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Comment by Planktonne

17 hours ago

That's an absurdist argument that would make 'smarter' meaningless.

A giraffe isn't smarter than me at being tall.

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Planktonne

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skybrian  17 hours ago

Playing chess, writing code, finding security bugs, and proving mathematical theorems all seem fairly similar to thinking and don't seem much like being tall.

  • hollowturtle  15 hours ago

    > writing code, finding security bugs, and proving mathematical theorems

    While the second can be automated as in "this is the repo go on and look for security issues", the first one and especially the last one do not ever happen alone. Terence Tao did the math proof not chatGPT that was just used as a tool, a tool can do smart things but it's not smart

  • Planktonne  16 hours ago

    The crucial distinction here is that "seem" does not at all mean the same thing as "is".

    Thunder seems like the anger of the gods but it isn't. We've had chess playing programs for a long time now and despite it seeming like thinking is required for them, it isn't.

    The principle you're using here isn't a scientific one but magical [1]. Abandoning empiricism and rationality is not a good way to make progress.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_magic

    • skybrian  16 hours ago

      You're insisting on a particular definition of a vague term.

      It makes sense now to say that temperature is what a thermometer measures. However, before there were good thermometers, people often thought that heat and cold were different things. The meanings of the words we use were influenced by scientific progress.

      For thinking, we don't have a good thermometer. There are IQ tests, but they aren't aren't necessarily all that useful for comparing what people do to what machines do. And that's why there are a zillion AI benchmarks - none are entirely satisfactory.

      So what does "smart" mean to you? How do you define it in practical sense? What definition should scientists settle on?

      Without a proper definition, how do you tell the difference between "seems smart" and "is smart?"

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