The limits of human intelligence

Humans are limited by their bodies. A dog can smell certain chemicals, and hear very high pitched sounds, but a human can’t, because they don’t have the nose or ears to do it. Meanwhile, dogs cannot build civilisations or create machines because they don’t have the brain power to do so. This thought won’t occur to you while you go about your daily lives, but the human brain is also limited. This limit has massive implications for us, since surely we will, or already have, come to a point where we can’t solve certain problems.

How can we be sure that the answers to Goldbach’s Conjecture or world peace or the meaning of life or whatever are not freaking bloody obvious? So long as we have limited intelligence, and hence limited capacity to figure out solutions or even notice them, I have a feeling these sorts of really difficult questions will continue to cause problems for us. Only extremely intelligent and knowledgeable people have made advances in answering these really tough questions, and many of them have died without ever seeing the answer. How can we fix this limited intelligence?

Create an even greater intelligence.

What do I mean by this? Take for example, the use of computers. Computers have, in a way, allowed us to overcome certain limitations of the human brain and enhance our knowledge and comprehension of things. Computers can calculate things very quickly, accurately and don’t need to rest. With computers, humans have been able to solve certain problems which were previously impossible or difficult to solve, like finding really good approximations to irrational roots. The combination of a computer and a human’s brain is a greater intellect that a humans brain alone.

How do we go about doing this? Well, I can envision two methods this can be done. One way would be to continue enhancing computers, and possibly one day connect computers and brains together to create intelligent cyborgs. A second way would be to genetically engineer humans. We can breed horses for speed, so why can’t we breed humans for intelligence? We can change the genome of a plant so they make more fruit, so why can’t we change the genome of humans so their brain is the size of an elephant?

A computer cannot go beyond the limits of our intelligence. It can only accomplish tasks we are capable of accomplishing, just faster.

We need an all knowing brain grown in a whale sized womb like in Elfen Lied.

If they ever do get "smarter" then us every one of us is fucked. Think 2001 a space odyssey but on a global scale, brrrr...

We would have to know how to create a program that could learn at a greater scale than we could.

Which really, the only possibility of that happening is probably by accident.

it starts with 2001(computers rebel), then goes to terminator(computers conquor), then matrix(computers own).

Church wont allow artificial birth/creation. It's like.... playing GOD. D:
besides, computers are calculators, made fun. It isn't smart. It was just made to help calculate accurately. Computers wont process data without someone inputting it. Thus, computers aren't as smart as human brain is. :/

Only if they know about it.


Computers by themselves aren't smart, they're just parts. It's the software that works all the magic (of course, the relation is somewhat symbiotic - software can't run if the computer is inoperable, and in turn parts just plugged into the electricity don't do much).

Computers are pretty much based on human brain, but they're much more "streamlined" in a manner of speaking. Human brain has to do thousand of things a second to keep human body alive and in relatively good shape. Computer on the other hand, can commit much more of they processing power to given task.

In fact, it becomes pretty apparent when you're running several demanding tasks on it - the more they are, the longer it takes for the software to carry them all out.

In that retrospect, the human brain is truly a biological supercomputer. We're just eat a lot of processing power to just keep running.

In a way computers are reflections of our brains, only made more efficient.
I doubt that a supercomputer, no matter how efficient, would be necessarily smarter than us (it could, but not by that huge margin). Besides, it's outcomes would be based on the data that we deliver. If you'd want to make it superior, it would need to do more than that.

It would have to be creative.

For that, you'd need a true AI, which doesn't just process data. It thinks, but is not just limited to Yes/No answers or processing.

In a way, AI is a human mind, only that it can devote itself entirely to expanding it's knowledge - made faster by assistance of dozens of analytic software that it would no doubt have under it's control.

So yeah, cyborgs, or humans whose mind serves as the supercomputers OS can be the answer to making a "higher intelligence". Only that, if it's sentient, it doesn't necessarily have to become better than us - that is entirely random.

Genetic engineering may have a hand in this (like making a human neurons somehow better etc. and then melding it with a computer) but we must remember that human body does have it's limits. There is only so far that you can stretch that. You might breed horses to be progressively faster with each generation, but a sports car will still outrun them.

Just throwing in my few cents and thoughts.

In order for us to be truly inteligent we might have to have a higher percent controll of our brain. We only use and are restricted to use 10 to 15 percent of our brain. Such things seem imposible, some tibetan monks have done this but only had succes budging there brains an extra 3 to 5 percent.

By the way computers do need rest, because they over heat, especialy in summer.

The Big Brain am winning again. I am the greetest! Now I am leaving earth for no raeson!

i believe the limits of human intelligence will be gone and replaced with new ones over time has we evolve and gain new technology. Just like how people living 300+ years ago werent able to imagine todays scoiety and how intelligent we have become we also arent able to comprehend the types of advanced technology that will be in 200+ years in the future. Now Computers on the other hand will only be as smart as we are . We give computers the abilities to be able to process the things and calculations we can do but at a much more accurate and faster pace. Computers MAY be able to eventually over take us ONLY if they can also evolve to the point were they can deem humans less Intelligent and necessary then we are,this may or may not happened. i mean seriously though who would be dumb enough to build something that has ALL the cabilities that we humans have ex. reflexies,courosity, ever growing intelligence, and thats just a few things that make us superior to the other species on our planet.
this is just my opionion on this subject

There are no such thing as playing God.. if it is happened it's caused God allowed it..
over 100.000 years human intelligence does not increase significantly.. the improvement that only happen is the tool.. if there will be a tool that make human intelligence through the limits latter that would be fascinating..

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/TECH/05/23/brain.download/

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That's true.

I think the brain is capable of more things than we'd think. The human mind and heart are very complicated things. I guess someone has to unravel it all to get past their limits.

lol wut.

I've got a friend who has a PHD in software programing in robotics. He says thats it's not impossible at all for machines to be able to surpass us on an artificial level. This is because the laws of the universe (mathematics etc) have no bounds. An artificial intelligence might one day be able to conceive notions of laws that we humans can't.

For example, no matter how hard you try you can't ever teach a monkey calculus. Calculus is a universal law that exists but to a monkey they can't even begin to conceive the notion of calculus because of their biological limits. The same can be said for us humans. Computers are not bound to these sorts of limits.

Fun Fact
Human intelligence inhibits our strength.
Example
Senioritis, which is best explained as a period of heightened emotion, is what happens when your brain is not preventing you from performing at your peak physical level.

Consider this:

A human brain functions not all that different from today's computer's structure.
We accumulate through our lives experiences. Learn things from parents, teachers and other sources, and also the things we learn from our own bodies, like when jump from a high place, our legs will hurt, and we learn that's dangerous.
Based on all this stuff we learn along our lives, we 'create' for ourselves sets of rules, and make decisions based on those rules, that we usually call experience.

Likewise, a computer works on rules too, and make decisions based on them. That's also how today's AIs are build. They have a large database of rules, situations and possible outcomes for trouble situations. When faced with a problem, an AI uses programmed algorithms to calculate what are the most probable outcomes for different approaches to that same problem, tries to calculate what outcome have more chances of achieving the most successful or complete result and then acts accordingly.

But there's still one problem. Emotions. We humans can, and tend to do it very often, in a situation of anger, frustration, sadness, whatever, break those rules and act differently than we would. In a scenario like that, the results of our actions are somewhat random. Most of the time it ends in destructive acts and terrible things tend to happen when acting by instinct (or whatever you want to call it), but sometimes, those results can be good, and sometimes by accident, we discover new ways to solve something that seemed unsolvable before.

What i'm trying to say is, emotions, impulsiveness play a big role in human evolution, but it's still not very clear how emotion works. If we are to build machines that can think and evolve by themselves, we would have to learn how to implement emotions into a machine. Real emotions, and not a preprogrammed algorithm, because, as thought we could create a machine that systematically grows it's own intellect, but using always the same ways and rules to do so, it would invariably, sooner or later, hit an 'evolutionary wall', where it will 'know everything' that there is to know.

I don't know if i made myself clear. It's a quite confusing matter and a little hard to explain the concept, but what i'm saying is that don't see a computer surpassing a human brain anytime soon.

Well, alot of information concerning brains and how they work is still speculation
And until we find out how it does work, if we ever do, then computers will never be able to match a human's intelligence
As to the limits
Its said that humans use a very small portion of the max capabilites of the brain, so...

The posts in this thread got a little sidetracked with discussion about whether computers will surpass humans in intelligence. That wasn't what my original psot was about, but this new direction of discussion doesn't worry me.

In my uneducated opinion, I don't think computers will surpass human intelligence (at least from a human perspective) in a very long time. Computers are extremely good at crunching large amounts of numbers and facts quickly and without mistakes. It isn't 'intelligent' though because it has no faculties to relate its number crunching power to real life problems without modelling, and it can't fix its own mistakes. Both modelling and debugging are done by humans who can comprehend these things. And then there are the physical limits of the silicone chips we use to process things: they can hold only so many electrons in a certain amount of space without getting too huge and hot. Perhaps a leap from solid state computing to quantum computing, where we use the spin direction of subatomic particles to represent 0's and 1's, is needed before we have processing power to rival a human brain. (This is just my uninformed speculation.)

The statement that "A computer cannot go beyond the limits of our intelligence. It can only accomplish tasks we are capable of accomplishing, just faster. " is partially untrue and partially irrelevant. It can accomplish small tasks faster (and accurately), and precisely because of that, it can accomplish large tasks which are impossible or near impossible for humans. There aren't any humans who can calculate the millionth-degree Taylor polynomial approximation for a function without making a mistake in under a few hours. There aren't any humans who can calculate Pi to a trillion decimal points. By itself, computers are probably less intelligent than an animal. However, the intelligence of computers and humans combined is greater than just humans alone.