Posts Tagged ‘intelligence’
“If all insects disappeared, all life on earth would perish. If all humans disappeared, all life on earth would flourish.”
As Lars Chittka explains, insects have surprisingly rich inner lives—a revelation that has wide-ranging ethical implications…
In the early 1990s, when I was a Ph.D. student at the Free University of Berlin modeling the evolution of bee color perception, I asked a botany professor for some advice about flower pigments. I wanted to know the degrees of freedom that flowers have in producing colors to signal to bees. He replied, rather furiously, that he was not going to engage in a discussion with me, because I worked in a neurobiological laboratory where invasive procedures on live honeybees were performed. The professor was convinced that insects had the capacity to feel pain. I remember walking out of the botanist’s office shaking my head, thinking the man had lost his mind.
Back then, my views were in line with the mainstream. Pain is a conscious experience, and many scholars then thought that consciousness is unique to humans. But these days, after decades of researching the perception and intelligence of bees, I am wondering if the Berlin botany professor might have been right.
Researchers have since shown that bees and some other insects are capable of intelligent behavior that no one thought possible when I was a student. Bees, for example, can count, grasp concepts of sameness and difference, learn complex tasks by observing others, and know their own individual body dimensions, a capacity associated with consciousness in humans. They also appear to experience both pleasure and pain. In other words, it now looks like at least some species of insects—and maybe all of them—are sentient.
These discoveries raise fascinating questions about the origins of complex cognition. They also have far-reaching ethical implications for how we should treat insects in the laboratory and in the wild…
Insects are key enablers of much life on earth. They appear to exhibit intelligence, and maybe more: “Do Insects Feel Joy and Pain?” in @sciam.
Bugs are not going to inherit the earth. They own it now. So we might as well make peace with the landlord.
– Thomas Eisner
Pair with this helpfully skeptical (but respectful) review of Chittka’s book, The Mind of a Bee.
* Jonas Salk
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As we ponder our place, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that physician Sir Ronald Ross made a key breakthrough when he discovered malaria parasites while dissecting a mosquito. This day is now known as World Mosquito Day, in celebration of his critical discovery.
“Sheer dumb sentience”*…
As the power of AI grows, we find ourselves searching for a way to tell it might– or has– become sentient. Kristen Andrews and Jonathan Birch suggest that we should look to the minds of animals…
… Last year, [Google engineer Blake] Lemoine leaked the transcript [of an exchange he’d had with LaMDA, a Google AI system] because he genuinely came to believe that LaMDA was sentient – capable of feeling – and in urgent need of protection.
Should he have been more sceptical? Google thought so: they fired him for violation of data security policies, calling his claims ‘wholly unfounded’. If nothing else, though, the case should make us take seriously the possibility that AI systems, in the very near future, will persuade large numbers of users of their sentience. What will happen next? Will we be able to use scientific evidence to allay those fears? If so, what sort of evidence could actually show that an AI is – or is not – sentient?
The question is vast and daunting, and it’s hard to know where to start. But it may be comforting to learn that a group of scientists has been wrestling with a very similar question for a long time. They are ‘comparative psychologists’: scientists of animal minds.
We have lots of evidence that many other animals are sentient beings. It’s not that we have a single, decisive test that conclusively settles the issue, but rather that animals display many different markers of sentience. Markers are behavioural and physiological properties we can observe in scientific settings, and often in our everyday life as well. Their presence in animals can justify our seeing them as having sentient minds. Just as we often diagnose a disease by looking for lots of symptoms, all of which raise the probability of having that disease, so we can look for sentience by investigating many different markers…
On learning from our experience of animals to assess AI sentience: “What has feelings?” from @KristinAndrewz and @birchlse in @aeonmag.
Apposite: “The Future of Human Agency” (a Pew round-up of expert opinion on the future impact of AI)
Provocative in a resonant way: “The Philosopher Who Believes in Living Things.”
* Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312
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As we talk to the animals, we might send thoughtful birthday greetings to J. P. Guilford; he was born on this date in 1897. A psychologist, he’s best remembered as a developer and practitioner of psychometrics, the quantitative measurement of subjective psychological phenomena (such sensation, personality, attention).
Guilford’s Structure of Intellect (SI) theory rejected the view that intelligence could be characterized in a single numerical parameter. He proposed that three dimensions were necessary for accurate description: operations, content, and products.
Guilford also developed the concepts of “convergent” and “divergent” thinking, as part of work he did emphasizing the importance of creativity in industry, science, arts, and education, and in urging more research into it nature.
A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Guilford as the 27th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.
“Insofar as we have power over the world and over one another, we must learn to do what the leaf and the whale and the wind do of their own nature.”*…
James Bridle’s remarkable new book, Ways of Being-Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence, explores the many types of intelligences that exist in the more-than-human world around us. In a fascinating interview with Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee, Bridle elaborates…
I knew, setting out to do this, that I would have to at some point, as a writer about intelligence, define what I meant by intelligence. But I was very frustrated by the lack of what seemed to me to be clear, good definitions of what it is we’re all talking about. You can get all these lists of what people mean when they talk about intelligence, and it’s a kind of grab bag of different qualities that changes all the time: things like planning, counterfactual imagining or coming up with scenarios, theories of mind, tool use, all these different qualities. People pick from them according to whatever their particular field is, but they all come from a human perspective. That seemed to me to be what actually united almost all our common discussions about intelligence: that it was just whatever humans did. And so all our discussions about other potential forms of intelligence, other intelligences that we encountered in the world, or intelligences that we imagined, were all framed in terms of how we understood ourselves and our own thinking. It really struck me that this became an incredibly limiting factor in how we were thinking about intelligence more broadly—and not just intelligence, really, but all relationships we have in the world that are so often mediated by our own intelligence. On the one hand this has restricted our ability to recognize the intelligences of other beings—and I think we’ll probably come to that—but it’s also deeply shaped our history of technology, and particularly AI…
So much more at: “An Ecological Technology– An Interview with James Bridle“; @jamesbridle in @emergence_zine.
* Ursula K. Le Guin, The Farthest Shore
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As we investigate intelligence inclusively, we might recall that it was on this date in 1878 that the first telephone directory was issued. Consisting of a single piece of cardboard, it listed 50 individuals, businesses, and other offices in New Haven, Connecticut that had telephones. There were, as readers will note on the photo below, no numbers, as callers had to be connected by an operator.
“The brain is a wonderful organ; it starts working the moment you get up in the morning and does not stop until you get into the office”*…
For as long as humans have thought, humans have thought about thinking. George Cave on the power and the limits of the metaphors we’ve used to do that…
For thousands of years, humans have described their understanding of intelligence with engineering metaphors. In the 3rd century BCE, the invention of hydraulics popularized the model of fluid flow (“humours”) in the body. This lasted until the 1500s, supplanted by the invention of automata and the idea of humans as complex machines. From electrical and chemical metaphors in the 1700s to advances in communications a century later, each metaphor reflected the most advanced thinking of that era. Today is no different: we talk of brains that store, process and retrieve memories, mirroring the language of computers.
I’ve always believed metaphors to be helpful and productive in communicating unfamiliar concepts. But this fascinating history of cognitive science metaphors shows that flawed metaphors can take hold and limit the scope for alternative ideas. In the worst case, the EU spent 10 years and $1.3 billion building a model of the brain based on the incorrect belief that the brain functions like a computer…
Thinking about thinking, from @George_Cave in @the_prepared.
Apposite: “Finding Language in the Brain.”
* Robert Frost
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As we cogitate on cognition, we might send carefully-computed birthday greetings to Grace Brewster Murray Hopper. A seminal computer scientist and Rear Admiral in the U.S. Navy, “Amazing Grace” (as she was known to many in her field) was one of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer (in 1944), invented the first compiler for a computer programming language, and was one of the leaders in popularizing the concept of machine-independent programming languages– which led to the development of COBOL, one of the first high-level programming languages.
Hopper also (inadvertently) contributed one of the most ubiquitous metaphors in computer science: she found and documented the first computer “bug” (in 1947).
She has both a ship (the guided-missile destroyer USS Hopper) and a super-computer (the Cray XE6 “Hopper” at NERSC) named in her honor.
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“The intelligence of the universe is social”*…
Recently, (Roughly) Daily looked at AI and our (that’s to say, humans’) possible relationships to it. In a consideration of Jame Bridle‘s new book, Ways of Being, Doug Bierend widens the iris, considering our relationship not only to intelligences we might create but also to those with which we already co-habit…
It’s lonely at the top, but it doesn’t have to be. We humans tend to see ourselves as the anointed objects of evolution, our intelligence representing the leading edge of unlikely order cultivated amid an entropic universe. While there is no way to determine any purpose or intention behind the processes that produced us, let alone where they will or should lead, that hasn’t stopped some from making assertions.
For example, consider the school of thought called longtermism, explored by Phil Torres in this essay for Aeon. Longtermism — a worldview held, as Torres notes, by some highly influential people including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, tech entrepreneur Jaan Tallinn, and Jason Matheny, President Biden’s deputy assistant for technology and national security — essentially sees the prime directive of Homo sapiens as one of maximizing the “potential” of our species. That potential — often defined along such utilitarian lines as maximizing the population, distribution, longevity, and comfort that future humans could achieve over the coming millennia — is what longtermers say should drive the decisions we make today. Its most extreme version represents a kind of interstellar manifest destiny, human exceptionalism on the vastest possible scale. The stars are mere substrate for the extension and preservation of our species’ putatively unique gifts. Some fondly imagine our distant descendants cast throughout the universe in womb-like symbiosis with machines, ensconced in virtual environments enjoying perpetual states of bliss —The Matrix as utopia.
Longtermist philosophy also overlaps with the “transhumanist” line of thought, articulated by figures such as philosopher Nick Bostrom, who describes human nature as incomplete, “a half-baked beginning that we can learn to remold in desirable ways.” Here, humanity as currently or historically constituted isn’t an end so much as a means of realizing some far greater fate. Transhumanism espouses the possibility of slipping the surly bonds of our limited brains and bodies to become “more than human,” in a sense reminiscent of fictional android builder Eldon Tyrell in Blade Runner: “Commerce is our goal,” Tyrell boasts. “‘More human than human’ is our motto.” Rather than celebrating and deepening our role within the world that produced us, these outlooks seek to exaggerate and consummate a centuries-long process of separation historically enabled by the paired forces of technology and capital.
But this is not the only possible conception of the more than human. In their excellent new book Ways of Being, James Bridle also invokes the “more than human,” not as an effort to exceed our own limitations through various forms of enhancement but as a mega-category that collects within it essentially everything, from microbes and plants to water and stone, even machines. It is a grouping so vast and diverse as to be indefinable, which is part of Bridle’s point: The category disappears, and the interactions within it are what matters. More-than-human, in this usage, dismisses human exceptionalism in favor of recognizing the ecological nature of our existence, the co-construction of our lives, futures, and minds with the world itself.
From this point of view, human intelligence is just one form of a more universal phenomenon, an emergent “flowering” found all throughout the evolutionary tree. It is among the tangled bramble of all life that our intelligence becomes intelligible, a gestalt rather than a particular trait. As Bridle writes, “intelligence is not something which exists, but something one does. It is active, interpersonal and generative, and it manifests when we think and act.” In Bridle’s telling, mind and meaning alike exist by way of relationship with everything else in the world, living or not. Accepting this, it makes little sense to elevate human agency and priorities above all others. If our minds are exceptional, it is still only in terms of their relationship to everything else that acts within the world. That is, our minds, like our bodies, aren’t just ours; they are contingent on everything else, which would suggest that the path forward should involve moving with the wider world rather than attempting to escape or surpass it.
This way of thinking borrows heavily from Indigenous concepts and cosmologies. It decenters human perspective and priorities, instead setting them within an infinite concatenation of agents engaged in the collective project of existence. No one viewpoint is more favored than another, not even of the biological over the mineral or mechanical. It is an invitation to engage with the “more-than-human” world not as though it consisted of objects but rather fellow subjects. This would cut against the impulse to enclose and conquer nature, which has been reified by our very study of it….
Technology often presupposes human domination, but it could instead reflect our ecological dependence: “Entangled Intelligence,” from @DougBierend in @_reallifemag (via @inevernu and @sentiers). Eminently worth reading in full.
* Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations
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As we welcome fellow travelers, we might recall that this date in 1752 was the final day of use of the Julian calendar in Great Britain, Ireland, and the British colonies, including those on the East coast of America. Eleven days were skipped to sync to the Gregorian calendar, which was designed to realign the calendar with equinoxes. Hence the following day was September 14. (Most of Europe had shifted, by Papal decree, to the Gregorian calendar in the 16th century; Russia and China made the move in the 20th century.)
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