Ah, the comments regarding an S45 post to the G+ AI Community. One person (Doctor Dissent) cannot understand the quality and quality importance of intelligence. Below is one of my replies regarding my view of five Einsteins being better than one. It is also important to note Doctor D makes a fallacious smear regarding AI improving our world. The "Doctor" thinks awareness of the advanced problem-solving ability of AI is a "digital Jesus." Maybe he thinks stem cell regenerative cures constitutes Voodoo? He thinks AI "might" be beyond our 2014 ability to comprehend. Here is one of my comments:
+Doctor Dissent are you really doubting intelligence is related to progress? You wrote: "Prove to me that intelligence has a thing to do with it."
The way humans have progressed is wholly due to our brains being very different from other animals. If biologically the differences are small the ramifications are colossal. It is very easy to prove how human intelligence, in general, is responsible for our science and technological advancement.
You wrote: "Furthermore there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that 5 Einsteins would find something like a cure for cancer faster than the one Einstein that actually figures it out."
OK. Let's remove Einstein from the equation, to avoid argument regarding some humans being more capable than others. Let's merely focus on humans generally.
Consider the human genome project. Would this have been completed later, earlier, or at the same time if one, five, or five hundred thousand people were working on it?
Solving science problems, the way I see it, resembles building a house. If only one person is building a house the job takes longer to complete, whereas if you have a teams of house-builders the job is completed much sooner. The problem is lots of data, lots of variables, many tasks to complete, which despite all the creativity in the world it generally takes one person longer than five people to solve a problem.
Bioinformatics is a good example of how being able to look at large amounts of data quickly solves problems quickly.
You wrote: "The world is not a linear set of logics like a giant math problem. Real genius seems to be discovering patterns that nobody else see."
Consider how Robot Adam (bioinformatics AI) in 2009 solved a genetics problem in few years, which had eluded humans since the 1960s.
Yes only one individual can have a Eureka moment but no man or woman is an island. How many humans were required to create the civilization where one person achieves a Eureka moment? What if civilization was more advanced thereby allowing more people to make breakthroughs?
Why is science progressing if progress isn't related to the collective intelligence of civilization? If only one person is needed for radical progress it seems odd, out of the billions of humans throughout the centuries, no one individual has solved every problem in science. The evidence is clear to my mind. Human progress depends upon collective intelligence. The more minds you have means the greater your progress will be via both teams of scientists working on the same problem and via each generation passing knowledge onto the next generation.
Progress does depend upon having more intelligent people (humans in general) instead of less people.
So, real genius: "Real genius seems to be discovering patterns that nobody else see."
What if we have twenty billion real geniuses with the freedom to fully explore their ideas. According to your "logic" perhaps you might think one genius would make better progress? It would be an interesting experiment to see what type of civilization twenty billion real geniuses create compared to the civilization of one real genius.
