Optimal intelligence?
And a question came to my mind: is there optimal intelligence?
Individuals differ from one another in their ability to understand complex ideas, to adapt effectively to the environment, to learn from experience, to engage in various forms of reasoning, to overcome obstacles by taking thought.
This suggests two-sidedeness and consequently subject of optimization. If you have no knowledge, everything is change - if you know everything, why would you change?
Intelligent people want to change the underlying systems that are causing major problems of our life. Some call this integral intelligence,
What makes such radical innovation more systemic?
Know the system you want to change - but not too much
Prototype - expect the unknown
Organize a feed back cycle - learn
IMO, an approach of optimal intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence
In The myth of AI, Edge, Jaron Lanier challenges the idea that computers are people. There's no doubt computers burst of knowledge - it's even computational…but...
I like the example of (Google) translation. Although back in the 50s, because of Chomsky's work, there has been a notion of a compact and elegant core to language, it took three decades, the AI community was trying to create ideal translators. It was a reasonable hypothesis, but nobody could do it. The break through came with the idea of statistical translation - from a huge set of examples provided by millions of human translators adding and improving the example stack daily. It's not perfect, not artful…but readable. Great.
We,ve invented zillions of tests (Turing test…) for algorithms to decide whether we want to call the computer that runs it a person. With this view we consequently love it, fear its misbehavior…
My simple question: what are the mechanism to make them partners of an optimal intelligence - changing the underling systems that are causing major problems of our human life.