Can AI Games Create Super-Intelligent Humans?

destinyland writes "A technology CEO sees game artificial intelligence as the key to a revolution in education, predicting a synergy where games create smarter humans who then create smarter games. Citing lessons drawn from Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age, Alex Peake, founder of Primer Labs, sees the possibility of a self-fueling feedback loop which creates 'a Moore's law for artificial intelligence,' with accelerating returns ultimately generating the best possible education outcomes. 'What the computer taught me was that there was real muggle magic ...' writes Peake, adding 'Once we begin relying on AI mentors for our children and we get those mentors increasing in sophistication at an exponential rate, we're dipping our toe into symbiosis between humans and the AI that shape them.'"

Re:Have you not seen

[wagnerrp]

You have to remember two things:

1. 1. Of all the colleges at a university, the teaching college will generally have the lowest, or near the lowest, admissions requirements. Low pay just doesn't draw the high quality talent. Now sure, you'll find some absolutely stellar teachers, ones that actually care about their students, and spend lots of time outside of school researching the stuff they're teaching, building lesson plans, projects, field trips. You'll find a lot more who are just teaching straight out of the text book. I could outwit at least half my grade school teachers.
2. 2. We are in school of some form or another for a good chunk of our lives. A couple years of daycare. Another decade of elementary and high school. From there, a few years of vocational, or several years of college, or up to another decade for higher level degrees. For 20 years of care, we only get another 40-50 of functional lifetime out of a person. We simply can't afford as a society to have a low student/teacher count. AI could fill the gaps for the less demanding tasks. An AI could guide individual students through directed self study, and aid them in homework, allowing a teacher to assign more work and still expect it be accomplished. An AI could handle larger lectures, allowing teachers to focus one-on-one, or with small groups.

AI in schools would allow the teachers we had to operate more efficiently and more effectively. That in turn means fewer teachers per student, increasing individual teacher pay, and drawing in a better quality of teacher. Think of it as the same thing that has happened in manufacturing for the last 200 years. Machines don't replace humans all together. They simply fulfill the more repetitive tasks.

Re:Intelligent Tutoring Systems

[TaoPhoenix]

"Sufficiently advanced educational processes verge on terrorism". (Hi Mods! Note the quotes which means it's rhetorical!)
We already have this game.

A "bunch of script kiddies", er, Students, have been beating various professional IT departments at the game called "Cyber Security". Since two years ago we would have called anyone who said they could bust federal contractors a "tin foil hat", they took some bits as prisoners to prove it. This then caused Memos to be Issued to block those security holes. The Students then observed the results, and then took NATO for a ride in Round 2. This caused more Memos to be Issued by the "AI". (Insert rest of article here.)

Oh wait, you're saying that's not a game? Games are supposed to be cute little self contained exercises that *don't matter* right?

Right. Gotcha. Uh huh.

Re:No

[silentcoder]

You'd think geeks would understand basic physics better than this. It was okay when Asimov got thermodynamics just plain wrong - because it was 60 years ago and everybody had it wrong. Even Roger Penrose still had it wrong in the 70's but the whole "universe increases in entropy so why are there constellations and life" paradox doesn't exist.

Real scientists figured that out a long, long time ago. The longer version is: thermodynamics is a model of the behavior of gasses in a closed system which makes a lot of assumptions (for starters: it treats all gas molecules as solid, perfect spheres that bounce off once another with no loss of velocity - e.g. energy transfer without friction). These assumptions are okay to make in thermodynamics because the energy "lost" to friction doesn't get "lost" from the system - it becomes heat energy and it all averages out. But they do mean something. Thermodynamics tells you if you dump a bunch of gas in a tank it will end up evenly spread rather than clumped in the corner (that is the ENTIRETY of the entropy law - and information entropy has NOTHING to do with it and the "relationship" is not even conjecture - it's BAD science fiction - for starters it goes in the OPPOSITE DIRECTION and the symbols in the equations have different meanings [c is a distance in geometry and a velocity in physics for example]). That is the purpose of thermodynamics, it's a model of physics that explains the behavior of gasses (and with minor adaptation liquids and solids) from a certain point of view, but it's a model of reality that ignores a bunch of inconvenient things because within the scale of the model those things have no measureable impact. Scientists call it "coarse-graining" - the details we don't see in thermodynamics because they are too small do matter on the scale of a star system.
The most important detail that thermodynamics completely ignores is the force of gravity. There is no thermodynamic law that considers the impact of gravity. In a tank containing only one gass - it actually means that on average the gas will be slightly more concentrated on the bottom of the tank than the top - not enough to matter, so the model does it's job - but thats because individual gas molecules have very little mass, on astronomic scales the whole tank has almost no mass.
But star systems and planets have huge amounts of mass - and suddenly a force which on the nuclear level is incredibly weak (a small speaker magnet has more than enough force to lift a nail against the gravity of the entire planet) starts to matter: a lot.
Gravity on the universal force acts to collect things together, and the more they collect, the more gravity they have - it is a trend in the opposite direction of entropy.
On small scales (what thermodynamics is for) entropy wins. On the scale of galaxies, entropy is (much) weaker than gravity and the entropic "heat death of the universe" is unscientific hogwash.

In the real universe the battle between entropy and gravity is pretty close. That's why we don't have a "smoothly spread" universe now. If gravity was too strong - we'd have the opposite: the entire universe collapsed into a single black-hole. The ultimate singularity.

In the end, one or the other may yet win out - but the odds of a black-hole ending is at least as good as a for an entropic heat death and either way for either to actually win when the difference is so small - would take a lot longer than the lifetime of the universe so far still - meaning we got at least a few hundred billion years left.