[Sigia-l] Findability

[Listera]

"Karl Fast" wrote:

> Yet I know that a fire hydrant doesn't
> understand "The Grapes of Wrath."

And yet, in a few years, a refrigerator may 'understand' more about food
preservation and detection of spoilage better than you ever could. A toilet
may 'understand' the health of your intestinal tracks better than you. Etc.
 
> But I do.

Yes, but allow the possibility that someone else might 'understand' "The
Grapes of Wrath" much better than you. So, as you point it out later, this
is a matter of degree.
 
> Now if I gave that URL to Google it wouldn't understand it all.

Again this is murky too. A typical test done in high school is to give you
some text and have you type up a one graph summary of it, to presumably show
understanding. While there are many apps that can currently extract a
summary out of text, it's not far fetched for me to imagine that computers
may be able to this 'better' than most people in not-too-distant a future.
Is that 'understanding'?
 
> But, at present, it does not understand that document in any
> meaningful way that approaches human intelligence.

What about people who are not 'intelligent' about this aspect of life? Are
they not worthy of the moniker 'human'? Intelligence is a very hard thing to
define.

> Regardless, I don't think that scaling up our current computational
> paradigm will get us there.

Remember 1983. :-)

Ziya
Nullius in Verba