While recently in
Seattle for a few days a local newspaper there frequently came to my attention, primarily on account of its frequent abbreviation to "P-I." The newspaper's fully-expanded name is
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and every time I reflected upon it I found myself wondering just what post-intelligence would consist of. Here's what I arrived at, a sort of
Turing test:
You could talk to a pre-intelligence and like a Racter, Eliza or Dr. SBaitso it might occasionally give the impression of conversing with you, if usually to itself or some unseen and unheard third party:
You: The ferry trip there was unusually choppy. Have you ever been in a boat?Pre-I: A boat is a vessel for transporting people and objects through or across bodies of water.
You: A good enough definition, but have you nothing to share with me from your own experience?
Pre-I: They say that experience is the best teacher.
You: I can't help but suspect that reading an account of rape might be ultimately "better" for me than experiencing one firsthand.
Pre-I: What is your favourite kind of sandwich?
You: Has anyone ever told you that your tangential conversational habits are appalling?
Pre-I: Fancy that!! Has anyone ever told me that my tangential conversational habits are appalling is my favourite kind of sandwich as well!
Conversations with
intelligences comprise the majority of verbal interactions we engage in (if we're lucky.) They still jump about, but usually in ways which are scrutable.
The_King: I miss my sister.An I: How long has it been since she last wrote?
The_King: Two weeks, though there's probably something from her working its way through the post as we speak.
An I: Are you getting tired of picking up poop?
The_King: Uhh... what?
An I: Oh, aren't you taking care of her dog while she's away? Or is someone else in charge of that monster?
The_King: Oh, of course! But, uh, don't tell anybody this, but I just let it lie. No amount of soap can remove the feeling of a hot, dripping doggie turd separated from your hand by only a milimetre of plastic.
An I: People like you shouldn't own pets.
The_King: Hey, this is just for a temporary basis. At least, that's the plan... unless her next piece of mail reveals some new advance in the so-far fruitless job search.
An I: If all else fails, I hear there's quite a lucrative market in that part of the world for healthy infant caucasian children...
... and so forth. My conception of the paradigm beyond the "mere" (and unattainable by science so far) intelligence is of a colossal intellect capable of remembering and weighing the sum total of your interest, experience and context and through it, being able to skip through the possible avenues of conversations
Deep Blue-style and automagically
anticipate the answer you're ultimately looking for before you even ask its question - sometimes even before it occurs to you that there is a question to be asked.
Hypochrondriac: After I woke up from that party Sunday night I had a weird lump on the left side of my neck and it still hasn't gone away.Post-I: It's not cancer.
Japester: I got this joke in my e-mail box Thursday...
Post-I: so I says to him - "If that's your wife, where's your pen?"
PJ Juliez: What do guys think about girls who use their pierced navels to attract guys for one night stands to put household objects in their vaginas?
Post-I: It's not too late for a tubal ligation, you know.
Skeptic: What platform are you running under?
Post-I: Mu.
The biggest problem I have with the model of the post-intelligence I show here is I suspect that due to the large, sudden and objective leaps it would make its eventually-correct response could easily be interpreted by the eventual asker as mere
non sequitur, and without a full record of the simulated conversational steps omitted the merely-intelligent might very well mistake the output of a post-intelligence for that of a pre-intelligence.