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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."
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.
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
An author using /. to publicise their latest novel. Yawn.
From what I've seen we are as near to creating decent AI as we are to producing fusion power stations.
They got the video phone right, it is possible as others have pointed out. What they got wrong was the market, and they were futurists after all so who can blame them on that.
The problem with the video phone is that I can't roll out of bed and answer it. Video conferencing does have it's uses, but I need time to prepare so I don't look like my usual pile of ass who just rolled out of bed. That might make the telemarketers stop calling tho... hmmm
It wasn't technology they guessed wrong, unless you count not having those things the jetsons did, instantly groom and dress out as you got out of bed. Now that would make the video phone take off.
Happy Noodle Boy says "F###ing doughnut! Mock me? You fried cyclops!!"
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.
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
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.
Are you serious?
How about these:
1791 Luigi Galvani accidentally closing an electrical circuit through a frog's leg, causing it to
jerk violently. This rapidly led to the understanding of how nerves and muscles work.
1879 Louis Pasteur accidentally inoculated chickens with an old cholera culture. The chickens should have died from cholera, but they got sick and then got better. After discovering the mistake, Pasteur re-inoculated the chickens with fresh culture and the chickens didn't even get sick. This lead to the modern vaccination.
1895 Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered X-rays.
1928 Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered that a type of mold (later named Penicillium) significantly inhibited bacterial growth. This lead to antibiotics.
Never assume that all discoveries are predicted before they are "discovered." I would actually say that most INSIGNIFICANT technological advancement is predicted well out, most of these are evolutionary. Many significant advancements are revolutionary and there is no way many of them could be predicted as there was no information related to the new process before the discovery of the process itself.
"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.
The Laws of Robotics . . .and a great big "OFF" button would be a start.
Although I now post under my actual initials, in my day I've had two screen aliases. Yours is one of them. It feels kinda weird to reply to it.
KFG
In Australia we have a local idiot (Damien Broderick) who enthuses over the singularity and I find it incredibly irritating. I don't have a problem with the concept of a singularity, I DO have a problem with the insistence of some enthusiasts that the singularity is just round the corner. My biggest problem is that most of the pundits don't actually seem to work with technology.
It is really easy as an observer to sit on the outside and say: "Wow, more neato stuff seems to be coming out faster and faster- why, if I extrapolate it will probably keep coming out faster and faster and we'll get this exponential curve." But that ignores the fact that:
* The problems get harder
* Technological adoption is generally limited by the speed at which society can absorb it, not by the technology
* We've never found a silver bullet
By which I mean:
The problems get harder: Einstein may have been a genius- but we have our share of geniuses today. We almost certainly have many more geniuses actively involved in science (and physics research) than ever before- and they are well resourced (not fantastically, but OK). But they aren't producing Einstein like breakthrough physics because it is damn hard to improve on what we have. We know the current models have holes but we haven't worked out how to fix them- and not for want of trying.
The same applies to lots of technical problems- both the technical research and the translation of that research into real world products. Batteries and fusion power both have enormous commerical incentives but somehow we haven't found the answer yet. We HAVE made improvements but the simple truth is: these are hard problems.
See also the cost of electronic foundaries- around a billion $US and climbing by roughly an order of magnitude with each succesive generation. That is where the bleeding edge of real world technology rests and it isn't cheap and it is just unbelievably tricky.
Technological adoption is generally limited by the speed at which society can absorb it, not by the availability of technology: Science can in theory race ahead of everyday use but in practice it usually has to be supported by technology. Leaving aside silver bullet technologues (like AI- see below) scientific research needs to be translated into technologies that everyday people can use. And technology that everyday people use needs to be adopted, which means it needs to be understood and accepted. That isn't a formula for a singularity.
In theory a small population could make a 'huge breakthrough' and race ahead leaving the rest of the world's population bewildered by the change, but every indication is that the be big problems need big resources to address. And even more resources to translate into actual out of the lab usage (see electronics foundries link above).
We do see some impressive stuff (like Google) which catches our attention and is really useful but this is a tool that society adopts at its own rate. And Google is successful because it DOESN'T baffle and bewilder. It empowers the everyday person. That is pretty characteristic of succesful technology.
We've never found a silver bullet: Science fiction stories often have a bit of hidden magic- the AI, fusion power, teleportation (aka worm hole gates, star drives, etc...) that definitively solves some problem (problem solving, energy, transport to the stars) with no big side effects. That is great for science fiction, but in the real world we don't do this (I won't say absolutely, but I can't think of a real life silver bullet). Everything is a careful trade off, the really big problems don't just go away.
The big one is thinking: for all that computers help us do work they don't do what we would consider 'intelligent' things. Or when they do (like pattern recognition in breast cancer X-Rays) they are so limited in their scope that we st
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.
You say that like it might be a bad thing.
Religion is all well and good when it is a personal thing and mayebe OK when you are following the teachings of people (or things) long gone, but once it forms into clumps or groups of people, and it would seem especially once these groups of people start following the teachings of people who are alive now, we start getting problems. It's the high priests, the living leaders of religions who decide they need to spread the word of their god at the point of their follower's swords and that's when the trouble starts!
Eclectic beats from Leeds, UK
handmadehands.co.uk
"The thread was assuming that a super AI was formed, and that they would rule over us . . . "
Maybe it's better to be ruled by artificical intelligence than by the natural stupidity that rules over us now.