Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky Read Free Book Online Page B

can
count
but it can’t
add?
It can understand nouns, but not some noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn’t speak Japanese and
I
don’t speak any Hebrew, so it’s not using
their
knowledge, and it’s not using
my
knowledge -” Harry waved a hand helplessly. “The rules seem
sorta
consistent but they don’t
mean
anything! I’m not even going to ask how a
pouch
ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding when the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can’t get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work,” Harry gasped for breath, “but
what
is going
on?
”
    “Magic,” said Professor McGonagall.
    “That’s just a
word!
Even after you tell me that, I can’t make any new predictions! It’s exactly like saying ‘phlogiston’ or ‘elan vital’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘complexity’!”
    The black-robed witch laughed aloud. “But it
is
magic, Mr. Potter.”
    Harry slumped over a little. “With respect, Professor McGonagall, I’m not quite sure you understand what I’m trying to do here.”
    “With respect, Mr. Potter, I’m quite sure I don’t. Unless - this is just a guess, mind - you’re trying to take over the world?”
    “No! I mean yes - well,
no!
”
    “I think I should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question.”
    Harry glumly considered the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. It had been the first conference ever on the topic, the one that had coined the phrase “Artificial Intelligence”. They had identified key problems such as making computers understand language, learn, and improve themselves. They had suggested, in perfect seriousness, that significant advances on these problems might be made by ten scientists working together for two months.
    No. Chin up. You’re just
starting
on the problem of unravelling all the secrets of magic. You don’t actually
know
whether it’s going to be too difficult to do in two months.
    “And you
really
haven’t heard of other wizards asking these sorts of questions or doing this sort of scientific experimenting?” Harry asked again. It just seemed so
obvious
to him.
    Then again, it’d taken more than two hundred years
after
the invention of the scientific method before any Muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a
human four-year-old
could or couldn’t understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could’ve been discovered in the eighteenth century, in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the twentieth. So you couldn’t really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the Retrieval Charm.
    Professor McGonagall pursed her lips, then shrugged. “I’m still not sure what you mean by ‘scientific experimenting’, Mr. Potter. As I said, I’ve seen Muggleborn students try to get Muggle science to work inside Hogwarts, and people invent new Charms and Potions every year.”
    Harry shook his head. “Technology isn’t the same thing as science at all. And trying lots of different ways to do something isn’t the same as experimenting to figure out the rules.” There were plenty of people who’d tried to invent flying machines by trying out lots of things-with-wings, but only the Wright Brothers had built a wind tunnel to measure lift… “Um, how many Muggle-raised children
do
you get at Hogwarts every year?”
    “Perhaps ten or so?”
    Harry missed a step and almost tripped over his own feet. “
Ten?
”
    The Muggle world had a population of six billion and counting. If you were one in a million, there were seven of you in London and a thousand more in China. It was inevitable that the Muggle population would produce
some
eleven-year-olds who could do calculus - Harry knew he wasn’t the only one. He’d met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he’d been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably