Thinkism
Kevin Kelly (via inky):
No amount of thinkism will discover how the cell ages, or how telomeres fall off. No intelligence, no matter how super duper, can figure out how human body works simply by reading all the known scientific literature in the world and then contemplating it. No super AI can simply think about all the current and past nuclear fission experiments and then come up with working nuclear fusion in a day.
I think he’s overstating his case considerably. It’s a cogent point that we need data and experiments to determine how the world works. The question is how much information we need. Kelly says not only that we need data but that we specifically need more data than we have — not only do we need more data, but so does a hypothetical superhuman intelligence several orders of magnitude more intelligent than humans. And that is something we cannot know for sure.
We can almost never say exactly what data are needed to solve a specific physical mystery. We can sometimes make educated guesses, but that’s about it. When we have solved a problem, it often becomes apparent that we needed less data than we had at the time we discovered how to make sense of it all. The puzzle piece that triggered the final human epiphany need not be a piece of data without which no amount of thinking could reveal the shape of the solution. For example, Scott Aaronson contends:
Quantum mechanics is what you would inevitably come up with if you started from probability theory, and then said, let’s try to generalize it so that the numbers we used to call “probabilities” can be negative numbers. As such, the theory could have been invented by mathematicians in the 19th century without any input from experiment. It wasn’t, but it could have been.
It took experimental data to guide physicists to QM. But if some bright or lucky mathematician had thought to come up with the appropriate modifications to probability theory, maybe someone would have thought up the theory before the data that triggered the invention of quantum mechanics. Who’s to say a superhuman intelligence, working from the same data the pre-QM physicists were, wouldn’t have thought of this?
For the record, I don’t believe in the singularity, certainly not within my lifetime or the next few centuries, quite possibly not ever. But I believe it is only in hindsight, when we have the solution, that we can determine the minimal set of data any intelligence, no matter how refined, would need in order to work out the solution.
