What is “Intelligence” ?

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Some good posts are popping up over the the Singularity Institute blog, though the discussions have been taking that odd “hostile academic” tone you often find from PhD wannabes who spend way too much time learning how to reference obvious things in obscure ways.

Michael Anissimov asked over there “What is Intelligence” and offered up a definition that could apply to human as well as artificial intelligence.    

I would suggest that intelligence is overrated as part of our evolutionarily designed, self-absorbed human nature, and in fact is best studied as separate from the states of “consciousness” and “self awareness” that are harder to define.    I think computers – and even a simple calculator – have degrees of intelligence but they do not have consciousness or self awareness.    It is these last two things that make humans think we are so very special.    I’d say consciousness is neat but probably a simpler thing than we like to …. um … think about.

Over there I wrote this in response to Michael’s post:

My working hypothesis about “intelligence” is that it is best viewed and defined in ways that separate it from “consciousness”.  I’d say intelligence is best defined such that it can exist without consciousness or self-awareness.   Thus I’d refer to a computer chess program as intelligent, but not conscious or self aware. 

I would suggest that intelligence is a prerequisite for consciousness which is a prerequisite for self-awareness, but separating these three things seems to avoid some of the difficulties of explanations that get bogged down as we try to develop models of animal and non-animal intelligence.  Also, I think this will describe the development curve of AIs which are already “intelligent”, but none are yet “conscious” or “self aware”.   I think consciousness may turn out to be simply a *massive number* of  interconnections carrying on intelligent internal conversations within a system – human or AI.

A stumbling block I find very interesting is the absurd notion that human intelligence is fundamentally or qualitatively different from other animal intelligences.   Although only a few other species appear to have self-awareness, there are many other “conscious” species and millions of “intelligent” species

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A good question about intelligence is “WHY is intelligence”.   The obvious answer is evolutionary adaptivity, which in turn helps explain why our brains are so good at some things and so bad at others.  e.g. Human survival was more a function of short term planning rather than long term planning, so as you’d expect we are pretty good short term planners (“Let’s eat!”  “Let’s make a baby!”  “Look out for that car!) and pretty bad long term planners (Let’s address Social Security shortfalls!, “Let’s fix Iraq!)

Oregon Retirement

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Wow, I’m doing some research for an Oregon retirement website and just learned that according to  recent survey  the   2004 book called “Retirement Places Rated” out of hundreds of retirement areas in the USA two of the top ten places to retire in the USA are right in my back yard – one of them actually includes my back yard because it’s the Medford / Ashland area here in Southern Oregon. The other is Florence, Oregon – number one in the survey of over 300 places. I travel there often and personally prefer this area due to much better weather and our abundant big-city amenities in a small city, but Florence Oregon is a really nice place too and it’s the home of Oregon Coast Magazine and our Online Highways websites including this great Oregon Travel section in case you are planning a trip to Oregon. Our Travel Blog is here and I’ve posted a few good Oregon travel references as a warmup to the big blog I’m starting this month that will cover the entire state of Oregon. More on that later.

Locals call this the “Rogue Valley” and historically our wonderful region does very well in national “best places to retire” and “best places to live” surveys. I’ve lived in the East, Midwest, several California cities, and here in the Rogue Valley and it’s hard to imagine a better place to raise a family or retire. The houses are relatively expensive and the economics for a wage earner are the most challenging aspect here which may be why the population remains modest, though growth in some of our areas has been dramatic.

Scoble : More friends than he can click a mouse at

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Robert’s got neat ideas about online “friends”, pointing out that the best definition for online friend is NOT the same as for offline “let’s have dinner” friends in real life.   But he’s complaining that Facebook is poorly engineered because it limits people to 5000 friends.   Over at Scoble’s blog several are correctly pointing out that he’s such an exception to normal use it’s not fair to expect Facebook to change for the few huge social networkers like Robert.

Uh-oh….I hope he doesn’t bump ME off his friends list now…

Dave Winer, meanwhile, is proclaiming that “Facebook Sucks”, noting that their image, video sharing, and some other features are inferior to the alternatives.   It’s an excellent point though Facebook may be opening up enough to allow integration with pretty much *all* other stuff, and if they do they deserve the praise now heaped upon them in almost nauseating fashion.   Thanks Dave for the reality check.    I wonder if anybody will heed it.

TechMeme River of Tech news with a river of comments …

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I could not resist this.   I’m taking a day of TechMeme stories and links and then commenting on all of them.   Partly because I *always* have something to say and partly because I just want to see how this is processed as TM commentary.    If this seems to annoying to some of you great folks that read the blog …. just skip this post, OK?

The Register: California court tilts towards mandating web accessibility
Could be interesting.  If accessibility is mandated it may push some smaller sites and even small companies off the web.   Or, it may launch a revolution in overpriced accessibility software.   Either way, consumers will probably lose.

Washington Post: Shadowy Russian Firm Seen as Conduit for Cybercrime
Spooky.  Sometimes you just want them to bring back the good old USSR.    There was the mean KGB, but they NEVER went after your credit card! 

Read/WriteWeb: New York Times Puts Reader Comments on Main Page – Good Idea?  Of course it’s a good idea.  Only old school journalists think regular folks have nothing important to say.   It’s the other way around in fact – regular folks in Darfur, Inner City, and all over the world are, literally, dying to have their say while journalists keep harping on sensational garbage, Britney Spears, and …. Britney Spears.  Quality Journalism is as close to an oxymoron as you can get.

Telegraph: Could the time be ripe to pick off Apple?
Yes, it could.   The iPhone was Apple’s final brilliancy, and it’ll be heavily copied.  Sell AAPL now or face the consequences.

New York Times: The New Advertising Outlet: Your Life
It’s all about marketing.   People say they hate ads and sales, but that’s what makes the President and feeds your kids if you run or work for a business.   Or even a public sector because they are run with taxes and taxes come from business which runs off advertising.  Don’t like it?   Tough.

TechCrunch: Facebook Has LinkedIn In Their Crosshairs
..and everybody else too.   Yes they are overhyped but yes they could win it all.   However I think there is room for both unless Facebook can really do a better job with biz social networking rather than “fun” social networking.

Silicon Alley Insider: Radiohead: 1.3 Mil Downloads! (But Big Music Not Dead)
Fred Wilson likes them so they must be good.

New York Times: A Site Warhol Would Relish
I think Andy Warhol was hugely overrated.   Elite Art people are for the most part silly and hypocritical, as demonstrated by tests that show art “experts” often can’t even tell expert art.   You are lucky you are grant funded by rich people, dudes. 

CrunchGear: ‘Sneaker Pimps’ pimped out NES sneaker
I prefer the term “Tennis Shoe”

Voidstar: blog: Anouncing Twype.exe — I’ve been playing around with posting … Not going to try this one out.   I’m suffering from Social Network fatigue. 

Rough Type: The case for Google — As investors push Google’s stock ever higher …  Like Nick, I did not buy Google when I should.   I stupidly bought put options because I knew they were overhyped.   Nick’s thinking they may not be overhyped anymore.  They are, and contrary to his quote of ?, you can short a mania.

NewTeeVee: Announcing the NewTeeVee Live Schedule
Is this a TechMeme sponsor post?  I don’t really care.

internetnews.com: Skype Co-Founder Admits Expectations Were Too High
… in the running for 10th place “understatement of the year” in tech biz, 2007

law & Life: Patent Troll Fire First Volley at Open Source
Ha -I would NOT mess with Open Source people.  They are some of the toughest, meanest, nothing-to-losiest people in tech.  They’ll kill you for just *complimenting* the Vista color scheme, so this could mean war.

CenterNetworks: What About a Random Twitter and/or Twitter Gallery?
Probably a good thing to do first and ask questions about later.    Personally, I don’t really care.  Twitter is for those of us who have too much online time on our hands and don’t want to work on complicated projects.   

Ars Technica: UK to look for ever-elusive link between WiFi and health problems.    It’s elusive because it’s not there.  What is *wrong* with smart people that makes them consistently exaggerate trivial health risks?   Science based skeptic Shermer discusses this in his excellent  book “Why People Believe Weird Things”.  The short answer:  We are stupid.   Singularity, hurry the heck up!

the::unwired: INNOVATION: Microsoft receives Patent for a new User Interface for Mobile Devices I could read what this is, but unless I’m way off this is NOT going to be a significant new interface.   Seems to me that the killer ap for mobile would be much better voice control of all data applications.  

Computerworld: Why Skype and Vonage must die
Die early adopters!   Long live VOIP!    These are brilliant companies that are way ahead of their time.   Contrary to the stupid notion that you must be first in a space to succeed, I think in 90% of all spaces you *cannot* be first in the space and succeed.   Steamboats, for example.  Or Fax Machines.  Or VOIP.    Coca Cola?   Hey, maybe an exception there?

Inside AdSense: Getting more quality inventory for publishers
C’mon, all those “Buy links here” advertisements are totally relevant for blogs discussing Google’s tendency to penalize commercial links while promoting their sale like crazy via adwords PPC.   Even I’m confused now.

New York Times: Imitating the Web, for the Busy Reader
Imitation is the sincereist form of flattery.    Hey NYT, I can imitate Tom Friedman because I believe the earth is flat, too.

The Jason Calacanis Weblog: Why TechMeme is great and the haters hate (the *official* …  Right on Jason.  TechMeme is great!    Also it’s so refreshing to read a post by you that does not try to hype your Mahalo! project.   Aloha.

Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim: Costco.com Hits the Billion Dollar Sales Mark
Great Costco data except for the “half online” error.   Based on this data I calculated they make about $4-5 profit per incoming click assuming those clicks are as good as regular traffic.  Not a good assumption probably, because $4-5 seems way too high.

paidContent.org: Interview: Henry Copeland, CEO, Founder of BlogAds: To Make Money … reduce exposure of your online audience to your comments.   But that, of course, totally sucks because comments are already relegated to relative obscurity.   This is why TechMeme is so great – if people blog instead of comment, and then get listed along with the story, “we” the users can read new voices and get more diversity of opinion.   Journalists are allowed, but not really favored.   That’s good.  Unless you are a journalist.   Maybe.   I actually think journalists are great, but journalism is crappy.   We have commercialized journalism into irrelevance.   FOX News is a great example.  Some of those folks are actually excellent *journalists*, but commercial considerations and political ones at FOX mean they’ll talk nonsense about nothing to keep the job and keep the profits rolling.   

Coffee Calendar

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My brother-in-law Ricardo is an artist in Minneapolis, MN.  He’s got a neat new project he’s been working on for some time called “The Coffee Calendar“.   For Coffee or Calendar enthusiasts this will make a neat christmas gift, and you can order it directly from his Coffee Calendar Website over at TheCoffeeCalendar.com

Oh, yes, this post is in part an attempt to get the coffee calendar *correctly listed* over at Google as the top result for the query “Coffee Calendar” where it now shows as third.   I suppose Google could argue that the coffee shop calendars they have should be at the top, but I’d say Ricardo’s Coffee Calendar is more relevant.   

Of course, relevance is, in part, defined by the linking structure of the web which in this case I’m slightly manipulating by this blog post.  But it’s for a good cause and I think even the inimitable Matt Cutts over at Google would agree this is white hat SEO which helps internet users find the Coffee Calendar they’ve been looking for for so long.   

Note:  This is NOT a pay to post post about coffee calendars.  Would it be less relevant if it was a pay to post post?    Yes, but clearly it would have some relevance about coffee and calendars nonetheless.   How much relevance?    Google makes all those decisions and they are mysterious algorithmic magic, so don’t ask me.  

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Paid Content has a great article about online advertising and how the concentration of online advertising in the hands of so few websites is becoming a problem. 

They note this remarkable stat from Zenith regarding distribution of online ad revenue:

So the big problem is not that ad spending is drying up, it’s that the bulk is concentrated in a few sites. Citing the IAB, Reuters points out that the top 50 websites in the U.S. took in more than 90 percent of the revenue from online ads in H107, while the top 10 sites sucked up 70 percent of internet revs for the same period. 

They also quote Zenith as suggesting that even as late as 2009 online advertising will remain a fraction –  under 10% – of the total global ad spend of some 495 billion.     I’m skeptical of that estimate – very skeptical – because online ROIs remain vastly superior to offline, though this advantage is not as obvious as it should be because so much of the spend is done in foolish “old media” ways with large, expensive, poorly targeted campaigns.  As PPC campaign sophistication improves, people continue to move online, video continues to move online, and advertisers increasingly continue to insist on positive ROI we should see online buys approach offline – I’d wildly guess there will be online / offline ad parity by 2015, though interactive TV and video clip advertising may blur the distinction between a TV ad and an online ad.

New telescope will help with search for ET

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Thanks to some megabucks from Microsoft founder Paul Allen there’s a new telescope on the block and it will soon be bigger and better at spotting aliens than anything to date.   Here is the BBC story.

I would argue that alien life is almost a certainty, but *finding it* is not at all certain since the distances to other systems are so great that even if there is intelligent life on planets of our “next door neighbor” star, Proxima Centauri, and even if they are beaming some TV shows or data in our direction, it would take about 4.5 years for us to get the signal and another 4.5 to send one back.   Now THAT is lag time in a conversation.   

Think how hard it would be to buy and sell stuff with alien dudes that were, say, 50 light years distant.  The ad would have to read “If you act right NOW on our special offer, you might get it just before you DIE of old age.  Only $9.95 and supplies are limited”.

But if the new scope finds more life perhaps they will have invented technologies we can only dream of, or more likely and hopefully they’ll have intelligence extending capabilities that we could copy.    Kurzweil’s singularity promises immortality, but it’s best not to hold your breath on that one quite yet.

Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and IPCC

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Congratulations – sort of – to Al Gore and the IPCC for the Nobel Peace Prize.   I’m somewhat confused because it seems to me their efforts would not fall under the general category of promoting “Peace”.    AP story about Al Gore and IPCC Peace Prize is here.  More importantly people should be concerned that our new global focus on very expensive and problematic climate change science will distract us from more pressing problems.   Here’s what I just wrote to the Nobel Prize Committee – their website even promises I’ll get a response. 

As much as I respect Al Gore and the IPCC I worry that our new global focus on Climate Change will distract us from the more pressing problems of poverty, health, and violent conflict.   Was this possibility considered by the awards committee?

Climate change is the best current example of how humans process information, problems, and solutions in irrational ways.    Generally people note that global warming is happening (true) and that warming is likely the result of human activity (probably true – IPCC concludes over 90% likely).    It’s also reasonable to assume that warming will lead to mostly undesirable changes.   HOWEVER, it does not follow from these truths that we should make Global Warming the top priority.  In fact due to the expense and difficulties involved a clear mind will conclude that we should implement cheap changes but forego the expensive changes in favor of devoting those resources to *current* catastrophic global conditions – generally these relate to poverty and health conditions in the developing world, but would also probably include work to alleviate the appalling conditions found in many American and European big city neighborhoods.

Below is a link to a video of Bjorn Lomborg at TED Conference on Global Solution Priorities.   In my opinion he’s the clearest thinker out there – a contrast to people who are so poisoned by “political thinking” and “advocacy thinking” that they can’t see the facts from their causes.    I think a good test of whether you are clear thinking about a topic is to make the opposition case effectively enough that people can’t tell your bias.    Most topics have complex sets of facts and no easy answers – everybody should keep that in mind.   
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dtbn9zBfJSs

Hey – Al Gore’s office looks a lot like mine, but with bigger monitors.    I like him, but don’t agree with him that GW is the big problem facing us.

There’s a LOT MORE about this over at Max’s blog.

Facebook is not worth $100,000,000,000.00 ?! What is this, the 1980s?

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Jason Calcanis has an excellent post noting that Facebook madness has become so absurd people are now seriously suggesting that a company with 100 million in revenues could be worth 100 billion.   

Ha – only a year ago knowlegeable people were scoffing at the notion that Facebook  is even worth a billion dollars.   Although Facebook has grown a lot in this past year and has distinguished itself as a brilliant Web 2.0 juggernaut powerhouse in social media, the hype is almost nauseating.  

Unless, of course, you own a piece of the action….

Bubble investors better pack a a golden parachute, because it seems with all these low revenue sky-high valued companies it could all get very ugly very fast. 

Google and Wikipedia combine to “bomb” NYC.

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Update – below was “fixed” with Wiki’s correction and Google’s refreshed index. Looks like the bogus snippet lasted about 1-2 days at Google – probably even less at Wikipedia because they have people reviewing the edits.
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Search credibility is still a challenge for Google and Wikipedia as today’s second result for the query “New York City” indicates:

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New York City– Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

new york city has just been hit with a nuclear bomb and it has destroyed half of the cityand has left thousands dead. george bush says the people involved …
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City – 315k – Cached – Similar pages

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This is a very clear example of the challenges of information systems that have no human intervention in the routine editing process (Google) , or have defective human intervention (Wikipedia).    What happened here was a malicious change of the NY City page at Wikipedia followed by Google’s spidering of the bogus content.   I’m hardly a naive user but during my search tonight for NYC info I did a double take on this Google query result and quickly had to reason out that it was bogus.    Wikipedia’s been fixed and this will probably go away within days when Google refreshes it’s listing, but you can sure see how things can get out of hand fast online. 

A recent study suggested Wikipedia and Brittanica were about equally authoritative, and I do think this is an exception to the normal super quality at Wikipedia.