> For current standards of what intelligence means, we'd better hope we don't get ASI in the next decade or two, because if and when that happens then "humans need not apply" — and by extension, foundational assumptions of economics may just stop holding true.
I'm not sure that we need superintelligence for that to be the case - it may depend on whether you include physical ability in the definition of intelligence.
At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed unless they're cheaper than the AI.
While I would certainly expect a radical change to economics even from a middling IQ AI — or indeed a low IQ, as I have previously used the example of IQ 85 because that's 15.9% of the population that would become permanently unable to be economically useful — I don't think it's quite as you say.
Increasing IQ scores seem to allow increasingly difficult tasks to be performed competently — not just the same tasks faster, and also not just "increasingly difficult" in the big-O-notation sense, but it seems like below certain IQ thresholds (or above them but with certain pathologies), some thoughts just aren't "thinkable" even with unbounded time.
While this might simply be an illusion that breaks with computers because silicon outpaces synapses by literally the degree to which jogging outpaces continental drift, I don't see strong evidence at this time for the idea that this is an illusion. We may get that evidence in a very short window, but I don't see it yet.
Therefore, in the absence of full brain uploads, I suspect that higher IQ people may well be able to perform useful work even as lower IQ people are outclassed by AI.
If we do get full brain uploads, then it's the other way around, as a few super-geniuses will get their brains scanned but say it takes a billion dollars a year to run the sim in real time, then Moore's and Koomey's laws will take n years to lower that to $10 million dollars a year, 2n years to lower it to a $100k a year, and 3n years to lower it to $1k/year.
I think this trend of using IQ as a primary measuring stick is flawed.
Human minds and AI minds have radically different architectures, and therefore have different strengths and weaknesses. IQ is only one component of what allows a typical worker to do their job.
Even just comparing humans, the fact that one person with, say, a 120 IQ can do a particular job—say they are an excellent doctor—obviously does not mean that any other human with an equal or greater IQ can also do that job effectively.
> I think this trend of using IQ as a primary measuring stick is flawed.
I agree, but it's difficult to fully describe the impact of a tech where $5 gets you the ability to do arithmetic faster than literally every human combined even if we were all working at the speed of the current world record holder, yet simultaneously it took a billion dollar research team 14 years to figure out how to get a robot to reliably tie its own shoelaces (this September: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advances-in-robot-dext...)
So, IQ it is. Rough guide for a human equivalent intelligence scale, but being mapped to a wildly different architecture so that it, the different architecture, can be reasoned about.
> Even just comparing humans, the fact that one person with, say, a 120 IQ can do a particular job—say they are an excellent doctor—obviously does not mean that any other human with an equal or greater IQ can also do that job effectively.
Indeed, though in this case I would expect that such a human could learn any of those skills.
It's difficult to fully describe, so let's just give up and use a deeply flawed benchmark? Why not try to develop benchmarks that actually work and tell us something useful instead?
The key issue is that there is no result an AI can achieve on a standard IQ test which guarantees that same AI can do any task at a superhuman level, apart from taking IQ tests. Can an LLM that scores 250 replace a human driver? Who knows? Can it replace a senior software engineer? Who knows? Can it replace a manual laborer? Again, who can say? We know a human with a 250 IQ can do all those things, but with an AI we have no idea, because those tasks have many more inputs than IQ.
Rather than IQ, which tells us almost nothing concrete, I think we should focus on what tasks it can actually achieve. What's a Waymo's IQ? Who cares?! I don't care about its IQ. I care about its ability to drive me safely across the city. Similarly, I don't care whether a coding AI can drive a car or write great novels.
Of course it's interesting to measure and speculate about IQ as it relates to AGI, but I think it gives people the very mistaken impression that we are on some kind of linear path where all we need to do is keep pushing up a single all-important number.
> It's difficult to fully describe, so let's just give up and use a deeply flawed benchmark? Why not try to develop benchmarks that actually work and tell us something useful instead?
Two reasons. First: in this sub-thread I'm focusing on employment issues due to AI, so consider the quote from above:
> At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed unless they're cheaper than the AI.
IQ doesn't capture what machines do, but it does seem to capture a rough approximation of what humans do, so when the question is "can this thing cause humans to become economically irrelevant?", that's still a close approximation of the target to beat.
You just have to remember that as AI don't match human thinking, so an AI which is wildly superhuman at arithmetic or chess isn't necessarily able to tie its own shoelaces. The AI has to beat humans at everything (at least, everything economically relevant) at that IQ level for this result.
Second: Lots of people are in fact trying to develop new benchmarks.
This is a major research topic all by itself (as in "I could do a PhD in this"), and also a fast-moving topic (as in "…but if I tried to do a PhD, I'd be out of date before I've finished"). I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole in the space of a comment about the exact performance thresholds an AI has to reach to be economically disruptive.
More importantly, basically all of the IQ tests are in the training sets, so it's hard to know how the models would perform on similar tests not in the training set.
Indeed. People do try to overcome this, for example see the difference in results between "Show Offline Test" and "Show Mensa Norway" on https://trackingai.org/IQ
Even the lower value is still only an upper-bound on human-equivalent IQ, as we can't really be sure the extent to which the training data is (despite efforts) enough to "train for the test", nor can we really be sure that these tests are merely a proxy for what we think we mean by intelligence rather than what we actually mean by intelligence (a problem which is why IQ tests have been changed over the years).
My intention in this sub-thread is more of the economic issues rather than the technical, which complicates things further, because if you have an AI architecture where spending a few tens of millions on compute — either from scratch or as fine-tuning — gets you superhuman performance (performance specifically, regardless of if you count it as "intelligent" or not), then any sector which employs merely a couple of hundred workers (in rich economies) will still have an economic incentive to train an AI on those workers to replace them within a year.
This is still humans having jobs, and still being economically relevant, but makes basically everyone into a contractor that has to be ready and able to change jobs suddenly, which is also economically disruptive because we're not set up for that.
This is it. Another primary example is that I can put a 80 IQ person to work on a farm or let them build something under supervision. There is no way for an AI to do either at this time, even if the AI is much smarter.
Robots at this point are specialized for a highly specific task. None of them are as dynamically deployable as a 80 IQ person. You can let a walk around a construction site doing whatever, no such robot is available right now.
If I'm wrong please post where I can buy such a general robot.
Robots are hardware, AI is software, so in principle you can put any AI in charge of any robot.
A quick google got me this list of current uses, I'd suggest you can skim the first part as it will be clear when you get to the actual examples: https://builtin.com/robotics/humanoid-robots
(But disregard Atlas, IIRC Boston Dynamics don't sell that, only the robot dogs? But you didn't actually ask for a humanoid, so you can have the dogs as a replacement).
And are you really sure about what it means to be an IQ 80 human? Because that's where people start having problems reading plans, safety instructions, timesheets etc., or following multi-step instructions, handling unexpected situations.
A robot is not only hardware. A robot is hardware and software.
The robots in the links you posted are either not commercially available or not capable of working in an unrestricted construction environment. Such an environment do require a humanoid frame at this time because the entire world is geared to that. I agree that a few show promising demos, but that's not what I would "available". Perhaps I should have been more clear. Unless I(As in some rando corporation) can go out and buy it I don't consider it available.
I completely agree with everything that you're saying here - my use of the term "basically everyone" was lazy in that I'm implying that at the 110 IQ level the majority (approx 70%) of people are economically obsolete outside of niche areas (e.g. care/butler style work in which people desire the "human touch" for emotional reasons).
I think that far below the 70% level we've already broken economics. I can't see a society functioning in which most people actually _know_ that they can't break out of whatever box they're currently in - I think that things like UBI are a distraction in that they don't account for things like status jockeying that I think we're pretty hardwired to do.
> At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed unless they're cheaper than the AI.
Until a problem space is "solved", you will still need AIs that are more capable than those with 110 IQ to review the other AIs work. All evidence points to "mistakes will be made" with any AI system I have used and any human I have worked with.
I'm not sure that we need superintelligence for that to be the case - it may depend on whether you include physical ability in the definition of intelligence.
At the point that we have an AI that's capable of every task that say a 110 IQ human is, including manipulating objects in the physical world, then basically everyone is unemployed unless they're cheaper than the AI.