The original note, as written at the time
Do we know of any other intelligence other than human intelligence. No. This is the only template we have. That is why AI systems must turn to the internet and therefore trip on the internet. For the internet is the most perfect collective image of who we are. And that image isn’t a clean one. It is evident we shall have to put in extra effort if we are to build a General Purpose AI that embodies our ideal aspirations as a species.
Ongoing development
Do we know of any other intelligence other than human intelligence? No. This is the only template we have.
That is not a modest observation, it is a structural problem, and everything downstream of it follows.
Because we have only one template, every AI system is ultimately trained on us. Not on our best thought, not on our considered positions, but on the record — the whole record, which is the most perfect collective image of who we are. And that image is not clean. It is the culmination of everything the species has put into text, which includes our patience and our cruelty in roughly the proportions we have produced them.
So the systems turn to the internet and then they trip on the internet. They learn the shape of our contradictions and reproduce them with perfect fidelity, and we are scandalised, as though we had been handed a mirror and objected to the face.
If we want a general purpose system that embodies our ideal aspirations rather than our actual behaviour, we have to do something the corpus will never do on its own: we have to be explicit about the aspiration, and fight for it, and lose most of the arguments. That is not a data-cleaning exercise. Data cleaning removes the slurs; it does not install a standard.
And there is a second consequence that nobody likes. If our only template is human, then the ceiling of the thing is human, and the ceiling is set not by our ambition but by our conduct. Which means the most effective way to raise the ceiling of machine intelligence may be to raise the standard of what we write down — and that is a project in ethics, not engineering.