[Sigia-l] Findability

[Karl Fast]

> And yet, in a few years, a refrigerator may 'understand' more about
> food preservation and detection of spoilage better than you ever
> could.

Really? It can detect and measure all kinds of things about the food
in my refrigerator and based on those measurements it can infer
certain things based on probabilities and computation.

I don't know if I'd call that understanding. Maybe it is
'understanding,' as you say, but still....

> 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.

Agreed.

But if someone else understands it better then I can engage that
person in a discussion (like we are having) and together I can
perhaps come to a deeper/richer/better understanding.

Could I have that kind of discussion with a refrigerator?

> give you some text and have you type up a one graph summary of it,
> ....many apps that cancurrently 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'?

Excellent example. 

This is a really hard problem and I understand researchers have made
significant progress. Is that true intelligence? I don't think it
is. The machine doesn't understand the summary, it merely knows the
rules necessary to compute a good one.

But I agree this is murky waters.



> Intelligence is a very hard thing to define.

And as Stella says in Rear Window: "Nothing has cause the human race
as much trouble as intelligence."

My, my, but I love that film.

--karl