Came home from the 2016 Bay Area Deep Learning School.

It occurred to me that Andrew Ng points out an interesting problem: on his team, they have trouble far exceeding human performance using machine learning technology. He hypothesizes that it is because people are really good at these tasks: near Bayes error performance. One could also argue that it may be that people trying to do something better than people can is foundamentally futile as human intelligence is ultimately limiting the outcome of that effort. But lastly, I reality , one wonders if there is an existential problem. When human tries to do something “better” than itself, it, the human, doesn’t know what’s better. Does there really exist a task that we can rationally define that exceeds ourself? Can we be objective in that case? Can we exceed our own objectivity? Is the human system capable of doing this? The question seems valid because we’ve certainly seen artificial computing system having provablely bounded cognition and rationality. It stands to suspicion that we have limits on our understanding of rationality and objectivity.

The optimist would say yes. Human have exceeded its own objectivity in the past. We’ve learned to be more rational and more objective as we have come to understand our world better. As we learned to reason better, we have become more rational and more objective in qualitatively different ways–in more dimensions, than human once ever thought–we thought more.

But this time, with artificial intelligence, that leap may be far more challenging than ever before.

Is intelligence a human right? Right of life, property and pursuit of happiness… Right of privacy, reproductive rights, religious rights, rights of speech, rights to politics. Do human founds mentally have a right to intelligence? Why ask this question?

Because it is possible to secretly and subtly limit human’s natural tendency and desire to learn and to self improve in his own intelligence. The state can systematically do so to maintain some control, for example, through brain washing propaganda. Search engine companies may return results differently for different population to keep relativeintelligence in the population at a status quo. The employer has rights to establish practices that keep employees unintelligent…

Does human have right of intelligence? Right to life seem to imply right to intelligence as intelligence, and the likes of growth, consumption, reproduction, are all attributes of life and therefore included as part of right to biological life. However it is not completely obvious that everyone agrees that this is a precious rights we need to spend serious energy and time protecting. 

I have a right to learn and exercise my intelligence. This should come at no cost more extraordinary than those required to sustain other aspects of life.