“Human intelligence is underrated”
Longtime readers of this blog who may have tired of my ruminations about AI imposing absolute reign over humanity should be overjoyed to hear that I am dropping the apocalyptic Artificial Intelligence thread for the foreseeable future.
That’s because this article in New Scientist has put my fears (mostly) to rest, with one of the pioneers of Deep Learning, Yoshua Bengio, saying, “[the machines] don’t even have the intelligence of a 6-month-old.” He is even quoted as saying “AIs are really dumb”—essentially answering my very question. Thanks Yoshua!
Bengio expresses himself in deceptively simple language, but that’s an exercise in humility, because . . .
Bengio is a recipient of the A.M. Turing Award, the “Nobel Prize of computing,” which gives his opinions great authority. He’s one of the originators of “deep learning,” that combines advanced hardware with state-of-the-art software enabling machines to train themselves to solve problems. Bengios’s high standing is enough to persuade me not to worry to excess until a contradictory view by an equally qualified AI expert comes out. Most of those sounding alarms about AI Apocalypse are not computer scientists, no matter how smart they are. Elon Musk, for example, discovered that robots in his Tesla factory were making stupid mistakes, and concluded, “human intelligence is underrated.”
Continue reading “Are Machines Too Dumb to Take Over the World? Part III: Yes.”