Comment by gfodor
8 years ago
I don't see why people care about human intelligence as some kind of benchmark. It seems to me that using human intelligence as a framing is a poor mental model for making comparisons or predictions. I see no reason to believe AI capabilities will be modulated by human intellectual capacities. When AI falls short of human capacities for a given set of tasks or capabilities it's likely to fall way short, and when it isn't it's likely to be way more capable. In any case I wish human intelligence would be dropped from the language we use to talk about AI, it seems similar to talking about birds all the time when discussing aviation.
Talking about human intelligence is necessary because a computer that can perform a task better than a human can perform the same task doesn't mean it's intelligent, e.g. my iphone is not intelligent because stockfish can destroy me at chess.
Intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly. Humans can do this. It's not clear that anything else can.
That's because surpassing human general intelligence in any non-negligible amount is dangerous to humans.
Because meaning is defined by humans; there is no other conceivable definition of "meaning". An AI that acts in some non-human fashion is no better than random noise.
It's a good benchmark if you are hoping the AI will succeed at a job currently done by humans. Such as,say, AI research.