William Ross Ashby: Intelligence Amplification
About selection and problem solving. How making a good choice is how we progress in all things. What happens when we have no choice? What happens when we make a ting choice and that is feeding into a bigger choice (voting, zooniverse, etc)? With some of these things we don’t know the end choices, we can only make the one that is in front of us here and now. Like bird and fish we can shoal without a goal.
William Ross Ashby: Intelligence Amplification[edit]
The term intelligence amplification (IA) has enjoyed a wide currency since William Ross Ashby wrote of “amplifying intelligence” in his Introduction to Cybernetics (1956). Related ideas were explicitly proposed as an alternative to Artificial Intelligence by Hao Wang from the early days of automatic theorem provers.
..”problem solving” is largely, perhaps entirely, a matter of appropriate selection. Take, for instance, any popular book of problems and puzzles. Almost every one can be reduced to the form: out of a certain set, indicate one element. … It is, in fact, difficult to think of a problem, either playful or serious, that does not ultimately require an appropriate selection as necessary and sufficient for its solution.
It is also clear that many of the tests used for measuring “intelligence” are scored essentially according to the candidate’s power of appropriate selection. … Thus it is not impossible that what is commonly referred to as “intellectual power” may be equivalent to “power of appropriate selection”. Indeed, if a talking Black Box were to show high power of appropriate selection in such matters — so that, when given difficult problems it persistently gave correct answers — we could hardly deny that it was showing the ‘behavioral’ equivalent of “high intelligence”.
If this is so, and as we know that power of selection can be amplified, it seems to follow that intellectual power, like physical power, can be amplified. Let no one say that it cannot be done, for the gene-patterns do it every time they form a brain that grows up to be something better than the gene-pattern could have specified in detail. What is new is that we can now do it synthetically, consciously, deliberately.
Ashby, W.R., An Introduction to Cybernetics, Chapman and Hall, London, UK, 1956. Reprinted, Methuen and Company, London, UK, 1964.
via Intelligence amplification – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.