预计阅读本页时间：-
Senior maverick, Wired; author, Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities
广告：个人专属 VPN，独立 IP，无限流量，多机房切换，还可以屏蔽广告和恶意软件，每月最低仅 5 美元
The most important thing about making machines that can think is that they will think differently.
Because of a quirk in our evolutionary history, we are cruising as if we were the only sentient species on our planet, leaving us with the incorrect idea that human intelligence is singular. It is not. Our intelligence is a society of intelligences, and this suite occupies only a small corner of the many types of intelligences and consciousnesses possible in the universe. We like to call our human intelligence “general purpose,” because, compared with other kinds of minds we’ve met, it can solve more kinds of problems, but as we continue to build synthetic minds, we’ll come to realize that human thinking isn’t general at all but only one species of thinking.
The kind of thinking done by today’s emerging AIs is not like human thinking. While they can play chess, drive a car, describe the contents of a photograph—tasks we once believed only humans could do—they don’t do it in humanlike fashion. Facebook can ramp up an AI that can start with a photo of any person on Earth and correctly identify them out of some 3 billion people online. Human brains cannot scale to this degree, which makes this ability nonhuman. We’re notoriously bad at statistical thinking, so we’re making intelligences with good statistical skills in order that they don’t think like us. One of the advantages of having AIs drive our cars is that they won’t drive like humans, with our easily distracted minds.
In a pervasively connected world, thinking differently is the source of innovation and wealth. Just being smart isn’t enough. Commercial incentives will make industrial-strength AI ubiquitous, embedding cheap smartness into all that we make. But a bigger payoff will come when we start inventing new kinds of intelligences and entirely new ways of thinking. We don’t know what the full taxonomy of intelligence is right now.
Some traits of human thinking will be common (as common as bilateral symmetry, segmentation, and tubular guts are in biology), but the possibility space of viable minds will likely contain traits far outside what we’ve evolved. It’s not necessary that this type of thinking be faster than that of humans, or greater or deeper. In some cases, it will be simpler. Our most important machines aren’t machines that do better at what humans do but machines that do things we can’t do at all. Our most important thinking machines won’t be faster or better at thinking what we can think; they will think what we can’t think.
To solve the current grand mysteries of quantum gravity, dark energy, and dark matter, we’ll probably need intelligences other than human. The extremely complex questions that will come after them may require even more distant and complex intelligences. Indeed, we may need to invent intermediate intelligences that can help us design yet more rarified intelligences that we couldn’t design alone.
Today, many scientific discoveries require hundreds of human minds to solve; in the near future, there may be classes of problems so deep they’ll require hundreds of different species of minds to solve. This will take us to a cultural edge, because it won’t be easy to accept answers from an alien intelligence. We already see that, in our unease in approving mathematical proofs done by computer. Dealing with alien intelligences will require a new skill and yet another broadening of ourselves.
AI could just as well stand for Alien Intelligence. We cannot be certain that we’ll contact extraterrestrial beings from one of the billion Earthlike planets in the sky in the next 200 years, but we can be almost 100 percent certain that we’ll have manufactured an alien intelligence by then. When we face those synthetic aliens, we’ll encounter the same benefits and challenges we expect from contact with ET. They’ll force us to reevaluate our roles, our beliefs, our goals, our identity. What are humans for? I believe our first answer will be that humans are for inventing new kinds of intelligences that biology couldn’t evolve. Our job is to make machines that think differently—to create alien intelligences. Call them artificial aliens.
