings were faked, climate change is a hoax, etc.
Humans are all both stupid and intelligent at the same time, at many different levels, from individual to collective to national to humanity levels.
At the personal level, some of us are super stupid or badly ignorant, while being a genius in some narrow domains of interest. This mental contradiction comes from the lack of general intelligence or universal understanding, to be completed with expert intelligence and special knowledge of special knowledge fields, as mathematics, physics, biology, sociology, engineering, etc.
Here are some examples of high SQ actions at a national level:
At the global level of the whole humanity, as a fresh example of SQ evidence could serve the?ongoing coronavirus?COVID-19 pandemic affecting?229 countries and territories.
Coronavirus Cases: 665,002,893; Deaths: 6,697,442; Recovered: 636,922,409
Formally, the general IQ could be estimated by the sum total of partial IQs minus the sum total of partial SQs
GIQ = IQs - SQs
An entity, a person, business entity or government agency, is generally intelligent if it has a relatively high aggregate IQ and an average or relatively low aggregate SQ.?An average or low aggregate IQ and a relatively high aggregate SQ is likely to make things rather absurd or nonsensical or generally stupid.
Beware human super stupidity, rather than artificial superintelligence
The most dangerous stupidity involve a so-called existential risk , "any risk that has the potential to eliminate all of humanity or, at the very least, kill large swaths of the global population, leaving the survivors without sufficient means to rebuild society to current standards of living".
?Among man-made?global catastrophic?risks are nuclear war or climate change or emerging technologies, like nanotechnology, biotechnology or neurotechnology, led by AI.
Take the "paperclip maximizer" thought experiment, suggested by N. Bostrom, which is a telling sample of ASI super stupidity:
"Suppose we have an AI whose only goal is to make as many paper clips as possible. The AI will realize quickly that it would be much better if there were no humans because humans might decide to switch it off. Because if humans do so, there would be fewer paper clips. Also, human bodies contain a lot of atoms that could be made into paper clips. The future that the AI would be trying to gear towards would be one in which there were a lot of paper clips but no humans".
In fact, stupidity is the cause of all human biases and prejudices, evils and sins, from poverty and inequality to violence and hostility, brutality and savagery.
The issue of issues with the study of stupidity is how to measure it at the individual, collective, national or universal humanity levels.
"We may agree that some of our actions, or other peoples’, or government or corporate policies are stupid; but how can we operationalize the concept? How can we measure stupidity? We have measures of almost everything: time and space and speed, fertility and mortality rates, G.D.P., presidential popularity, crime…but not stupidity. Can we compare stupidity rates by age, sex and ethnic group? Or by state or province? With accurate statistics we might be able to ameliorate the high costs.
Certainly we do have some measures: smoking rates, obesity rates, but we do not yet have a universal measure reliable for individuals and for cross-cultural comparison. We have IQs and EQs, and we need SQs".
Humanity's IQ/SQ could be measured by all its stupid history of conflicts and wars, self-reinforcing with technological and industrial revolutions.
At his talk celebrating the opening of the new Leverhulme Centre of the Future of Intelligence Hawking said: "We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity."
Natural Stupidity/Intelligence vs. Artificial Stupidity/Intelligence?
In the same lecture at the University of Cambridge,?Stephen Hawking ?made the bold claim ?that the creation of?artificial intelligence ?will be "either the best, or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity".
Here comes the mother of all human stupidity: artificial intelligence as a human-like or human-level intelligence, as if AI:
Now, the human-like artificial general intelligence (AGI)?(strong AI, full AI) is to describe machine intelligence which functionality matches human mental/intelligent/cognitive/behavioral capabilities across multiple domains. It is characterized by self-improvement mechanisms and generalization instead of specific data training to perform in narrow domains.
Considering its possible effects, HHAL is a much more unintelligent idea than even the human cloning, the creation of a genetically identical copy (or clone) of a human.
The language, speech and image recognition capabilities of HAI systems have developed very rapidly, and much better relative human performance.
The HAI would be a machine that is capable of performing the same?range?of intellectual tasks and solving problems that humans are capable of, being “able to learn to do anything that a human can do”, as Norvig and Russell put it in their AI textbook.
Such HAI machines would be able to do the work of blue- white, or gold-collar workforce, be it a translator, an accountant, an illustrator, a teacher, a therapist, a truck driver, or the work of a trader on the world’s financial markets. The would also be able to do research and science, and to develop new technologies based on that .
The make and break differences, HAI systems will have the immense memory of computer systems and the speed at which to absorb and process information.
These differences mean that an HAI as good as humans in every domain would overall be much more powerful than the human mind. Or, the first human-like and human-level AI would therefore be superhuman in many ways.
The HHAI systems are the result of decades of steady advances in AI technology.
The big chart below brings this history over the last eight decades into perspective . The timeline goes back to the 1940s, the very beginning of electronic computers.
What can we learn from this historical development for the future of HAI, if we are not badly stupid?
All major technological innovations lead to positive and negative consequences.
HAL is a very general-purpose technology that can be used for extremely good goals or some extraordinarily bad ones, like the nuclear technology. For such a unique ‘multiple use technology’, it is important to understand what is happening and how we want the technology to be used. Just a couple of decades ago the world was very different. What might HAI technology be capable of in the future? Sooner or latter, the HAI system would match the capabilities of a human brain, and exceed it x-fold.
Such an Human-like and Human-level AI system would be powerful enough to bring the world into an "black swan future". It could lead to a change much exceeding the scale of the previous major transformations in human history, the agricultural, industrial or digital revolutions.
This unprecedented event of Homo stupidus is dubbed as an?AI takeover. The HAI becomes the dominant form of intelligence on Earth, as?computers and humanoid robots, like Tesla bots,?"effectively take the control of the planet away from the human species, replacing the entire human workforce as a much more productive automated machine labor.
"Humanity will create something more powerful than itself. When you have something that understands you better than you understand yourself, then you are useless. Anything you can do, this system can do better." Y. N. Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Elon Musk has been a vocal critic of the human-like and human-level AI, calling it an “existential threat to humanity ” back in 2014, and saying “AI will make jobs kind of pointless ” at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.
He told Alibaba founder Jack Ma that humanity is merely a “biological boot loader for digital super intelligence ”, and at?SXSW 2018 , Musk unequivocally stated, ‘Mark my words — A.I. is far more dangerous than nukes.’
And here comes Stephen Hawking ?who timely warned that the creation of powerful artificial intelligence will be “either the best or the worst thing, ever to happen to humanity”
Conclusion
Never underestimate the destructive power of human nonintelligence/stupidity, individual, collective, national or transnational.
Massive/pandemic stupidity is the only real existential risk that threatens the premature extinction of humanity, the permanent and drastic destruction of its potential for a smart and sustainable future development.
For Homo sapiens to become Homo deus, it must not fall into the Homo stupidus fate, as Homo neanderthalensis.
Epilogue: Non-human AI as the most anti-stupid idea ever
Trans-AI: How to Build True AI or Real Machine Intelligence and Learning
Abstract:?We are at the edge of colossal changes. This is a critical moment of historical choice and opportunity. It could be the best 5 years ahead of us that we have ever had in human history or one of the worst, because we have all the power, technology and knowledge to create the most fundamental general-purpose technology (GPT), which could completely upend the whole human history.
The most important GPTs were fire, the wheel, language, writing, the printing press, the steam engine, electric power, information and telecommunications technology, all to be topped by real artificial intelligence technology. Our study refers to Why and How the Real Machine Intelligence or True AI or Real Superintelligence (RSI) could be designed and developed, deployed and distributed in the next 5 years. The whole idea of RSI took about three decades in three phases.
The first conceptual model of TransAI was published in 1989. It covered all possible physical phenomena, effects and processes. The more extended model of Real AI was developed in 1999.
A complete theory of superintelligence, with its reality model, global knowledge base, NL programing language, and master algorithm, was presented in 2008. The RSI project has been finally completed in 2020, with some key findings and discoveries being published on the EU AI Alliance/Futurium site in 20+ articles. The RSI features a unifying World Metamodel (Global Ontology), with a General Intelligence Framework (Master Algorithm), Standard Data Type Hierarchy, NL Programming Language, to effectively interact with the world by intelligent processing of its data, from the web data to the real-world data. The basic results with technical specifications, classifications, formulas, algorithms, designs and patterns, were kept as a trade secret and documented as the Corporate Confidential Report: How to Engineer Man-Machine Superintelligence 2025.
As a member of EU AI Alliance, the author has proposed the Man-Machine RSI Platform as a key part of Transnational EU-Russia Project. To shape a smart and sustainable future, the world should invest into the RSI Science and Technology, for the Trans-AI paradigm is the way to an inclusive, instrumented, interconnected and intelligent world.
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1 年Emer O'Donnell