Superintelligent A.I: The Measure Moves

Brains, eyes, environments, and why no trajectory of intelligence we can actually inspect supports the idea of monotonic improvement toward “superintelligence.” Start with an animal that should embarrass us. The mantis shrimp has twelve types of color photoreceptor; you have three. For decades the natural inference ran straight downhill from that number: twelve channels against three must mean a richer visual world, colors you cannot imagine, discrimination beyond anything a primate retina can manage. Then someone checked. In 2014, Hanne Thoen and colleagues trained mantis shrimp to pick a rewarded wavelength and then slid the alternatives closer and closer together to find where the animal began to guess. The result, published in Science, was the opposite of the legend: mantis shrimp discriminate colors worse than humans, worse than bees, worse than most animals tested. They cannot reliably tell apart hues that you separate without effort. The twelve receptors do not build a finer…