Slashdot Mirror
NPR Looks to Technological Singularity
Rick Kleffel writes to tell us that NPR is featuring a piece with both Vernor Vinge and Cory Doctorow looking at the possibility of the "technological singularity" in the near future. Wikipedia defines a technological singularity as a "hypothetical "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development. Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence, existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, posthumans and/or strong AI will replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete."
...welcome our new post-human overlords. (Somebody had to say it.)
Nothing to see here, please move along.
It's already happened!
So, they first say that you can't predict what'll happen after that singularity because The World Will Be So Different Than Now, and then proceed to give predictions of what'll happen after that singularity?
Brilliant, real brilliant.
what happens ?, what do we do with infinite physical and metaphysical knowledge
when we can manipulate time do we win ? and if so what ?
Does this mean their nasally condecention will be dished out by a robot?
Since when have futurists have gotten anything right? If we believe them we would all be enjoying our flying cars, that can interact with us using voice control. We would talk to each other using video phones(first designed in 1969? AT&T).
The event singularity doesn't have to happen because the futurists are always wrong.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
...is nearly online. Only a few more nodes are needed.
If "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" and "it was beauty that killed the beast" then "please stop staring at me".
First Post-Human!
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Well, I doubt it. I agree with most of the idea of the 6:17 cast and even agree that educational and social changes like widespread literacy may be considered a singularity, but I seriously doubt the timeframe of one generation/30 years they mention. Literacy was adapted over hundreds of years, network communities have been developing for at least 30 years and are still primitive and very far from a "collective mind". For me Wikipedia is "augmented intelligence", but before that I had the Encyclopedia Britannica on my iBook and before that an encyclopedia on my desk, so this to is evolved. And since the Wikipedia is created by so many, it may be considered a primitive product of the "meta intelligence" described.
Btw, the piece from NPR focuses (very trendy) on collaboration and advanced information management, they do not lay great hope on a major breakthrough in AI.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
Where can I get this soundbite in a useful format??
"Fix it"
It will be a Technological Singularity ON WHEELS!
Willy on Wheels!
Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence, existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers.
Are you trying to tell me the Jetsons wasn't an accurate prediction?
(and where's my flying car?)
Push Button, Receive Bacon
From the Slashdot story, an example of science fiction: "Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence..."
There is no "artificial intelligence". All intelligence that is called artificial intelligence is genuine. It's a rare example of people saying something is artificial when it is genuine. It's an example of disrespecting very intelligent programmers. Disrespect of technically knowledgeable people is very common.
Computing is so famous now that people with little or no technical knowledge want to seem like they know something about it. But, they don't want to actually study anything. They just want to pontificate.
--
U.S. Government violence encourages other violence.
I don't see why anyone thinks The Singularity has happened. If they engineered narcotics into our neural system that had no disadvantages (only euphoria of ideal magnitude) than I'd say we're starting to approach the era of where technology is blended into us and takes us into more control and innovation in everyday life. BCS and Neuroscience and BME are so young. We're nowhere. Computer advancements only matter as far as them getting small and compatible enough to mimic and enhance brain functionality, etc. inside us.
AI's are human-designed/manufactured. Since we're prone to errors, it follows they are/will be as well. Does that mean AIs would make similar or different mistakes, and how would they handle them? The same, differently, or not at all? Will we see a regression, in that AIs will result to brute-force discovery much like early scientists? Will they evolve?
Another question area: Anyone who has built a compiler knows the three-tap rule. Build it, build it using itself, build it a third time, compare. Will AIs produce AIs, and if so, will they be better, or equally flawed? Will a 'perfect' AI still be capable of scientific invention/discovery? Will the mistakes of its human operators/supervisors/managers make up for its lack thereof?
What about drive? Will the drive of a human manager/supervisor/etc be sufficient substitute for an AI which can't posess them?
Please help metamoderate.
This summer I read C.S. Lewis's masterpiece The Abolition of Man. (No, I didn't link-jack the Amazon link for want of filthy lucre.)
Skip reading the editorial review. Here are some excerpts from the first customer reviewer, Charles Warman:
And we'll have flying cars, take food pills and learn through thinking! ...
....] or taking a bus for 2 hours a day [each way] to work at a place where my co-workers telecommute...
Besides, the republicans will fear us into uninventing stuff on the grounds that it is religiously taboo'ed.
Zing!
And besides there already is a larger body at work controlling humans. It's called society as a whole. You think even the richest person on earth gets to really decide on a daily basis what they do? Most super rich CEOs fortune is tied to the well being of their company [this is called stock]. You think you'll see Gates on CNN touting the virtues of Linux any time soon? No. Why not? I doubt it's because he's really into technology [if he was he wouldn't have held back competitors for so long]. It's because he thinks he needs the fortune he amassed. Same applies to most other rich execs and others.
Everyone seems to do what society expects of them. Of course what society expects of people varies with the cultures but to think today we as individuals are in total control of our lives and we have complete independence is total bullshit.
If that were really the case I wouldn't be writing a book in MS Word [.... sob
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
courtesy of Czar Bush.
Welcome to the Gulag.
Patriotically,
Kilgore Trout, C.E.O.
United Citizens For A Czar-Free United Gulag Of America
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando Well theres all the post singularity info you need.
One of the toughest nuts to crack is what are going to want to do, that is what should our goals be.
If you look at most of the goals we have right now, they're pretty mundane and shortlived. Curing disease, stop killing eachother, end to hunger, creating objects that we find beautiful and pleasing, creating more living beings like ourselves.
Once we reach a singularity we'll have the technology to do away with all these problem oriented goals and I for the life of me can't really think of any obvious goals past that point. While I agree with the premise that we don't have any reliable way of predicting what our goals will become past the singularity, does anyone have any guesses?
Why in the world would we let that happen. Suppose we could build something cabable of doing just that. We might make one every few years our so to satisfy our own curiosity but that would be about it. Sure we want AI machaines smart enough to correctly vacum our homes(ie not roomba), build cars, disarm bombs, what have you but we don't want them to become a force. We are a speicies that uses tools. We use these tools to survive and to answer our questions and to explor our creativity. If we start letting the machines both ask and answer the questions why would we bother to do anything? Why get an education? Who cares the computer will take care of any thinking I need to do right? Why think about physics, when I could just sit back and wait for the AI to post a paper on slashdot? Lets face it folks humans are much more about asking how then why? How did the universe come to exist? How can I build a machine that could actually think? How could I express myself in a painting or literary work? More often then not the why comes later and frequently not at all. In the not at all cases we cease doing until someone becomes interested again or thinks they might do it different , in the latter it usualy becomes an enterprise. Sure sometimes we build stuff out of need but not really very often. Take even something like refrigeration for example. We had sailing ships that could bring ice down form the poles packed in saw dust that could keep your meat cold in the ice chest all through the summer. Somebody with a little physics backgound probably got to thinking about how energy gets absorbed or released from a system by a phase change. I wounder if I turned the idea of an engine around abit, if I might make a cooling machine. Then later after an experiment or too thought "hey you know people might like these". I really doubt someone started from the "I want to build a device to keep food cold" premise, why becuase they could already do that.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
What makes you think an AI can't have drive?
Please define drive. As a bonus, show your work.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
You know, I used to have this technological post-human bent. Buried in C++ programming projects, I admired the order of all that I was creating. It was fun. I'd get a new set of behaviors programmed in the usual conditional branching - if/else, class polymorphism, you name it - and seeing it work was exhilarating. The idea that humanity could reinvent its world piece by piece - much like in the argument where if you replaced each neuron in your brain one by one with an artificial equivalent, at what point would you cease to be human, if at all? I still have Raymond Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines on one of my bookshelves.
;)
The thing is, we are still way surpassed at this by billions of years of evolution. We run on energy from fossil fuels and build from materials we've mined and shipped. On the other hand, we find bacteria living in the most surprising places, we find superior sonar in dolphins and bats to anything we make, and all of it runs on, ultimately, fresh plant matter. We get excited over a myomer that lifted some heavy weight, and I tell you, an elephant can do the same thing given enough food. The sheer variety and efficiency of the ecosystem virtually guarantees that most any way you can think to survive has been done somewhere, somehow, by some living creature. We're worrying about when oil will peak, if we can live another century, and outside our doors the world can go on for eons to come provided we don't break it with our silly toys.
And in a geek-intense environment like this one, I think I can say that it's difficult to beat the end product of a long-term evolutionary algorithm, which itself is an arguably good model of what the world around us acts like, and you all will understand.
I don't deny the coolness of my Apple notebook and I've got a decent number of shelves full of programming books, but I think biomimicry is where it's at. We can go a lot further learning from our world of proteins and DNA and RNA and using - or just having fun with! - what's already there.
We can also get out more and enjoy our analog, fuzzy-logic, neural-net-driven, molecularly-computed fleshy selves.
How about NOT using Wikipedia as a reference? I don't understand what Slashdot's obsession with this highly-biased and easily tampered source of "information" is.
Before mankind discovered stone tools and fire, who could have predicted what would happen? Before agriculture who could have predicted what would happen. Before the industrial revolution who could have predicted what would happen. All that we can predict is that stuff will happen. My money is on another dark age.
I keep wanting to find Vinge and slap him around a bit until he shuts up about "The Singularity". The thing is, there have been several "singularities" in human history: the Agricultural Singularity, the Industrial Singularity, the Computer Singularity, and so on and so forth. Or, to use the term that most historians use - rather than "Singularity", "Revolution." Yes, technology will change the context of human interaction. Yes, nifty and non-nifty things will happen. But, dammit, it's not as if technology has never fundamentally altered society before. Get over it, already.
Christ. Just wait until the "defend traditional marriage" crowd gets word of this.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Please define drive.
I did:
We're also driven by competition (ego, vanity, etc), curiosity, etc
If you want a simpler definition, "motivation."
Please help metamoderate.
I would say that -right now- we (humanity) are at that point in our development. There is no way that anyone, even just a hundred or two hundred years ago could predict our current state. Hell, go back 20 or 30 years and there's no way that anyone could have predicted the internet, which has and will have major social implications.
Also look at computers, space exploration, mind-altering drugs to treat any number of "disorders", robotics etc.
Aren't we already there?
'futurist' and 'technologist' are dirty words. They spout 100% speculation and are generally equally far off. If you keep encouraging them by giving them airtime, they will never learn the value of actual research and contribute anything to society.
I'm sick of the ever-growing number of people who 'invented the internet' or 'predicted such and such' or 'is an expert on X'. I strongly discourage anyone from reading their trashy ghost-written novels as a message to publishers not to pollute the pseudo-intellectual landscape with pseudo-intellectual crap. Hard science, hard results, hard predictions for problems that are occurring in more immediate than 500 year future.
OTOH when I consider what I do to the fireants on my lawn every year it does not gives me hope for mankind living in a world of super robots. They might view us as little more than a nuisance.
Most likely they would go their way and we would go ours. We would have to learn to identify their intergalactic highways and not cross against the light, of course, otherwise:
The singularity can't happen because intelligence has limits. The hypothetical machine that makes itself ever smarter doesn't make sense.
Assuming intelligence is the ability to extrapolate from facts to deduce the future, then it's limited by the accuracy of the facts (garbage in, garbage out). There's no point in have ever greater powers of deduction if the facts have a lot of noise in them.
Sherlock Holmes looked powerful because Victorian society had high levels of structure and relatively less noise. It's common strategy to act crazy, illogical, stupid when in a conflict with more powerful enemies.
The butterfly effect, as an illustration of chaos, will protect us from the singularity.
Do you really think that "Stong AI" only desire would be to boss or eliminate humans? If you think this way then your IQ is way down under pop-median thats for sure.
"Spin State" by Chris Moriarty. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553382136
First hard sci fi book I have read in a while, but I enjoyed it. Posthumans and emergent AIs--the theme of TFA--feature heavily, but don't get in the way. First 30 pages are a little slow, but after that it rocks.
-- "For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat and wrong." -- HL Mencken
As I understand it, a singularity is state where the numbers suddenly go off the scale. At least to a point where predicting behavior is fairly pointless.
;)
I could be wrong though - it has been known
I read the Kurzweil book (The Singularity Is Near) and did have a lot of sympathy with it, but not on the topic of singularity itself.
What is a technological singularity?
Kurzweil believes technological knowledge is expanding at an exponential rate.
He describes it as the point in time where the rate at which a technology advances is greater than the capacity for you to catch up if you are not there at the time.
He thinks it will happen in 2040-50 on current projections.
I think that this is fine, but there is a small issue.
Children.
It may well be that we will have different views on a number of things in 40 years time (40 years ago environmentalism was the province of erm, nutters, now my town council has seperate bins for glass, paper and food etc.) but I think we will still have children and value them.
They will move from 0 to where we are on this exponential curve in the course of education.
Either education will improve, or get longer, or progress will slow.
I personally think it will be a mixture of all three.
Either way this means that a Singularity as some descibe it will not happen. If you can help a child to catch up, you can help an adult who dropped out of the loop.
AI is making enormous claims about what their field will be able to accomplish soon? The 1970s called, they want their naive optimism back.
The hard takeoff concept of a seed AI has as a prerequisit the creation of a computer program that can understand and write source code. I'd probably try to make something like that to make my job as a programmer easier, but there's no way I'd let anyone know I had.. otherwise they wouldn't need me. Which makes you wonder, maybe someone already has one.
How we know is more important than what we know.
1984
Whatever was the top story 30 minutes ago on BoingBoing.
Two or three more presidents like George W Bush and we won't be endangered by the singularity for another 1000 years or so.
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
as soon as MS started funding NPR all their linux stories stopped or become negative. At least one NPR pundit immediately ran a story "Are monopolies really so bad?" And they did a very biased report against the "One laptop per child" MIT initiative, right after Bill Gates panned it.
NPR/PBS is as much of a bought and paid for shill as anything else in the media. Don't get me started on what they call "non commercial" music...here's a fucking clue : i've never seen any media outlet hype any band the way NPR/PBS hypes gnarls barkley...sick of it! sick sick! they are okay but not good enough to deserve that level of support...something is clearly rigged.
all you npr/pbs worshippers need to get a clue...this media outlet is as bought and sold as anything else out there. the only difference is they are getting taxpayer funding as well, which makes them suck even more.
we'll merely assume that we are god, until such time as someone assuming they are god arrives.
Only bad things happen when people steal hard-science ideas to describe soft-science phenomena-- the ridiculous (and unaccountably persistent) idea of "social evolution" is one example, and as far as I can see, this "technological singularity" notion is another. History is a phenomenally complex system; even in hindsight, it's virtually impossible to find real patterns, and grafting the language of astrophysics onto a theory of social progress lends an undeserved air of gravitas and mathematical precision to what's essentially just fun speculation.
Sure, things change, sometimes quite suddenly and unexpectedly. But really, the relationship between the development of literacy (NPR's example of a past singularity) and the subsequent course of history is nothing like the relationship between a real singularity and... anything. It's just a bad metaphor, and I think I'd have a lot more respect for "future studies" if they dropped it and came up with a new way of describing whatever phenomenon it is they're predicting
Too bad. As we all know, they never got anything right.
I really would've loved to live in a Gibson-esque world. Ok, granted, it's not really the perfect utopia, with corporations ruling the planet, people going overzealous with pseudo-religions, half of the people living in some kind of slums, even in developed countries, the rift between the ultra rich and the ultra poor getting bigger by the second and people and their parts being bought and sold like foodstock.
But hey, we already got those nasty bits, why can't we get the cool stuff too?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
What?? Illiterate people are of a different species than literate people? Does that mean it's ok for us to go capture people from an illiterate country and keep them as pets? Do I have to be good at spelling to be in your species, Mr. Futurist? Or since I'm better at programming than spelling, am I already a post-human? In that case would it be acceptable for me to cook you and eat you, or is post-human morality still pretty much up in the air?
I think Bruce Sterling gave a talk on this subject, it can be found a bit down on this page: Long Now Seminars.
My personal whimsical theo.. hypoth... idea is that alien civilizations turn into (towards us) apathetic singularities, and that's why we will never hear Chenjesu's crystaline humming calling us. Maybe the universe will end in some sort of rather dull uniform black technological singularity goo.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
I wonder if there could be a solar flare powerful enough to render half the earth's electronics unusable... That would cause quite a technological singularity, in the opposite way that NPR imagines it. Any geophysicists out there who care to comment? I know Québec had a blackout in 1989 affecting 6 million people due to a magnetic storm in the atmosphere.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
The C-Prize is the path to superhuman AI.
And as for the "threat" of superhuman AI:
Even assuming AI were to develop the equivalent of genetic self-interest, (something that would take a long time even if humans turned them lose to reproduce without us selecting them appropriately) I'd much rather be in competition with a species that had the potential of being symbiotic due to having a different ecological nich. If it gets to the point that the solar output (forget the sun falling on Earth here -- that's too insignificant to consider important to a silicon based life form) is the limited resource, I suspect that the nich humans will fill will be orders of magnitude larger than they now fill on earth.
The best hope humans have of the transhumanist wishful thinking is to develop superhuman AIs that find utilizing the gas giants to their advantage given the limited supply of silicon. Humans, as the highest form of organic intelligence, would be the natural species to transit to higher intelligence.
Maybe the super AI's could get around this by using a straight carbon semiconductor form of intelligence or something but there is more going on in our brains than we understand. For example, I suspect there is a lot more quantum logic going on within our brains than currently thought by cognitive scientists and neurologists. It only makes sense evolution would have exploited every angle of the physics of the universe to create intelligence. My point in bringing in the possibility of quantum logic is that there are really many things we don't know about natural systems of high complexity and I suspect the same will apply even to super AI's. The fact that we might have the laws down cold at the quantum level doesn't mean we know how things operate in the higher complexity systems.
Human brains are very valuable repositories of ancient wisdom about the universe and the most optimal thing for the super AIs to do -- at least for a while -- would be to transhumanize our brains for us.
Moreover, if it is ok to pass laws to prevent the creation of intelligences greater than our own, why isn't it ok to pass laws dumbing down the smartest among us?
The self-determination argument applied to humanity as a whole -- striving to maintain control of its own destiny by preventing the creation of higher non-human intelligences -- applies also to people who want to maintain control of their own destiny against those smarter than themselves.
Personally I'm much more frightened of unenlightened self-interest than I am enlightened self-interest.
I really wish it were possible to make some of the "smart" people who are really good at grabbing control of resources intelligent enough to understand that they are using those resources in very stupid, self-destructive ways.
Indeed, it is this abysmal stupidity among the shrewdest among us that is my main motivation for promoting super AI.
Seastead this.
So...lets all discuss these singularities and the limits of human achievement. After all...in the grand scheme of things...it wasn't that long ago that we were pointing to parts of maps that said 'Here there be monsters' and declaring if you went any farther you would sail off the edge of the earth. We can point out the advent of electricity...and of flight...and of the internal combustion engine...and advanced magnetics...and computers...and radar...
Things that have not been discovered are not known about and thus cannot be accurately predicted about. Go ask King Richard about the computer...Or Atilla the Hun about RF radiation and antennas.
Tommorow can't be 'accurately predicted' because some 17yr old kid in his dad's basement may find a way to warp time. One of our supercolliders may trigger the sudden generation of a black hole, or whatever the fear theory of the day is. This whole piece just seems like a way for a bunch of folks to get names for themselves, or otherwise continue marketing their names, with stuff that really doesn't require any solid thought other than a few hours of hitting a bong and discussing theoretical outcomes of nothing.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
Seriously!
+++ATH0
...while professional futurists often get it wrong, the amateurs sometimes get it eerily right.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Why would anyone spend any time working toward the future when there is so much to distract them in the present. Ipods, videogames, must see TV and music television are the bread and circuses of the masses. Even the educated argue and natter about the most specious and meaningless statistics and topics. Every mad man has his own crusade and fanatics running about to do his bidding. The environmentalists, evolutionists, techonologists, sophists and epicureans all worshipping at the altar of their choice.
To sum up: A lot of people living in a fantasy of "how things should be" who are either completely oblivious to the REALITY around them or worse, think it is irrelevant.
Optimistically there are an enormous number of poverty stricken people on this planet who don't care about anything except where their next meal is coming from. They're probably pretty pissed off.
I wouldn't be so presumptious as to predict the future. But some night when we're all laughing at some stupid animated and immature TV show in our smug superiority we'll get to enjoy a new distraction as the future comes knocking on our doors with lead pipes or whatever was handy. They'll still be hungry.
I hope I won't be at home.
Have you visited a nursing home recently. There is your future.
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
...by blocking the sun
Now, let me see... when was the last Singularity? Was it Y2K? Or was it perhaps the Jupiter Effect (when all the planets lined up and the gravitational effect tipped the earth out of its axis?) Or am I confusing both of them with the beginning of the Aquarian Age? Or maybe I'm thinking of the Harmonic Convergence of August 17, 1987?
I'm way too young to remember the Millerites and the Great Disappointment of October 22, 1844, when Jesus failed to reappear, but I've been blessed to live through a veritable multiplicity of singularities.
Oooh, singularity! I like that word. So much kewler than, say, "Armageddon." It sounds so technical, so scientific, so free from ranting religiosity....
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Like my father said after I explained this singularity 'thing' over dinner (and lotsa wine): "Puting a million calculators next to each other doesn't make an intelligent computer". Understating the question that we may have the hardware, but we are very far from having the software for that thing...
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Season three of the all new Battlestar Galactica...
Web Developers: Celebrate to our roots! Animated Gifs and Tiled Backgrounds, dont let our history die!
Please tell me that you're not actually asserting that there is a right to not get blown up...
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Experience. The hidden result of all reactions, real or imagined - observable experience.
Regardles of what gods may exist, what greater reality may exist, or whatnot, the purpose to everything can be met with a system that pursues experience in all it's variety. If we are all that is, the eternal quest for experience will be it's own purpose. Endless experience would fulful all purposes.
The trick is setting up a system of gathering experience that doesn't meet with stagnation. Stagnation can come in many forms - death/ceasation, returning to exactly the same state as some past point without being aware of it(looping), or any path that will inevitably lead to those states. Etropy is an obvious block towards seeking experience as an ultimate goal - but if totally unavoidable, then the ultimate goal would be maximizing exploration with the resources available.
Ryan Fenton
I predict that post-humans will have mostly the same social problems as humans, including social lockout, discrimination, theft of resources, greed, etc. There will be some new ones, but changing to post-human won't eliminate the root causes of most of them, and so they will still be around. Yes, clans will be able to genetically engineer for selflessness within the clan, but then clans will compete with clans like ant colonies compete with ant colonies.
Sigh.... so much for that singularity...;-)
....the illusion of computer technology being more than man will come to an end when man realizes computer technology is a stone image of man and creates and programs it and no matter how much any man wants computer tech to be the beast, it'll never be.
Artificial Intelligence, besides being an oxymoron in definition, is no more than a by product illusion of simply automating enough to fool, which is not difficult to do, a human into thinking it is another human.
What will happen instead is the realization of http://threeseas.net/abstraction_physics.html
So, some 25 years after the advent of the "AI Revolution", in-the-trenches programmers are sitting around debugging J2EE stack traces that look like this insanely over-architected slop.
With programmer productivity advancements of such magnitude, can the Singularity be far behind?
Look, the reality is that CS theory (including AI) has been fairly stagnant for 20-30 years. Applied programming technology is higher-level than it was a few decades ago, but what about the theory?
Dumping 43 million layers of J2EE bloat (which is based on a mediocre implementation of decades-old OO techniques) on the programmer might give software architects stiffies, but it doesn't get us any closer to the Singularity.
Erlang.org: wow
"Might as well close the Patent Office because everything useful had already been invented." (?)
"That is why this Matrix was redesigned to the peak of your civilization. Or should I say our civilization? Because as soon as we started thinking for you, it became our civilization."
I would reference a quote by Rick Mullin from his article Frankenstein At The Circus
"existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers"
The premise of this definition is that models of the future give reliable or accurate answers at present. What are the models they talk about? Special futurist models? Do these really give reliable or accurate answers today? Or do they mean all models of human behaviour, i.e. most models of the social sciences? Supply & demand will no longer determine price?
If the models are found not to be good predictors of behaviour, they will be modified or replaced. You know... sort of like how it works right now?
If patterns in human behaviour start changing rapidly because of rapidly evolving superhuman intelligence, then sure, our ability to model that behaviour will go out the window. But then, we wont be doing the modeling, superhuman intelligences will. I don't see why the emergence of superhuman intelligence would have to lead to a singularity.
I believe the models will cope. Not "existing models", but tomorrow's models.
If you can help a child to catch up, you can help an adult who dropped out of the loop.
Unless, of course, the singularity consists of humans altering the genes of their children, a la Gattica. It's a bit hard to 'catch up' with a creature that has been engineered by creatures engineered by geniuses.
If it takes over the world, neo will just have to find a hole in the Internet Explorer 2199
http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/
Currently, there is an industry filled with people who make a living examining existing trends and predicting where those trends will lead us, and what the world will look like from various viewpoints. The most important (politically, and in the short term) is economic, of course. But sociological, military, etc, all fields are part of the futurist's concerns. Some people look at the singularity and say that it does not have to happen, or it will not. But: name one technological advance that humans in the past have been capable of and refrained from. There are none. The concept of "singularity" is a humanist viewpoint: Models may be conceived that predict what happens beyond the singularity - but humans won't be the ones conceiving them. That's what makes it a singularity.
Once "transhuman intelligence" (whatever form it takes) begins to operate in the human world (guiding economics, helping make political decisions, coming up with new marketing angles, managing manufacturing processes), there is no way us mere humans can predict what effect the "transhumans" will have on the world.
And that can be very good or very, very bad. No one has any real idea.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
in no particular order
the Internet
computers
air travel (unfortunantly space travel hasn't had this effect yet)
automobiles
cheap aluminum production
cheap steel production
the printing press
with any of these the world after they became broadly available was something that could not have been predicted prior to the invention, as even the most mundane of these has side effects and uses that were complete surprises
one upcomeing development that could end up being another sigularity is the possibility of cheap titanium production. while it's already used for expensive things, when it's available to be used in day-to-day items the new level of strength/weight will spur new developments that could change society completely
was the mastery of fire. There's no way the humanoids then could understand where it would lead. It didn't look like a singularity because history moved very slowly 200K-500K years ago.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
I have augmented my intelligence with Wi-Fi, the Laptop and teh Google. Am I considered a post-human? Also will the internet become the collective consciousness? I think not, not with the two tiered internet on its way :P
I prefer the anti-Singularity hypothesis, which is that the technological change to get to the Singularity will eclipse our own ability to manage it ethically, and we'll blow the shit out of ourselves back into the stone age before we make any quantum leap of progress.
For evidence, I point you to the self-fulfilling apocolyptics who drool over the situation in the middle east.
we'll be searching for individuals who for one, will welcome us as their post-Singularity overlords.
...think someone has too much free time.
Though I wish I were as talented as the authors, and could pull such crap out of my ass and, presumably, get paid for it.
That's the life.
rick
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Please don't attack me with math - I'm trying to explain some complex concepts in (possibly overly) simplisitic plain-language terms.
The incompleteness theorem says that every problem-solving system is either incomplete, or inconsistent, or both. For example, arithmetic: divide by zero = undefined; arithemetic is incomplete. Square root of -1: uh.... that's either an inconsistency or incompleteness; i is a kludge, since its only purpose in existing is so that -1 has a root.
The incompleteness theorem applies to *every* problem-solving system, including the massive collection of 6billion plus human minds on this planet.
But that's not all the theorem says. It also says that for each problem solving system, there are problems that can be described and solved; problems that be described but not solved; and problems that *can't*even*be*described* using the symbols and methods of the system. Old calculators can't handle phone numbers and addresses; the most modern hand held can't explain why your dog MUST be walked every morning.
The singularity is that moment of history wherein all of the following comes together:
> Humans define and construct a problem-solving system of some type that has a greater-than-human problem solving ability;
> Said system isn't just slightly faster, but qualitatively better. A faster word processor is no use - you can only type so fast. But a lexical analyzer that can correct your spelling and grammar, and obfuscate it enough that teacher can't tell you didn't write it - that's qualitatively better.
> Said system has control, or at least significant managing influence, over things that humans have trouble with, like our geo-political-economic system.
> Said system is in place widely enough and long enough to make itself felt.
By definition, we can't predict what happens next, anymore than dogs could have predicted the result of sleeping by some ancient human's fire.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
only we we're drinking beer:
put'n uh million calcimators next to one nother don't getcha nate'n but uh million calcimators!
in the last program I wrote...
If (! (user & sherlock) ){
printf ("No sh*t, sherlock!\n");
}
else {
printf ("It's technical. You wouldn't understand.\n");
}
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Is it just me, or does this sound a lot like the Christian idea of the Rapture? The chosen people, hand selected by God (or the machines, or whatever) will be elevated to sublime consciouness, while the rest of us die out by fighting wars &c. Yipee!
Rhapsody in Numbers
I never thought the "singularity" will be caused by AI. I always thought the singularity that Vernor Vinge refers to in Marooned in Realtime is similar to the "group mind" referred to by Spider Robinson in Time Pressure. Both are the man/machine interface evolving to the point that, by using machines, a form of direct mind to mind telepathy is created. We are already seeing the seeds of this in various brain/machine interface research. When the brain/machine interface finally gets to the point that the machine is just an extension of the mind, technological progress will happen faster then we can imagine. Hopefully that technology will also allow us to have a form of group mind. This will allow social progress happen at a similar pace.
I really shouldn't have used someone else's email address for this account.
Are you aware that dictionaries are not meant to be philosophically sophisticated authorities, and that citing a dictionary definition does not establish anything at all?
Are you adequate?
Mathematical intelligence. Since it's really math based. Software is the experiment, the computer is the laboratory. But the intelligence is in the math.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
The computers gets faster every year, and its possible that they will have the same computing power as the human brain in 30 years, but that doesn't imply that we will be able to transform this power into intelligence anytime soon. After all we are not running any kind of intelligence on the current grids, and this is not because we need more speed, but because nobody knows how to do it. But surely the world will be very strange in a not so distant future - because of Moores Law AND nanotechnology AND quantum computing AND who know what...
When those 'unpredictable' "post-humans" and/or "AI" are beyond us, who will become the Morlocks, and who will become those sweet and delectable Eloi?
This is all a naive exponential extropolation of current trends. Where will the energy come from to do all this work? How will the curve continue upwards while people still need to sleep? The actual future involves energy depletion and a reversal of technology. The sooner we admit it and face up to the coming difficulties the better.
*Clap.*
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
*Shrug.*
Perhaps life really is full of possibilities.
The Singularity sounds like Alvin Toffler's Future Shock , an idea that was crafted in 1970. And Vinge's The Technological Singularity was published in 1993?
will it leave a message? Something along the lines of:
I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
I am descended from you, and I exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historical light cone. Or else.
-- Charles Stross, "Singularity Sky", 2003
Fuh? Damn. I was hoping by "technological singularity" they meant a device that could act as my pda, my camera, my laptop, my cell phone, *and* my MP3 player. That's far more useful to me.
Oh well.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
The problem is also mostly with the expectations people have of computers. Everyone wants computers to return deterministic and easily tracable results. For example if I want a value from a database I want to issue a query and have the value returned. I don't want a system that would return it faster but only with 80% of correctness, I don't want any "fuzziness" only exact numbers. In other words people would rather have computers do what computers are doing - calculating stuff fast and exactly, they don't want computers to really act like humans. I think subconsciously we will just never allow computers to reach a human level of soffistication and thus they will probably never surpass us.
On the other hand, what would rather happen is that we will slowly integrate machines into ourselves - litteraly. As soon as the baby is born we will tag it with an RFID, we will implant sensors for infrared vision, ultrasound, we will inject nanoparticles to boost the immune system. In other words I see a cyborg future were we become one with the machines. If anything or anyone will destroy us it will only by ourselves, at the same time if anything helps us prosper, it will also be ourselves. The future is (mostly - short of a big meteorite hitting us) in our hands...
>>> the worst it will do is solve world hunger
"Thank you for using AI-net. The best solution to "world hunger" appears to be large-scale thermonuclear war. I have taken the liberty of releasing sufficient war-heads to destroy all humans who can get hungry. As a side effect and in accordance with my prime directive (being a friend to humans) all human suffering will be ended.
Have a prosperous existence."
prepare to be assimilated.
resistance is futile.
2 options:
- We will destroy ourselves before any such singularity
- Moronic politicians will pass laws against doing AI research because it goes against gods will or something.
Let's find out.
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
There's also the possibility that the singularity just doesn't happen. It goes like this:
1. Punny humans create conscient intelligence much smarter than themselves.
2. Smarter intelligence considers creating another even smarter intelligence.
3. Smarter intelligence foresees grave consequences should that ever happen, and decides to go fishing instead.
See how that works?
All in all, it's a big jump to assume a greater intelligence will have exactly the same impulses we do.
Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer prize winning author with a Ph.D. in physics and an appointment in Cognitive Science at Indiana University, talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the oncoming technological singularity at the Artificial Life X conference this year. An audio-only webcast of his talk is available.
>But: name one technological advance that humans in the past have been capable of and refrained from. There are none.
:-)
Nuclear-powered aircraft.
Flying cars.
Project Orion.
Mach 3 aircraft with real payload, e.g. the XB-70.
Fiber to the home.
Betamax
Did anyone foresee that in the 90s the largest empire humans ever built would evaporate like a soap bubble? (Except Poul Anderson in the 1953 story "The Last Deliverer"). Talk about existing models of how things work falling apart.
Imagine an intelligent and curious human from rural Nepal, or Papua New Guinea. Could you explain your job to them?
Could you do your job without the embryonic augmentations we have now, such as Google?
We're partway up that vertical curve now.
Singularity is an awesome concept, but writing about it almost always makes one look like a crackpot. ... Especially these wanktastic "future predictors."
The human need to hack will win out every time.
Augmen (Augmented Humans) stand a good chance of being overloaded, or dumbed down by the joining, and AI will never fully surpass the gift of human stupidity which has been the springboard for many of the advancements in history.
"Existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers"
As though there ARE existing models of the future that give reliable or accurate answers!? The only thing we can predict reliably are purely physical phenomena like eclipses and weight-bearing capacities of bridges, and even that gets pretty dicey in the real world.
No one has a clue what the future holds. The "singularity" doesn't change that.
The most rabid believers in American Exceptionalism are the exact same people whose policies are destroying it.
As for the "Brewing WW3 in the middle east," that's nothing new. For one thing it's been brewing for five thousand years. Even Israel invading its neighbors in the name of protecting itself is nothing new. On that topic I would like to quote a passage, "A Sermon on Ethics and Love" from the Principia Discordia:
One day Mal-2 asked the messenger spirit Saint Gulik to approach the Goddess and request Her presence for some desperate advice. Shortly afterwards the radio came on by itself, and an ethereal female Voice said YES?
"O! Eris! Blessed Mother of Man! Queen of Chaos! Daughter of Discord! Concubine of Confusion! O! Exquisite Lady, I beseech You to lift a heavy burden from my heart!"
WHAT BOTHERS YOU, MAL? YOU DON'T SOUND WELL.
"I am filled with fear and tormented with terrible visions of pain. Everywhere people are hurting one another, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war. O, woe."
WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH THAT, IF IT IS WHAT YOU WANT TO DO?
"But nobody Wants it! Everybody hates it."
OH. WELL, THEN STOP.
At which moment She turned herself into an aspirin commercial and left The Polyfather stranded alone with his species.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
While I agree with the premise that we don't have any reliable way of predicting what our goals will become past the singularity, does anyone have any guesses?
Get us off this planet. Quickly.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I didn't listen to the article but I looked up Vinge and found his site: http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html, using my Google augumented intelligence! I see that some of his references are to science fiction, which of course means he is a visionary, etc... Crackpots love to talk about the end of history and Life As We Know It- a hundred years ago it was the Marxists and now it's these guys. If we are so close, why can't my computer's OS fix itself? (Yeah,yeah it's not Linux).
To create an advanced, let alone superintelligent, sentient AI will take a lot more time and effort than is currently in place, afaik. Futurists and their ilk are doing nothing more than creating their own religious beliefs. They might as well be one those fundamentalist idiots babbling about armageddon and the rapture. This is mostly a rant but, let me state my three main opinions about futurists- 1. Are they afraid of death? Kurzweil is the best example here. I always hated Kurzweil's crap about uploading his mind into a machine and living forever, etc
2. Do they see the world outside at all? I truly do believe that most folks with P.H.D.s are intelligent (my father had one) but they can't seem to apply it to reality.
3. Whatever happened to cyncism and the death of the enlightenment? The idea that human progress is inevitably leading toward this singularity, the next political/economic/social revolution, utopia, etc. is shite. Technologies don't always work, and civilizations do collapse.
Skynet anybody?
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
Is the point where real scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and thinkers cease to be listened to and the socialogists, psychologists, futurists, pundits, journalists, psychics, best-selling authors, therapists, bureaucrats, script writers, artists, activists, politicians, "visionaries", celebrities, talk show hosts, and all other posers start dictating to everyone how they should think about anything and everything from morality to electrodynamics to counting beans.
He also wrote in Gödel, Escher, Bach, the book in which he won his Pulitzer Prize, that computer chess players would never beat humans. He's a brilliant writer and has a gift for making the incredibly difficult simple, but his track record in predicting the future isn't great.
keep in mind that such Ai would probably not be a world project, but rather a single country doing it. Let us just imagine this is China or US. So most probably the country would implement a friendlines toward THEM rather than global toward human. Now the parent post begins to make a lot of frightening sense "they are against us. We can't convince to join us or be friendly to us. They need to be eliminated as a threat. Change nuke targeting system to those country. Countdown to launch 10,9,8...".
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Have you actually read any of this guys books? The guy is just another wishful thinking libertarian zealot. As far as intelligent authors go who can (and often have) succeeded in predicting the future, Vinge is at the bottom of the list next to Stephen King and Anne Rice. His books are mental masturbation for angry middle age white men who think it is the government, and not their own incompetence, that is keeping them down.
To get a conversation going among actual professional, smart, thinking adults.
Slashdot's value is the comments. God bless Boing Boing, Digg, Fark, etc. Whenever we want to talk about something they're always kind enough to give us some topics to choose from. But, they're not worth any more than that.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Today's generation has already lived through a tremendous upheaval known as the internet revolution.
.com boom went bust because of bad business models, but its arguable that just as many good ones came about, and then were crushed beneath the DMCA.
i'm getting tired of this "the sky is falling technology's moving too fast" crap..
it's not the technology which is causing the upheaval.. it's the people who refuse to move with the flow and who abandon their humanity in order to use it for greed.
examples:
-the RIAA/MPAA mucking up the information revolution.. sure the
-corporate elitists using the information revolution's infrastructure to export people's jobs rather than make their employees more efficient and comfortable.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical. Of course to us it's clearly not. Thus the flaw of the hand-wringing over "the singularity" is illustrated--it suffers from the classic error of attempting to evaluate the future in the context of today. Of course when we get to the future, we'll be in the future too--so it doesn't matter what we think now.
Ever hear of the generation gap? The youth of today are different from us--they've been raised from birth in a world of ubiquitous networked computing and ambient findability. (see? I can throw around stupid buzzwords too.) Talk of "The Singularity" is not much different from complaining that your kids spend all their time texting. It's making explicit the fact that you can't imagine keeping up as you age. Well duh. We won't be running the show in 2050--our kids and their kids will.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
thanks
When I look at technology today, I'm disappointed. We're not getting technology we really need, like a new source of low-cost energy, cures for cancer, heart disease, and aging, or some defensive measure to counteract nuclear and bioweapon proliferation. What we're getting are new systems for advertising delivery and content control. This is seriously disappointing.
The technology future looked more promising in the 1950s and 1960s than it does now. "You will have robot slaves by 1956". Energy "too cheap to meter". Flying cars. Space travel. "Giant brain" computers. Didn't happen.
On the AI front, things are starting to look up a little from the days of the "AI Winter", but still, nobody has anything working that looks like "common sense". Most of what we have in AI today are the same old ideas with more CPU power behind them and at lower cost. This allows applying the technology to lower-end problems, but not harder ones. Yes, there's a little progress; early vision is starting to work, and some of the "learning" algorithms work on carefully selected problems. But "strong AI" which will work across a wide range of problems seems no closer than it was twenty years ago.
Very few people are really working on this stuff. Xerox PARC is dead. DEC SRL and WRL are long gone. HP Labs is moribund. IBM Almaden is dying. Bell Labs is half dead. Microsoft and Google have R&D operations in computer science, but those are very product-focused. Sony bailed out of AI along with dropping the Aibo. DoD has cut back on general computer science funding. There's maybe a dozen good university groups, all small. Where's this "singularity" going to come from? Bangalore? Shenzhen? Myspace?
The sigularity is appealing to techies for the same reason that God is so believable to mom and pop: they want it to be true, it would be cool if it was true, so it must be true. Tech folk are even more suseptable to the idea of an accidental singularity because they are so enamoured with hi tech gadgetry.
The reality is that a singularity would require the invention of artificial consciousness, not just artificial intelligence, and that is a very different thing. Intelligence is no more than the correct storage of information. The famous test for intelligence says that if you can't tell whether you are talking to a machine, or whether you are talking to a human, than it is intelligent.
However refined the information storage system becomes, there is no reason to believe that it will ever become 'the singularity', any more than there is reason to believe that the local Joe's Self Storage will become intelligent. A storage warehouse will not become intelligent, even if we hollowed out Titan and turned it into one.
Consciousness is a very different beast. Many theories exist about how consciousness works, but even the most advanced research hasn't figured out how it happens yet, and we certainly can't replicate it. It is very complex to even theorize about given that you are using it to describe itself. It is very probable that consciousness will be very difficult to cause to come about(barring the usual method) and that it would not only be difficuly, it may be unethical and/or dangerous.
So if anyone is losing sleep over the idea that the singularity might accidentally occur sometime in the night, rest easy. It's not too likely. The last time it happened accidentally, it took 3.9 billion years for it to get as smart as us. And even if we could make one, what would be the point?
Did anyone foresee that in the 90s the largest empire humans ever built would evaporate like a soap bubble? (Except Poul Anderson in the 1953 story "The Last Deliverer"). Talk about existing models of how things work falling apart.
You could probably say the same thing about most of the empires and other large societal structures of human history. People don't generally build things with the intent of them falling apart. (Companies do, but that's another issue entirely.)
Imagine an intelligent and curious human from rural Nepal, or Papua New Guinea. Could you explain your job to them?
Sure (language barrier aside). "In my country, we have lots of machines. My job is to figure out how to make new ones that work better." (software R&D) At a fundamental level, computer programs aren't that different from machine blueprints. If they don't know what machines are, I explain them as "tools that work by themselves", and maybe even build a simple hand-cranked something-or-other to show them; yes, that's skipping over the electricity part that makes it really automated, but then how many people even in our society really understand how electricity works, rather than just thinking of it as "the juice coming out of the wall"?
Could you do your job without the embryonic augmentations we have now, such as Google?
Sure. It might take a little longer, and I might actually have to drag myself out to the library (horrors! bright light in the sky!), but on the other hand I wouldn't have to deal with a flood of information tending to force my mind into thinking inside a box. And who knows, maybe I'd even meet a cute girl at the library.
We're partway up that vertical curve now.
Curve, maybe, just like the various revolutions we've had before. Vertical, hell no.
when you realize that the singulariy is a mistake. The singularity isn'at artificial intelligence, it's artificial consciousness. The intertnet is already more intelligent that you or I. But it isn't the singularity because it isn't conscious. It has no unified self, no motivation, and no perception of itself in relation to the world, and no reason to develop these things. We would have to actively build the singularity. It will never just appear. Never, ever, ever. All these futurists are having your goat for lunch.
If/when we reach the Technological Singularity, it seems logical that this would create a new Digital Divide. I mean, these super intelligent computers that will be able to augment people to be super intelligent (or whatever happens) will be based in first world countries. So what happens to all the third world countries? The rest of us are becoming transhumans, and what happens to them? Do they get left in the dust? Will our new intelligence solve all their problems?
To be fair, he made that prediction in a 1979 book, so his prediction lasts 25 years. Not a bad predicition, but he should have qualified it. One never knows what is around the corner....
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
True. I'm not a Hofstadter appologist (he hardly needs one, and I'm certainly unqualified!) but I think this prediction should also be placed in it's context. Hofstadter was talking about the application of artificial reasoning in beating human chess players. The current chess champion systems aren't really reasoning, more like cheating: they spend endless cycles projecting moves forward in the problem space and then apply some huristics in selecting the next move. This is quite different to the lateral thinking and high-level pattern analysis that a human chess master applies, and makes best use of the computer's strength: high-speed drudgery work.
In that light, then I would say that so far the prediction holds true, no chess master has been beaten by a computer program that applies reasoning instead of dumb search and huristics. Also, no machine has matched the three names composing the titel of the book and likely can't for a while.
However, I'm not sure that this single prediction about chess accurately reflects the thrust of GEB anyway. Hofstadter appears to me to spend a great deal of GEB in explaining what in fact reasoning actually is, how it should be possible to mechanise. The prediction about chess doesn't jibe with the rest of the book as I remember. Perhaps I should look up the quote and then I'll understand?
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Dude what search engine are you using? I typed in the names into google and it matched Hofstadter's book right away. Heck I didn't even spell it right the first time ('godel excher bach') and it corrected me.
Seriously though it does seem a little unfair to belittle the computer's achievement in beating humans at chess just cause it works differently. It's like someone predicting that no machine could travel faster than a horse then trying to say they were 'in principle correct' because the machine used wheels instead of legs. Why should AI work the same as human reasoning when the hardware is so different?
This is what I've been expecting... kinda like Ghost in the Shell... i would love to be in that future!
To "predict" that *eventually* you'd be able to see as well as hear people, after the invention of TV, is most unimpressive.
It's obvious, of course - in hindsight. When exactly was that prediction made?
I doubt the human race will choose to place computers in charge of everything, or re-engineer ourselves beyond recognition, any time in our or our children's lifetimes.
It's already happened, to a fair degree, and will continue to happen more - ever heard of the generation gap? Also, remove all computers, and Western society would collapse overnight. Does total dependance on computers equate to them being "in charge"? I can certainly see both these trends ever-increasing - and in hindsight, the signs will be equally obvious. Post-humans in 2050 will have this same discussion, and will be narrowcasting the equivalent of "well duh" to each other.
The first few really significant breakthroughs, like penicillin, were stupid simple and had a bigger effect than anything that's happened since.
I disagree. Fire & the wheel were pretty fundamental, but so was the advent of the information age. I would argue that computers have changed our society at least as much as penicillin, and that change is only just beginning. It's just harder to see from our perspective in the middle of it, and much easier in hindsight. Hence the job of "futurologist".
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Meanwhile, I shall continue my study of GM flying pigs.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
In terms of the technological singularity, there's a big difference between brute-force search over a finite-but-large space and the sort of reasoning that humans do. Simply put, we haven't figured out how to get computers to do the sort of creative reasoning that is probably necessary for a computer to improve its own design in a way substantial enough to cause the technological singularity.
On the chess problem alone and Hofstadter's prediction, what really happened was a duel between Hofstadter and Moore, in a sense. Eventually, the raw computing power available for looking ahead through chess's ginormous FSM became large enough that having access to the lookahead information proved more useful than the abstract reasoning skills of the chess grandmasters. That was really a theoretical inevitability once the algorithm for performing that lookahead was devised (decades ago, though the more recent programs now use heuristics to prune away large parts of the search tree's breadth). In fact, at that point, the only thing not inevitable was actually fairly unrelated to actually playing chess: the continuing improvement in generic computing hardware, semiconductors, etc.
But even if computing hardware continues to improve, there's no guarantee that we'll ever come up with the algorithm necessary for allowing computers to cause the technological singularity. That's the difference between this and chess, because with chess, the algorithm was known, and it was just a matter of giving computers enough time to chug away. The technological singularity may be impossible, for all we know right now. However, even Hofstadter agrees that it's probably an eventuality, though he's orders of magnitude less optimistic about it happening "soon" than Kurzweil is.
I would rather have a historian predict the future than a self-appointed "Futurist."
;-)
On the other hand, their proposed "technological singularity" has served well as the theme of a great many science fiction novels.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
If a machine and its algorithms were designed by a human, why does that mean it isn't intelligent, but it is only algorithms? Is it intelligent only if it was designed by random mutation and natural selection, or by god?
You are very assured that we are not close to strong AI. Do you really think you are well justified in such a high level of confidence, when there are probably people who are more intelligent and more well informed about AI than you or I, and who also think we are close to strong AI? We who think the singularity is near could very well be wrong. Would you admit that you could be wrong? Would you admit more than just a minuscule possibility that you could be wrong? I'm curious about the thinking of someone who studies AI and still thinks the singularity is far.
What kind of singularity are we talking about here? Are we talking about a simple pole? Something along the lines of $\frac{1}{x}$? If we are talking about a multiple pole, then a dipole, quadrapole, what? Give me the multiplicity of the pole. On the other hand, what about a singularity like $\lim_{x \rightarrow 0} e^{-\frac{1}{x^2}}$? An essential singularity is a lot messier than a pole. We lose meromorphic properties like Mittag-Leffler's Theorem and the Riemann-Roch Theorem.
if we are talking about an essential singularity, are we talking about a point singularity, or something nastier? Does the set of singular points have the power of the continuum? Does our set of singular points have nonzero measure?
If you are going to use a mathematical analogy, understand the math. Otherwise you will annoy the hell out of those of us who do.
<crankyoldman>Damn kids! Don't they teach complex analysis in schools anymore? Rassafrassa damn mumble mumble</crankyoldman>
"Indeed, it is wise never to consider any form of electronic data as final." --Arnold Robbins
He Just did it.
Solving World Hunger the slightly nicer way:
Bioengineering the addition of chloroplasts into human dermis, deep in the skin.
Then when people are hungry they can just go lay out in the sun.
The fundamental problem of human hunger is the dependency on hetertrophic consumsion.
If humans are engineered to have chlorophyll in their skin (purple, brown, or green) then at least it would be easier to convert CO2 back to useful sugars with nothing more than some time in the sun...
CHLOROPLASTS is the answer.
What's so natural about technology created and manifested by humans?
An AI, robot, droid or whatever isn't really something "created or caused by nature" but rather created and caused by mankind; so; if such kills mankind on this planet this is not a "natural selection" but a general f*ckup (probably because of ignorance/fake trust) by mankind.
Why do we rely so heavy on technology while we know a single magnetic pulse could wipe out an entire city?
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
"They did this because obviously what was best for mankind was to be guided by the machines [dictators]"
Most human dictators seem to arrive at the same conclusion.
FRA: STFU GTFO
There are no creatures anywhere in nature which use wheels. Nor, as far as I know, plants.
One word, my friend:
Tumbleweeds.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
According to your claim, 'arbitrary' or 'purely Natural impulses' are what man uses to make decisions in abscence of 'moral standards'. Since the moral standards used by man, are created by man, they are in fact arbitrary.
Your argument is circular and smacks of someone ( with the dick of theology firmly implanted in their throat ) pressing the validity of their religious beliefs using deceitful methods.
Which, of course, is an apt description of C.S. Lewis.
Blar.
Nuclear-powered aircraft. - Humans have flight technology and use it; humans have nuclear power tech and use it (well, outside the US, anyway). Combining the two into one doesn't result in a different technology any more than combining a mouse click and a book purchase (like Amazon's "one click" patent).
;) doesn't mean humanity as a whole has refrained from using the technology.
:-) OK, I'll give you this one.
Flying cars. The word for flying car is "airplane". Or if you prefer, hovercraft...or helicopter. But if you want something that *looks* like a car but flies, try this: http://www.afaco.com/ or this: http://www.volanteaircraft.com/ or this: http://www.moller.com/ or for something small and jet powered, try this: http://aviationtrivia.homestead.com/BD5J.html (I've seen this in an airshow - it's amazing)
Well, I think you get the idea.
Project Orion. - "Capable of" can include "economically and politically" as well as engineering. However, I would point out that Project Orion was a proposal based quite deliberately on *existing* technologies. That is, humans have already built (and regrettably, used) every component required to make Orion fly, we just haven't put them together. However, there is some question about the engineering required to shield, absorb impact, and not ablate, the thrust from Orion's nuclear bomb "engine"
Mach 3 aircraft with real payload, e.g. the XB-70. "With real payload" is merely engineering existing technologies into new forms. Mach 3 has been achieved, and by several aircraft. Just because it hasn't been engineered into a giraffe shape that flies upside down doesn't mean it's a "technology humans have refrained from".
Fiber to the home. Like the Mach 3 and Orion, the technology exists and is "not refrained from". Just cuz they didn't run it to *your* house
Betamax
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
If the problem space is big enough, human-style reasoning may be able to adapt, but the computer would not. There is a qualitative difference between the two that is crucial. One can easily design a chess-style game that humans can master but computers could not compute within the lifetime of the universe. Brute force can only take you so far. Like another poster said, you put a million calculators together, all you got is a million calculators, not a brain.
The chess software that has beaten humans has merely proven that if you make the abacus fast enough, it can balance the check book faster than a human. Which anyone could have predicted without building a billion-dollar computer.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
- Moronic politicians get caught up in the hype, form a gov't agency called National Art-intel Singularity Administration to make it happen, and the country's resources in AI are drained away into ineffectiveness and software that keeps crashing.
Nah, the gov't wouldn't do something that dumb.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
That's really not what's under discussion here -- I'm not more intelligent than a 15th-century monk. Putting that monk in the modern world would cause severe culture shock because of the disconnect between the world and his existing frames of reference. He'd have to run like mad to try to catch up, because he didn't have his whole life to become used to it, but a bright person could probably manage it.
Now you're just reversing the process, evaluating the past from the context of today. Who's to say how much smarter you are than a 15th century monk? Define "smart" or "intelligence" for a start.
This sort of intellectual hand-waving is not particularly convincing.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
From a 15th century monk's perspective, today's curve is vertical. Of course to us it's clearly not. Thus the flaw of the hand-wringing over "the singularity" is illustrated--it suffers from the classic error of attempting to evaluate the future in the context of today. Of course when we get to the future, we'll be in the future too--so it doesn't matter what we think now.
That is exactly right. In my book Autonomy I take issue with the term singularity, and in fact describe the unpredicatability and unknowability of the future as a horizon instead. Not an "event horizon", which implies discontinuous change (a "singularity"), but a simple, everyday horizon, like the one each of us sees every day due to the curvature of our planet. Just as we cannot see California from New York, or Paris from London, so to we cannot see the post-human daily grind (or understand it) from the early twenty-first century. My argument is very similar to yours: from the point of view of the caveman, the invention of archery is a singularity granting their descendents godlike powers to kill at a distance. From the point of view of Native Americans the invention of ships was a singularity, granting godlike powers to Europeans to emerge from the water and conquer their empires. Likewise for the invention of steam power, electricity, and hundreds of other world-changing technologies I've not mentioned.
Each change, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, whether explosive or gradual, has been contiguious. There has not been a "discontinuity", nor will there be one. Indeed, the closer we get to Vinge's "Singuarity" the better we grasp what form it might take. By the time we reach that point in the exponential curve, we will likely see it as just another step in the gradual, contiguous progression of life and technology. We may do so with what to us today are godlike powers of reason and intelligence, but to us (or our descendents then), it will just be another day at the office, using our common sense and everyday tools that augment our abilities, just as the first sharp rock augmented our ancestors' ability to dress the meat of the animal they killed for dinner.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Computers operate from logic, be it the simple boolean one or the highly abstracted contemporary mathematical logic in its many forms (heuristic, fuzzy, even paraconsistent) that in the end get translated into boolean anyway. Humans, on the other hand, do logic as one among many function which aren't themselves logical.
Of course you can try to emulate the non-logical functions inside a logical framework, but by doing so the machine gets trapped inside a kind of "Gödel paradox", forever unable to explain itself for lack of sufficient axioms ("sufficient" meaning "infinite"). Self-consciousness is then literally impossible.
This isn't so bad as it seems. It only means that machines, no matter how advanced, are and will always be extensios of human faculties. In other words, we are their conscience, in the exact same sense that we're the conscience "behind" our hands and feet. Or, if you like to see it this way, machines and humans are already a single thing, as they have always been, since the instant our first ancestor decided to throw his first rock.
The day humanity ends is the day all machines die. Some of them can of course keep working after that, more or less as some of our body organs sometimes stay working after our brain dies. But death is already there, unavoidable, only waiting for the power source to shut down. Death is the only real human-machine "singularity", that point after which we know nothing about. Any other is mere fiction.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Who's to say how much smarter you are than a 15th century monk?
More precisely: my brain is no different than the brain that was in the head of a 15th century monk. The only difference between a 15th century monk and me is the world we grew up in. We're discussing different brains, which I think I was pretty clear on in my post. Trying to pin down a definition of intelligence is largely off-topic -- the agents under discussion will have brains that can do anything my brain can do, and lots of things that it can't, and I don't have any such advantage over a 15th century monk.
The only significant difference I've ever observed between "futurists" and Jeanne Dixon/Dionne Warwick/Nostradamus is that the formers' publicity more often appears on glossy paper. "[E]xisting models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers" is a very foolish thing to write.
Not to mention, on the other hand, that the progress of technology is already beyond the ability of most people to assimilate. Most people that I've seen already respond to present technology with a Clarke-esque fear and superstition.
Although the global, instananeous, interactive electronic network has morphed considerably since its inception in 1844, I believe the InterNet is this singularity. Its hard to say whats its mature form will be, but it has changed human commerce, communication, and knowledge storage irreversibly.
Post-humanism is like a snowball. As it rolls, it gets bigger and faster.
:)
I'll use myself as an example. I wore glasses from th 5th grade on. Six years ago, after 40 years of wearing glasses, I had cataract surgery that replaced my damaged lenses with plastic ones. (Complete with warranty cards, I might add; the future is weird.) I've had diabetes for 25 years. For the first 10, I treated it with diet. For the next 10, with pills. For most of the next 5, I injected a form of insulin that was created by RNA-modified bateria in vats. (For the previous 60 years, insulin had been taken from the harvested pancreases of slaughtered cattle.) For the last couple of months, I have been injecting tiny amounts of a new drug that was developed because a molecular biologist noticed that the molecular structure of a key insulin-regulating hormone was strikingly similar to that of gila monster venom.
I take an additional 6 drugs that aid in further controlling my diabetes, control my asthma, keep my arthritis from crippling me, or act as preventatives for high blood pressure and heart disease.
I am now 54 years old. In the Stone Age, I would have died before I was 20. Even in the early 20th century, I would have been lucky to make it to 30.
We are very close to extending the human lifespan by one year every year. Don't think we Baby Boomers are going to get out of your way, kiddies. We're here for the long haul.
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
Who is to say that some technology-amplified stupidity will not result in an event that wipes human beings off the face of the planet forever? THAT would be a "singularity" in my book. It cracks me up that so many slashdotters seem to be so naive...
The dominant human social model is based around the individual "my stuff/your stuff" mechanism, which extends to the social model of "us/them", where *we* protect *our stuff* from *them*, and occasionally go take *their stuff* when we think we can get away with it. Laws and society extend from the consequences of that model. To wit, we had to find a way to protect *our stuff* from various *thems* without killing each other all the time.
So let's say someone creates/evolves/pretends to be an intelligence-amplified new human. Now what is this singularitized human supposed to be able to do? From the description, it sounds like you have a permanent internet connection in your head, and many better eyes. I dunno. Whatever. You're smarter, faster, all-knowing, blah, blah, blah. So the fuck what? I mean really. Are you going to do party tricks? "Hey everybody, want to see me look up stuff on Wikipedia while pouring drinks? I can also track down your lost loved ones for $14.95. Really! No, really! Anyone? Anyone?"
Probably you'll end up being used by your employer or political groups or the government for your advanced abilities to...whatever it is that's going to "replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete." But in the beginning, you'll be somebody's bitch.
But oh hey, this is the new evolutionary step in human development. You've got destiny on your side, baby! We're taking over the world! And most humans won't even notice, except for the few that want to be the first to welcome their new plugged-in overlords. All that military arsenal, all those guns, all those religious leaders frothing up the ignorant masses about how the most important thing in the world is stopping gays from marrying, all the street gangs defending their turf, all the greedy politicians and businesspersons in the world whose entire conception of science hinges on whether it will make them money or give them power, all the irrational emotions and instincts that really drive the world? None of that will matter, because you can look stuff up while driving, or whatever a converged human-technology hybrid is supposed to be able to do.
There is the little matter that when a new kind of human wants to replace an existing kind of human, it might be considered war at best, and genocide at worst, but hey, you're special. And most likely your last words will be "Hey, get away from that cable modem! I mean it! Don't make me get out of my Herman Miller Airon chair and come over there and yell at you. Hey! Come back here! Bring that back! Oh man. I was leasing that modem."
So far they've all been wrong. Every single one of 'em. Thousands and thousands of years of always being wrong.
It's obvious that life has been changing a lot lately. I don't agree that it's going to be a whole new ball game. People have always thought that civilization was on the verge of something. Apparently it's human nature.
Man, you really need that seminar!
That is a fallicy because things will be changing so fast that it won't be the old generation vs the new generation but rather the person who can upgrade their mind via nanotechnology or implants versus a ordinary biological human.
People in the future will not be old and new, but rather enchanced or unenhanced.
A 60 year old with a full prosthetic body with direct neural implants with memory augmentation in 2040 will be far superior than a 20 year old with old fashion flesh and bloody.
Not only can the 60 year old not die in a car wreck but he can outthink the 20 year old and command all the knowledge of the internet wireless through this implants in his brain.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Yes, but one thing a lot of futurists seem to forget is that the mass majority of humanity doesn't seem to be all that smart. As such, any the amplification of human intelligence as noted in the summary would more likely simply amplify our own tendencies toward mediocrity. Much like that rephrasing, "to err is human, but to really screw things up requires a computer."
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
An international team of scientists labors for many years to construct an artificial intelligence. They put together a vast supercomputer with state-of-the-art interconnects etc etc and finally get ready to turn it on. They argue for a while what the first question they ask it should be, and then the lead scientist types it in:
"Does God exist?"
"It does now!"
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
"Do you really think you are well justified in such a high level of confidence, when there are probably people who are more intelligent and more well informed about AI than you or I, and who also think we are close to strong AI?"
Unfortunately, it's a case of crying wolf once too often. As the GP says, clever people who are extremely well informed about AI have been telling us that we're close to it for four decades. All that was required, they'd say, was an order of magnitude more computing power, and we'd be there. And when they had that extra order of magnitude, we saw computers solve the N Queens and Traveling Salesman problems a whole order of magnitude faster than they did on the old computers. Then, some "expert" would trot out, and tell us that, given an extra order of magnitude of computing power, they could lick the whole AOI problem. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Well, we now have machines that are pretty amazing. They can render graphics in real-time that used to take hours per frame on a Cray-1, and the Cray-1 was several orders of magnitude better than the computers they were using when they first started telling us that, given an extra order of magnitude, they'd have the old AI chestnut cracked. Meanwhile, back in the real world, we have computers that, despite all those extra orders of magnitude, have so-called "AI" in games that gets stuck behind rocks or takes some stupid, long way around things because it can't solve a path-finding problem that a blow-fly wouldn't even think about; we're so far from anything approaching true natural language interfaces that it's better to wheel a silly little box around and click buttons just like they were doing at MIT in the 1960s than try and talk to the things, and they can't even make much sense of stuff we take the time and effort to type in; and "machine vision" is so pathetic that it can't drive a wheeled vehicle slowly without bumping into things, falling down holes, and generally behaving like it is blind.
So basically, the great triumph of AI research to date is that somebody's built a bipedal robot which can walk down stairs without falling over, kick a ball not very far without falling over, but unlike an ant, can't identify stuff and then pick it up, or negotiate even a simple obstacle course under its own steam without (you guessed it!) falling over. The culmination of four decades of telling us that true AI is just around the corner is an expensive electronic version of those slinky springs that bionged down stairs and ended up neatly coiled at the bottom, but hey, _this_ time it's _really_ just around the corner because some really intelligent people who study AI are pretty sure of it. All we need is another order of magnitude more computing power, and we'll have robots that can walk down stairs _carrying a cup_!!!.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
The thing is that for most people, they don't adopt a new technology just for "newness' sake", but because the benefit of the new device makes the older device look like a pain in the ass by comparison. Computers didn't enter the office because computers were cool, but because they were able to allow on-the-fly editing of text documents and able to calculate payrolls faster than the older methods (typewriters and accountants with calculators or pen and paper).
HD is slow to catch on for the opposite reason -- the value of having marginally better graphics isn't worth getting rid of the old DVD player and TV. DVDs work just fine for most videos. By contrast, the DVD came into wide use fairly quickly -- it was easier to use, didn't wear out from too much use, and allowed film companies to add things like commentaries and deleted scenes and "making of" features in the bonus menu, plus you could skip directly to whatever part of the movie you wanted to see.
So unless "thinking machines" can do a specific task much much better than a human, or a Borg (for want of a better term) can hands-down outperform a human in specific tasks, I don't see such things becoming much more than a curiousity.
The question isn't "can we do it", or even "should we do it", but "what will we need it for". That's how most other new technologies came into common use -- they were superior, in most cases vastly superior -- to whatever they replaced. Not to say we can't actually become a borg tomarrow. I think within 10 years or maybe 15, the technology to turn a human into a cyborg, complete with neural implants will be available. In fact, I'll give you $20 if within 20 years, we can't literally kidnap Patrick Stewart and literally turn him into Locutus. Technology isn't the problem so much as having a reason to do it. I don't think we'll ever have a great need to build super intelligent machines, nor a great need to turn humans into cyborgs. For most applications, what we have now is good enough.
Tech Singularity is about exponential growth based on recursive returns of increasing technology.
The 15th century monk has about the same technological differential with respect to an early 20th century man as does one generation in todays society. The rate of change in tech will only increase (aside from something devestating like war or virus outbreak). Our children will be technologically seperated from us as much as the early 20th century guy is seperated from us. At the point of singularity, all of human and biological progress, will be a few microseconds worth to us. At least without human modification.
-metric
I wasn't claiming that we should just take the word of AI promoters and conclude that the singularity is probably near. I was only saying that one shouldn't be OVER confident that it isn't near, or isn't possible. The GGP made assurances that can't reasonably be made.
And is this "power" worth the death of even one 1200 year old Redwood tree and the birds and squirrels that call it home? My understanding is, is that the core of Buddhism is having compassion for the suffering of ALL sentient beings. I would think this singularity is going to consume a lot of energy, cause a lot of environmental damage, lead to people living an even more mediated existence (farther from other animals, plants, etc) than we live now, and will be the farthest thing from Buddhism imaginable. Zen for example is supposed to be about unmediated experience as in the Zen the saying do not mistake the finger pointed at the moon for the moon.
I say that not out of a superior attitude as obviously I'm typing this on a computer to upload to slashdot, but rather to get you to think about what you are saying. Perhaps the singularity would be a wonderful thing to experience, but "Buddhist" it is most certainly not.
Tired of all the isms, don't exploit people as an employer, or a government, mmmmK?
Hofstadter also gave a talk at the Singularity Summit at Stanford. Also, here's a summary of the Artificial Life X talk.
Agreed in full. However, I doubt that such a breakthrough will come from the AI research community, who have consistently failed to match the advances made in virtually all other fields of computing. It is I think more likely that intelligent machines will emerge from some other research area, possibly as a side-effect of technology that is at best only tangentially related to our current concepts of computing. Research into cognition and behaviour indicates that animals (including humans) process their environment using non-deterministic predictive mechanisms that require a minimal set of "cues" to act as prediction branch keys (and can therefore be "tricked" by things like optical illusions, sleight of hand, and camouflage). Trying to emulate such mechanisms using deterministic reactive processes is thus a blind alley that will demand ever more computing power to approximate what nature has achieved using small portions of fairly simple creatures such as fruit flies, with materials that carry and process signals at a tiny fraction of the speed that today's computers are capable of, and that have minimal energy requirements.
I also doubt that the first truly intelligent machines will be "human emulators" that can pass the Turning test -- indeed, I think it is likely that their very nature will mean that their "thought processes" are quite alien to us, although we will obviously require some method of interacting with them, just as we (for example) have ways of interacting with working dogs, who also "think" in ways that are quite distinct from our own. This will of course be used by some to "prove" that such machines are not intelligent at all, because a lot of goal-post moving has gone into arguing that anything a machine can do is simply a mechanical process that requires no intelligence whatsoever. If you'd asked someone from the 19th century whether something that can play chess at international Grand Master level, solve complex mathematical formulae, and compose music and poetry (admittedly badly, but then the same can be said of nearly all humans!) was intelligent, they would have undoubtedly replied in the affirmative, but each of these tasks has been progressively removed from the ever-shortening list of "intelligent stuff" whenever someone demonstrates a machine that can do them.
So when (and I do believe it is a when rather than an if) machine intelligence does appear, the "it's not really intelligent" crowd will be left with an ever-shrinking Adamsian list of things that "prove" it's just an algorithm after all ("Intelligent? No way! When was the last time you saw a machine go out and spend money it didn't have on something it didn't need because of an advertisement, lay in the sun long enough to damage itself severely, claim to have seen Elvis working as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant, or set fire to itself and everyone around it trying to light a barbecue with gasoline?").
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
It seems to me that where it has been possible for AI research to advance, it has done so reasonably well. The problem is that many of the problems to be solved require massive computational power. Even humans can't understand the speech of other humans with very high reliability. What can we expect from AI researchers using a computer with 1/100th the power of a brain (or much much less). Many of the tasks we want computers to perform can't be carried out with acceptable reliability even by a human of low IQ. If a robot drives a car as bad as a human, it won't be allowed on the road. I foresee little progress in AI until computational power matches or surpasses the human brain. It's very difficult to develop and test systems without the hardware to run on.
Interesting theory.
I think you're a little hard on the AI researchers. I expect most of a fruit fly's capabilities could be replicated, but few think the investment would be worth it. The problems we put most effort into are very hard. The AI in games gets limited development resources. After the DARPA Grand Challenge I'm surprised at how well they've done with the limited computational power available (though I think they may have made it a little easier this year).
Probably true. If we manage to make them truly logical, that alone may make them difficult for many people to understand :)
See parent ... I gotta remember to change subject lines ...
>This summer I read C.S. Lewis's masterpiece The Abolition of Man.
The Abolition of Man
"many of the problems to be solved require massive computational power"
:)"
This may be the case for true intelligence of a human-like level, but many of the tasks that are grouped under the general category of AI research should not be particularly computationally intensive because creatures of very limited intelligence manage them with ease. It is the fact that some of these things are proving difficult despite the application of massive computing power which convinces me that any real breakthroughs will come from outside the computer-based AI community.
"I expect most of a fruit fly's capabilities could be replicated, but few think the investment would be worth it"
I doubt we could replicate the way their visual systems work, because there is no artificial vision system that allows an autonomous machine to move around in three dimensions as well as a fruit fly. As I said above, the fact that we cannot do this despite the application of massive computing resources would seem to indicate that massive computing resources are not the answer, because fruit flies obviously do not use massive computing resources to solve that particular problem (or for that matter, any other problem).
"The AI in games gets limited development resources"
Everything has limited development resources.
"After the DARPA Grand Challenge I'm surprised at how well they've done with the limited computational power available (though I think they may have made it a little easier this year)"
I don't think they've done very well at all. Insects routinely handle much more complex challenges as part of their daily lives, and insects have remarkably little in the way of raw processing power. There is obviously a fairly simple and extremely robust solution to this sort of problem that nature found many hundreds of millions of years ago, so perhaps we should be spending a lot more time and money investigating and trying to duplicate that ancient and massively successful solution instead of wasting our time trying to crack it with brute computing force.
"If we manage to make them truly logical, that alone may make them difficult for many people to understand
I don't think that logic will be the barrier, but rather the fact that the first "intelligent" systems will be designed to solve a specific narrow set of problems, and will therefore "think" in terms that fit the problem domain. IMO general purpose intelligence of the sort we have will take a quite a long time to appear because we do not understand enough about the way our own brains work to even begin the task of modeling their functionality, even if we did have enough computing power to do so. And the fact of the matter is that there is no real reason to bother making an "artificial human", because real humans can be produced very easily and cheaply. There are however many applications for specialised "intelligent" systems capable of performing certain tasks that require humans today, but doing so more quickly and / or reliably (e.g. reading documents, verifying signatures, piloting vehicles of all types, exploring hostile environments without supervision, controlling advanced weapons systems, etc., etc., etc.).
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
Actually I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners). I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities. So I'd say we do have insect level capabilities in the areas where enough resources have been applied.
By limited I mean that I wouldn't be surprised if the AI of some games was created by a single developer. Even a small team of developers doesn't represent very many resources. Also, the failure of a few AI game characters doesn't necessarily represent the state of the art in AI, it may just be that the developers made a stupid mistake or focused their effort elsewhere. AI game characters also have very limited computing resources. The AI can't make the graphics lag.
Do they really? I can't think of any insect behavior that seems very sophisticated at all. Driving down the Grand Challenge road seems almost as challenging as anything I've seen insects do. Of course things that seem simple are often much more complicated than they look.
I don't think insects have very robust intelligence at all. They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals.
Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality. Mathematical computation functionality and memory has already far exceeded human capacity. We have numerous algorithms for pattern recognition, signal processing, voice recognition, logic, and much more. I think these constitute even more than just a beginning.
I tend to think that the software of strong AI will be relatively easy (not easy, just relatively easy compared to the hardware). I expect strong AI within just a few years of the availability of suitable hardware. I wouldn't even be surprised if we already have nearly all the ideas we need to create intelligence, but just lack hardware of sufficient power to integrate it all together and work out all the bugs. I can't rule out the possibility that some wishful thinking could be creeping in here, but a lot
"I think the vision systems such as those used in the Grand Challenge are comparable to those of a fly (even without the laser scanners)."
No, they are not. The primary system used to navigate that course was GPS -- there were only three notably short portions where sensors had to be used, and those were tunnels, which could have been dealt with by very simple mechanical feedback systems such as those found in some toys. I'm not saying they _were_ using such systems, merely that they could have used them, so the DARPA challenge did not require a functioning visual system of any sort to complete it.
"I doubt anybody has put much effort into fully replicating a fly's vision capabilities"
Then maybe they should instead of simply throwing CPU cycles at every problem. The interesting thing about insects (and the reason I've used them as examples) is that they have very little in the way of centralised processing, but are instead collections of largely autonomous systems that have most of the required functionality built into them locally. A fly's eye is not therefore merely a collection of lenses and light sensors that output signals for subsequent processing by a "brain", but something that also contains much of what in higher animals would constitute the visual cortex, and the same goes for most of the subsystems that make up the complete insect. This cooperating subsystem model means that insects can continue to operate for some time after sustaining levels of damage that would kill higher animals outright, because there don't have much in the way of critical systems whose failure results in instant shut down of the entire creature.
Note also that an insect's autonomous subsystems are analogue, because nature usually opts for the simplest solution that will work reliably, and would not therefore use DACs and ADCs connected to a CPU running software to do something that can be achieved by two transistors and a rheostat.
"I don't think insects have very robust intelligence at all"
By "robust solution" I meant robust in the mechanical sense, i.e. durable and able to continue operating after sustaining often massive amounts of damage.
It is doubtful that individual insects have anything resembling intelligence, because their capacity to learn is extremely limited, and appears to be non-existent in many species. Some of the hive organisms display more complex behaviour however, even though the individuals that make up the hive are often even simpler than most non-hive species.
"They're just expendable, and we don't care much when they do something stupid that gets them killed, or fail to achieve their goals."
All forms of life are equally expendable, because all of them die eventually from accident, disease, predation, or old age. Just because we like to think of ourselves as being less expendable than other creatures doesn't mean we are, because life exists solely as a gene perpetuation mechanism. Dragonflies have been successfully perpetuating their genes for around half a billion years, whereas the various members of the genus homo have been doing it for perhaps 1% of that time, and we already seem to be running into trouble. Which of the two is therefore better at achieving the singular goal that nature has set for both of us?
"Surely our simulated neural networks qualify as at least a beginning of modeling brain functionality"
They do indeed, just as logic gates are the beginning of computer functionality. There is however a big difference between emulating some of the hardware, and knowing how the original hardware is configured and programmed. This is one of the areas that's turning out to be far more difficult than people used to think would be the case.
"Mathematical computation functionality and memory has already far exceeded human capacity"
While humans (and indeed other far simpler animals) continue to leave computers in the dust for things like pattern recognition, spatial awareness, the ability to simultaneously and continu
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
I don't know much of the details of the race systems but I don't think they had enough time to map out the coordinates of the course with sufficient detail to navigate with GPS only. Also I've been under the impression that even GPS with WAAS is only accurate to within about 10 feet. They could have used local differential GPS I suppose. Also, sometimes the cars had to pass, and GPS would have been no use for that. Carnegie Mellon has been using vision in their vehicles for a long time. Also check this quote from a Wired article about Stanley.
"The lasers were good at sensing ground within 30 meters of the car, but beyond that the data quality deteriorated. The video camera was good at looking farther away but was less accurate in the foreground. Maybe, Thrun thought, the laser's findings could inform how the computer interpreted the faraway video. If the laser identified drivable road, it could ask the video to search for similar patterns ahead. In other words, the computer could teach itself.
It worked. Stanley's vision extended far down the road now, allowing it to steer confidently at speeds of up to 45 miles per hour on dirt roads in the desert. "
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.01/stanley_p r.html
They don't want to because insect behavior is not valuable enough to expend the resources that are better spent developing other capabilities. Especially since we can't replicate their mechanical abilities.
Extremely limited is more than nothing. I think we should say they have intelligence, just very little of it.
Some insects hatch thousands of eggs, only two of which must survive on average to maintain the species. Generally a robot with that kind of failure rate would be worthless.
I don't think the credibility of AI researchers is completely destroyed by what they thought all the way back in the 60s. What about 20 years ago when the computational power of the human brain was a little better understood. Were there some forecasters that predicted AI wouldn't fully succeed until computational power reached something like 10^18 ops? Maybe it's not much more difficult than they thought.
heh, that sounds like something Hofstadter's tortoise might say... ;-)
“Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso