Day20: Alex Wissner-Gross

The reason: The prediction of future intelligence rising against us.

What is intelligence? I believe that many people should have been asking this question. I am sure that many approaches have been made. I want to share one of recent approach by Alex Wissner-Gross showed his approach by using physics.

As I describe here at Day 2 for Garry Kasparov. The world strongest chess was beaten by the artificial intelligence Deep Blue in 1997. However, the story was continuing. People realized that “Go” is more challenging game and also human are going lose against machine for past 10 years. The best techniques for playing Go now is maximizing the future choice during the game.

Oh, wait. This sounds familiar to physicist. Physicists Alex got hints recent advances in field ranging from cosmology to computer science. Entropy are always maximizing in closed space. So, is there any relation between intelligence and entropy maximization? His answer was “Yes”

Alex has showed that the simple equation for describing intelligence which might be equivalent E=mc2 in the relative theory. The equation tells us the intelligence is force F, the act that maximize the future freedom of actions with reservoir temperature (some strength) T with the diversity the possible accessible future S up to some future time horizon tau.

F = T *divergence(S) at tau

This equation is simple enough to understand for every person. But basically, simply I would say, “The intelligence is the action which maximizes the future possibilities”

So, by looking back our cognitive behavior, such as tool use, walking upright, social networking, we could clearly see that this single equation can explain the system is driven to increase the future freedom of actions.

If his theory is right, the natural consequence our human civilization has to face is rising up the machine intelligence. The machine will overtake us because the machines would produce more actions of freedom in the future. So that the machine does not become intelligence, the general intelligence will allow the machine to overtake us to have more options of actions for the future.

But, anyway, we could learn from many things. So, the intelligence should be the action which increases future actions of freedom. We could do, form today, what you need to do is trying to create new possibility or opportunities for future that should be intelligence as well. For me, personally, I will produce papers a lot, understand physics better, learn English, and acquiring new skills for creating knowledge to have more opportunities for the future innovations. I don’t want to be overtaken by machine though, until then I guess I will have good time anyways.

Alex said “The intelligence is a physical process that resists the future confinement” in short.

I also realized that how strong the approach of physics is. The physics is the first principal of reasoning by looking at the fundamental truth and reasoning to understand. So, physics is not mathematics because the physics is evidence based science. And physics is not the science like Chemistry, Biology, Engineering, and so on. It is not framework for solving specific problem, more like attitude toward unknown truth which sometimes is even counter-intuitive.