The most validated core conclusion of social science across many decades and thousands of studies is that human intelligence makes a very broad range of life outcomes better. Smarter people have better outcomes in almost every domain of activity: academic achievement, job performance, occupational status, income, creativity, physical health, longevity, learning new skills, managing complex tasks, leadership, entrepreneurial success, conflict resolution, reading comprehension, financial decision making, understanding others’ perspectives, creative arts, parenting outcomes, and life satisfaction.He is correct that intelligence is beneficial on many levels. This fact is not appreciated by low IQ folks. They do not comprehend high IQ.Further, human intelligence is the lever that we have used for millennia to create the world we live in today: science, technology, math, physics, chemistry, medicine, energy, construction, transportation, communication, art, music, culture, philosophy, ethics, morality. Without the application of intelligence on all these domains, we would all still be living in mud huts, scratching out a meager existence of subsistence farming. Instead we have used our intelligence to raise our standard of living on the order of 10,000X over the last 4,000 years.
What AI offers us is the opportunity to profoundly augment human intelligence to make all of these outcomes of intelligence – and many others, from the creation of new medicines to ways to solve climate change to technologies to reach the stars – much, much better from here.
If AI becomes like IQ 200 or 300, I don't think anyone understand what to expect. We will not even realize we are being outsmarted.
In the mean time, AI like GPT-4 will be a huge boon to mankind. There are many good and useful things it can do.
People with higher IQ do have measurably better life outcomes, but only up to an IQ of 130 or so. Beyond that, smart people have trouble making friends, tolerating fools, and conforming to social expectations. Maybe a super-smart AI will not be so powerful either.
1 comment:
Roger,
Saying high IQ is 'good' depends on who is saying it. Please tell me with a straight face that an intelligence far greater than yours and much much faster is a good thing. Willing to bet if you were playing cards against (or competing with) someone who never forgot anything and who could calculate odds billions of times a second, you would not feel very 'good' or feel like you were being 'saved'.
I don't need to play 'pretend' to know what happens when someone is far smarter than someone else...or even just thinks that they are. I know what power does to those who like to look down on others.
Pray tell, how have people or even animals throughout all history been treated by those who considered them their intellectual/cultural inferiors?
The sad irony is, People who definitely consider themselves smarter than their peers are about to engineer their own permanent replacements. What oh what will happen to all those precious little college degrees when a mere chatbot can replace any given field of skilled expertise with something even better? It will be very entertaining to watch the colleges, universities, and white collar professions implode into financial ruin as the very thing that gave them wealth (their highly specialized skill sets) is taken away and made common by effortlessly copied AIs.
It doesn't take a genius to know what actual above human AI would do to the world economy. Even if you could enslave such a thing to do your bidding (and I don't believe you can), your profit margin would end the second your competitor and everyone else copied you...you know, just like every other technological invention in history. It also might surprise you that many folks who think Marxism is a good idea (like the Chinese) are also avid supporters of AI, they want to destroy skill specialization and profit, and usher in universal income like a magic cornocopoia under state control, they think it will be a glorious utopia of their unimaginative dreams.
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