From: Matt Mahoney (matmahoney@yahoo.com)
Date: Sun Mar 01 2009 - 13:40:47 MST
--- On Sun, 3/1/09, Roko Mijic <rmijic@googlemail.com> wrote:
> Can you make precise what you mean by "the Internet is getting
> smarter, ... we have trouble defining what smarter means"
> - presumably if you don't know what smarter means, then you can't
> claim that the Internet is getting it...
"Smarter" can either mean doing more of what humans can do (the Turing test) or satisfying more goals faster (Legg and Hutter's universal intelligence). The internet is getting smarter in both senses of the word. For example, Google can answer natural language questions up to about 8 words long. Next year it will be 10 words, with fewer mistakes, thanks in part to cheaper computers and more websites.
However, intelligence is only useful to us if we are the ones specifying the goals. Most people don't care about intelligence for its own sake. Maybe that's true for the 100 or so people worldwide who are making a serious effort to build an artificial human brain, what we call AGI. But if you are talking about useful intelligence, then you are talking about a large portion of the world economy. And nobody is directing it.
-- Matt Mahoney, matmahoney@yahoo.com
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