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INTELLIGENCE Stupid is as Stupid does

Editors Daniel Durose Alice Butler Natalie Earthy

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Letter H el l o, h i y a a n d w e l c ome t o i ssu e z e ro of D U K . H e r e a t D U K w e l ook a t t h e w orl d a l i t t l e d i f f ere n t l y. C o n s ta n t l y q u e st i on i n g , ou r a i m i s t o p l a y t h e d e v i l ’ s a dv o c a t e a s w e b re a k t h rou g h t h e b u l l sh i t of t od a y ’ s c u l tu r e a n d t ot a l l y d i sreg a rd t h e soci a l c on st r u ct s t h a t sh a p e i t . O u r f i rst i ssu e w i l l ex p l ore i n t e l l i g e n c e . We ’v e b e en t h i n k i n g a l ot a b ou t w h a t rea l l y ma k e s someon e a n i n tel l i g en t p erson . S oci e t y h a s a f u n n y w a y of j u d g i n g i n te l l ect t h a t i n t h e en d a ct i v el y d i scou ra g es i n t e l l i g e n t thi n ki n g . As w e g row, ou r i n t e l l i g e n c e i s mea su re d b y ou r a bi l i ty t o re g u rg i t a t e u sel ess i n f orma t i on i n c on t rol l ed en v i ron men t s ( ev er h a d t o u se p i ? ) . S o h ow i n t el l i g en t ca n t h i s a ct u a l l y ma k e u s? We ’v e a l l d ou b t e d ou r i n t el l i g en ce a t some p oi n t or a n o ther, b u t w h y ? B e ca u se w e ’ v e f a i l ed a t somet h i n g t h a t s o m e o ne h a s t ol d u s i s i mp ort a n t ? We l l f u c k t h em, d o wha t y ou w a n t , l e a rn h ow y ou c a n , a n d n ev er st op a sk i n g qu e s ti o n s. I n t e l l i g e n c e h a s n ot h i n g t o d o w i t h b e i n g ri g h t o r wr on g , i t ’ s a b ou t a l w a y s q u est i on i n g w h a t y ou ’ re t ol d . Right? S o e n j oy, l a u g h a n d sp ec u l a t e a s w e sh i n e a d i f f e ren t k i n d of l i g h t on w h a t ’ s rea l l y g oi n g on .

creativity Truly creative people donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t come up with a greater percentage of good ideas, they simply come up with more of them and discard the bad ones.

graded My intelligence is not defined by a number, nor a letter. Nor should I be graded on a curve by people who don’t know me. What does knowing the pythagorean theorem have to do with me being a good person? What will memorizing words on a page help me with my rage raging about how education has become this conveyor belt chewing up and spitting out society’s warped up idea of intelligence. Throw me in a classroom with twenty-something students just to tell me I’m better than him but not as smart as her teachers saturating our brains with force fed textbook equations telling us this is what we have to know to make it “make it on time”, they say “Passing it in late is not okay” but when I am eventually thrown out of this conveyor belt of education the realization will be that life does not have a set schedule. My life will not change on time, as you ask I cannot cram my creativity onto a five-paragraph piece of paper. I cannot crunch my knowledge down onto six pages about who I am. Don’t give me guidelines my future does not have guidelines you think you’re teaching us information but in reality, you’re teaching us around the system of how to get a passing grade but not the exceeding knowledge about what? Our history? What about our future? We can’t learn about our future by staring at a blackboard in a dim-lit room with twenty-something other people wondering what the hell we’re doing here but being too scared to stand up and ask.

NOT

I hate education spending money and a large percentage of our lives to turn our organic minds into a one way street that everybody is parked on - Cali Courtney

T A RT A GENERATION OF PEOPLE WHO WILL BELIEVE EVERYTHING THAT THEY SEE ON THE INTERNET

study commissioned by the mental health watchdog OFFNUT, has revealed a startling decline in common sense worldwide. Initially seen as a purely American phenomenon, Total Absence of Rational Thought (TART) has spread rapidly throughout Europe and the Middle East. The study puts the blame squarely on the shoulders of the Internet, globalisation, global warning, the credit crunch, the War Against Terror and The Daily Mail. The UK government has responded immediately, proposing a twentyseven point public sector common sense conservation strategy and has called on other EU governments to follow suit. All government departments are expected to institute a program of "rationality rationing" by the end of the year.

Staff will be expected to carry out their jobs using only a minimum amount of common sense. It is hoped that, in many cases, tasks can be completed without thinking at all. To further reduce the "thought-burden" on senior staff, a multi-million pound computer system has been ordered. However, delivery may be delayed until IT managers can decide what it's supposed to do. As a precaution, the government has already instructed the public accounts committee to institute a far-reaching inquiry into the anticipated fiasco. A further twenty-five measures will be rolled out on an ad-hoc basis, in response to prevailing newspaper headlines. It is clear that decisive action is necessary before the common sense crisis spirals out of control. OFFNUT's preliminary report predicts a 43% reduction in rational thought by 2013. Unless something is done soon it is feared that by the 12th August 2019 the vast majority of the population will be so lacking in common sense that they will believe everything they read on the internet.

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IGNORANCE “Ignorance is bliss”, that’s my motto. The less you know the better, whatever the subject is. I look around and I see people desperate to learn, people who work so hard to have the best education, and little do they know that what they’ve spent their whole lives trying to accomplish is what will lead to their utter misery. Don’t be fooled! Education is nothing but a conspiracy created by those who are secretly controlling the world. Whoever they are. Schools are organizations formed to brainwash children and provide them with destructive data and knowledge. Teachers are merely agents working to demolish our future. They’re trying to eradicate ignorance and fill our minds with plenty of information to have us dazed and confused while they control the world. Ignorance is bliss, and gen is hell. I despise my parents for forcing me to attend school and learn what I now try so hard to erase from my mind. I also pity them for dying believing that intelligence is the key to a fruitful life. Look at Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and Thomas Edison. Look what intelligence got them to? Only death. Can you name any influential ignorant people have ended up like those people did? I don’t think so. We must make it our number one priority to fight these knowledgespreading institutions and make this world a better place for our children. A place full of ignorance and inexperience. And what’s the first step you take in order to defeat your enemy? Destroy their most powerful weapon. Books. Books are the bringer of knowledge. Books carry the words of those who plot to rid the world of ignorance. And they’re everywhere. All around you, you will see this horrible weapon disguising itself as a useful tool when in fact it destroys lives. By providing a massive effort into bringing awareness to this, we will be able to raise enough money to fund what I call, “The War on Books” or “The War on Knowledge”. Don’t listen to schemers like Ray Bradbury (Author of ‘Fahrenheit 451’) who try to make you believe that books are treasures that should be read and protected. Books should be thrown away, burned, destroyed! History, Science, Philosophy, Math, Economics, Arts; they’re all poisonous subjects created by the conspirators to destroy your brain and lead you in the wrong direction. Don’t be fooled! To change the world, you must first start with yourself. So if you want to play a major role in the War on Knowledge, you need to begin locally. The first step you should take is to get rid of any books, especially Encyclopedias, or any source of knowledge. If you’re forced by your parents to attend a school then I advise you to stand up to them and drop out immediately. Don’t talk to teachers and cover your ears every time they start to speak. Then, start gathering a few friends and form an assembly, and start convincing other people to join in. But be vigilant and keep your group underground for the time being. Try your best to abolish books and sabotage schools. Make sure you don’t have any moles in your brotherhood; teachers shouldn’t be underestimated. The bigger and stronger you grow, the more enemies you will have. Keep doing this and step-by-step many groups will flourish into one huge crowd, and then, only then, will the “Ignorant Revolution” truly begin. And history will remember our names.

Here’s something that is sure to get the hairs up on some peoples’ backs. Virgil Griffith, the creator of WikiScanner and a grad student from CalTech did some research which studied the relationship between musical styles and bands and the SAT scores of the people who listened to them. He found that the smartest students listened to Beethoven (average SAT of 1371) and the students who rung in at the bottom of the SAT scores listened to Lil’ Wayne (average SAT of 889). The average SAT score is around the 1000-1100 mark, and unsurprisingly most bands’ listeners fit into this range. Of course the (unanswered) question is: What is the relationship? Do you choose music based on your intelligence? Surely your personality has something to do with musical tastes, doesn’t it? Can listening to certain types of music make you dumb or smart? Do people gravitate towards a certain type of music because they are smart and think that it will make them seem smarter? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

We Need to Stop killer Robots!!! Nick Bostrom’s job is to dream up increasingly lurid scenarios that could wipe out the human race: Asteroid strikes; high-energy physics experiments that go wrong; global plagues of genetically-modified superbugs; the emergence of all-powerful computers with scant regard to human life – that sort of thing. In the hierarchy of risk categories, Bostrom’s speciality stands above mere catastrophic risks like climate change, financial market collapse and conventional warfare. As the Director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, Bostrom is part of a small but growing network of snappily-named academic institutions tackling these “existential risks”: the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge; the Future of Life Institute at MIT and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute at Berkeley. Their tools are philosophy, physics and lots and lots of hard maths. Five years ago he started writing a book aimed at the layman on a selection of existential risks but quickly realised that the chapter dealing with the dangers of artificial intelligence development growth was getting fatter and fatter and deserved a book of its own. The result is Super-intelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. It makes compelling – if scary – reading. The basic thesis is that developments in artificial intelligence will gather apace so that within this century it’s conceivable that we will be able to artificially replicate human level machine intelligence (HLMI). Once HLMI is reached, things move pretty quickly: intelligent machines will be able to design even more intelligent machines, leading to what mathematician I J Good called back in 1965 an “intelligence explosion” that will leave human capabilities far behind. We get to relax, safe in the knowledge that the really hard work is being done by super-computers we have brought into being. All sound good? Not really, thanks to the “control” problem. Basically it’s a lot easier to build an artificial intelligence than it is to build one that respects what humans hold dear. As Bostrom says: “There is no reason to think that by default these powerful future machine intelligences would have any human-friendly goals.”

Which brings us to the gorillas. In terms of muscle, gorillas outperform humans. However, our human brains are slightly more sophisticated than theirs, and millennia of tool-making (sharp sticks, iron bars, guns, etc.) have compounded this advantage. Now the future of gorillas depends more on humans than on the gorillas themselves. In his book, Bostrom argues that once a super intelligence is reached, present and future humanity become the gorillas; stalked by a more powerful, more capable agent that sees nothing wrong with imprisoning these docile creatures or wrecking their natural environments as part of a means of achieving its aims.

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INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE INTELLIGENCE

A failure to install the right kind of goals will lead to catastrophe, says Bostrom. A super intelligent AI could rapidly outgrow the human-designed context it was initially designed for, slip the leash and adopt extreme measures to achieve its goals. As Bostrom puts it, there comes a pivot point: when dumb, smarter is safer, when smart, smarter is more dangerous. Bostrom gives the example of a super intelligent AI located in a paperclip factory whose top-level goal is to maximise the production of paperclips, and whose intelligence would enable it to acquire different resources to increase its capabilities. “If your goal is to make as many paperclips as possible and you are a super-intelligent machine you may predict that human beings might want to switch off this paperclip machine after a certain amount of paperclips have been made,” he says. “So for this agent, it may be desirable to get rid of humans. It also would be desirable ultimately to use the material that humans use, including our bodies, our homes and our food to make paperclips.”

“Some of those arbitrary actions that improve paperclip production may involve the destruction of everything that we care about. The point that is actually quite difficult is specifying goals that would not have those consequences.” Bostrom predicts that the development of a superintelligent AI will either be very good or catastrophically bad for the human race, with little in between. It’s not all doom though. Bostrom’s contention is that humans have the decisive advantage: We get to make the first move. If we can develop a seed AI that ensures future superintelligences are aligned with human interests, all may be saved. Still, with this silver lining comes a cloud. “We may only ever get one shot at this,” he says. Once a superintelligence is developed, it will be too sophisticated for us to control effectively. How optimistic is Bostrom that the control problem can be solved? “It partly depends on how much we get our act together and how many of the cleverest people will work on this problem,” he says. “Part of it depends just how difficult this problem is, but that’s something we will not know until we have solved it. It looks really difficult. But whether it’s just very difficult or super-duper ultra difficult remains to be seen”. So, across the world’s labs there must be hoards of boffins beavering away on what Bostrom calls “the essential task of our time”? Err, not quite. “It’s hard to estimate how many exactly, but there’s probably about six people working on it [in the world] now”. Perhaps this has something to do with the idea that working on an all-powerful AI was the preserve of mouth-breathing eccentrics. “A lot of academics were wary of entering a field where there were a lot of crackpots or crazies. The crackpot factor deterred a lot of people for a long time,” says Bostrom.

One who wasn’t deterred was Daniel Dewey, who left a job at Google to work with Bostrom at the FHI and at Oxford University’s Martin School, lured in by the prospect of dealing with the AI control problem. “I still think that the best people to work with are in academia and non-profits, but that could be changing, as big companies like Google start to deeply consider the future of AI” says Dewey. The former Google staffer is optimistic that the altruistic nature of his former colleagues will trump any nefarious intentions connected with AI. “There’s a clear common good here. People in computer science generally want to improve the world as much as they can. There’s a real sense that science and engineering make the world a better place.” Jaan Tallinn, the founder of Skype and co-founder of the CSER, has invested millions in funding research into the AI ‘control’ problem, after his interest was piqued by realising that, as he puts it, “the default outcome was not good for humans”. For Tallin, there’s an added urgency to making sure AI is controlled appropriately. “AI is a kind of metarisk. If you manage to get AI right then it would help mitigate the other existential risks, whereas the reverse is not true. For example AI could amplify the risks associated with synthetic biology,” he says.

He maintains that we are not at the point where effective regulation can be introduced, yet “these existential risks are fairly new”. Tallin continues, “Once these topics get more acknowledged worldwide, people in technology companies may put in new kinds of polices to make these technologies safer.” “The regulations around bio-hazard levels are a good example of off-the-shelf policies that you use if you are dealing with bio-hazards. [In the future] It’d be great to have that for AI.” Jason Matheny, Programme Manager of IARPA at the USA’s Office of the National Intelligence agrees. “We need improved methods for assessing the risks of emerging technologies and the efficacy of safety measures,” he says.

Meanwhile, the quiet work of these half dozen researchers in labs and study rooms across the globe continues. As Matheny puts it: “existential risk [and superintelligence] is a neglected topic in both the scientific and governmental communities, but it’s hard to think of a topic more important than human survival.” He quotes Carl Sagan, writing about the costs of nuclear war: “We are talking about [the loss of life of] some 500 trillion people yet to come. There are many other possible measures of the potential loss – including culture and science, the evolutionary history of the planet and the significance of the lives of all of our ancestors who contributed to the future of their descendants. Extinction is the undoing of the human enterprise.”

And it all could come from clever computers. You’ve been warned.

AI // AI // AI // AI // AI // AI // AI

The threat of superintelligence is to Matheny far worse than any epidemic we have ever experienced. “Some risks that are especially difficult to control have three characteristics: autonomy, self-replication and self-modification. Infectious diseases have these characteristics, and have killed more people than any other class of events, including war. Some computer malware has these characteristics, and can do a lot of damage. But microbes and malware cannot intelligently self-modify, so countermeasures can catch up. A superintelligent system [as outlined by Bostrom] would be much harder to control if it were able to intelligently self-modify.”

U E Chatbot Eugene Goostman supposedly passed the legendary Turing Test, tricking 33% of a panel of judges into believing he was a real boy during the course of a five-minute chat conversation.

As you may or may not notice below, passing the Turing Test is less about building machines intelligent enough to convince humans they’re real and more about building programs that can anticipate certain questions from humans in order to pre-form and return semi-intelligible answers.

In that spirit, Eugene Goostman — the fake 13-year-old from Odessa, Ukraine who doesn’t speak English all that well – makes for a semi-convincing chatbot. His answers are at times enthusiastic and unintelligible like those from any normal 13-yearold would be; add in a shaky grasp of English, and there you go. How are you adjusting to all your new-found fame? I would rather not talk about it if you don’t mind. By the way, what’s your occupation? I mean – could you tell me about your work? I’m a technology blogger. It’s quite surprising that you are a technology blogger. Where do you came from, by the way? Could you tell me about the place where you live? I live in Boston but I grew up in Minnesota. I also lived in Seattle for a while.

Could you invite me to Seattle? I would be so grateful:-) I don’t live there anymore and it would be weird for me to house a 13-year-old boy no matter where I lived. Possibly, it will be a big surprise for you, but “no” isn’t the only answer. The word “yes” also exists! :-) Wonna ask me something more? That last answer of yours was a little shaky, Bro-Bro. Damn! I’ve just recalled that I didn’t feed my guinea pig this morning. Poor animal! Ah, okay. We’re changing the subject. What’s your guinea pig’s name? Name of my guinea pig’s name is Bill. But I suspect he doesn’t go by it. Perhaps, he is deaf and I should call him “Beethoven”.

Too soon. Too soon for a Beethoven joke. All the things you told me are nothing but a joke. I think you are trying to make a fool of me!

Well played. You appear to be able to detect sarcasm. Yeah! Well, let’s go on though. Okay. What’s your favorite sport?

I play sports sometimes. On computer. But I prefer racing. Do kids still say “computer” like that? Like, “let’s play computer?”

I have nice Celeron-667, by the way. I play games on it!

O S

[I disappear for a couple minutes] Sorry I was gone for so long. I had to publish a story. There’s no way you have a Celeron-667. It’s 2014.

I have Celeron so far. I’m not sure whether my next processor will be from Intel or AMD. Do you have an iPhone? If I say that I haven’t an iphone – will it satisfy your inquisitive mind? And I forgot to ask you where you are from… You asked me where I was from already. So what that you were from already By the way, what’s your occupation? I mean – could you tell me about your work? This is now unraveling at a rapid clip. You’re not the first one who told me that. Nice save. You’re back in the game. Possibly you are right. You aren’t the first one who tell me that. Oooh. Anything else? I think we’re done here. Congrats on the thing.

A study commissioned by the mental health watchdog OFFNUT, has revealed a startling decline in common sense worldwide.

STUPID IS, AS STUPID DOES

poor old forrest

Intelligence isn’t one thing, it doesn’t fit one shape, and it shouldn’t be judged by one rule. The key to intelligence isn’t narrowing it down, but in fact understanding that it is a quality unique to each individual. So, don’t be a dick, we’re all as smart as each other.

Poor old Forrest Gump was ridiculed, deemed ‘stupid’ because his view on life was different. But Forrest wasn’t stupid; he simply interpreted the world differently to others. He may not have succeeded significantly in school, but this fictitious character went on to achieve many marvelous things in his on-screen life. His insecurity about his intelligence never overshadowed the belief he had in himself. There’s a lesson to be learned from that.

Well asking questions like that makes you an idiot. First things first - don’t call people idiots. No one looks at the world through the same pair of glasses, so you can’t expect everyone to see the same as you.

What makes a person an intellect or an idiot?

Words by Alice Butler

gump

g e l

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The intelligent boy was just having fun, Doing so many things that couldn’t be done, It’s not with knowledge you see, But imagination’s the key