Steve Wozniak: The Future of AI Is 'Scary and Very Bad for People'

[hunter]

132. On the other hand, there might not be any "there" in intelligence.

Our minds may simply be a big bag of tools ready to be applied to specific problems, with a bunch of other tools on top of that, tools on top of tools to select lower level tools to use in a given situation.

We humans might call ourselves conscious and intelligent beings, but the only difference between us and a rat is we carry around a bigger set of tools in our head. At some point, when our software creations acquire a tool set similar in size to the human tool set, we'll have to consider them "intelligent." Otherwise it's just us changing the boundaries, "moving the goalposts," of what we call intelligence so we can exclude all but humans.

We already do that with animals, and the dominant human society has a long history of establishing boundaries that exclude other human societies.

It's clear to me there are plenty of conscious intelligent species on this planet, including some very obvious candidates like cetaceans, corvids, parrots, elephants, wolves, the rest of the great apes, and so on.

But if you recognize there is no one thing called intelligence, that there is no boundary, then you can start to recognize intelligence and communication in all sorts of life forms, not just the animals, but creatures such as trees, fungi, and social insects.

That scares the shit out of some people.