This is why I think the ability to ask good questions is a better indication of understanding and intelligence than the ability to generate answers.
As a gauge for how far we are from AI you can consider what sort of modeling capacity is required until an AI can ask, when presented with such a sequence: "What country is the swan from?" or, even more impressively: "Do you know where this took place and what country the swan's parents were from?" For the first question it would then abduce a color. Same for the second but perhaps it could include probabilities based on estimated number of each color and the genetics of swan color.
This post is a rotation meant to provide a better sense of scale for the problem at hand.
> This is why I think the ability to ask good questions is a better indication of understanding and intelligence than the ability to generate answers.
Certainly! Synthesis rather than reformatting (or, more commonly, regurgitation). Analysis and abduction are more than just "put it in your own words". More useful too.
There is something of a rush on at the moment to generate chat-bots to replace FAQs. Every Slack/Fleep/Blern/Crank channel appears to have five or six memoisation bots. Seems to be largely a solved problem!
When we can start having bots that can be sensibly interrogated for a summary (or even a "hey, you've been away for several hours: here's the key points"), we can finally abandon the chatrooms and let the generative bots flood them with abductive content, and the precis bots can then ping you every couple of weeks when something important comes up.
As a gauge for how far we are from AI you can consider what sort of modeling capacity is required until an AI can ask, when presented with such a sequence: "What country is the swan from?" or, even more impressively: "Do you know where this took place and what country the swan's parents were from?" For the first question it would then abduce a color. Same for the second but perhaps it could include probabilities based on estimated number of each color and the genetics of swan color.
This post is a rotation meant to provide a better sense of scale for the problem at hand.