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BT Futurologist On Smart Yogurt and the $7 PC
WelshBint writes, "BT's futurologist, Ian Pearson, has been speaking to itwales.com. He has some scary predictions, including the real rise of the Terminator, smart yogurt, and the $7 PC." Ian Pearson is definitely a proponent of strong AI — along with, he estimates, 30%-40% of the AI community. He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015. As to smart yogurt — linkable electronics in bacteria such as E. Coli — he figures that means the end of security. "So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."
I can't seem to open the containers without some of it splattering all over my glasses.
What, no flying cars? That's bloody useless.
computers smart as people BY 2015?
...
nah
the 'computer' in my casio watch has been smarter than a bunch of people i've worked with for at least 3 years!
So says Yogurt: And Spaceballs, the $7 Android!
Have you read my journal today?
So his portfolio has outperformed the S&P, I take it?
*ducks*
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
And New York was going to need 100,000,000 telephone operators by the middle of the 20th century.
Get a grip, for God's sake.
668: Neighbour of the Beast
So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards.
:)
Yeaaaah.
So how do I become a Futurologist? It sounds like a fun job that doesn't require much reasoning skill -- perfect for me
We already have people that are as dumb as computers. I say leave well enough alone.
Theory and practice are the same in theory, but different in practice.
"I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."
I'll admit I didn't RTFA but I'm guessing he's British?
I know some people that aren't any smarter than my current computer. Heck, in terms of chess, I'm one of them... my computer can kick my ass at chess. Right now we have computers that can feign intelligence, i.e. use the internet to pass a multiple-choice test, but this is not a true measure of intelligence. If in 2015 a computer literally breaks out of a research lab and starts a mission of doom, then I'd say we might have one as smart as a person.
stuff |
Well, he is from the UK, right? You could say I'm one to talk, being from the US, but I say, "GFY!"
Being a "futurologist," does this guy get paid future-salary? Cost of living increases, etc could make this the job to have...
I'm posting this right now so that I can cite myself in 9 years when I call this idiot a moron.
There will be no AI as smart as people in 2015. 2050 maybe, probably more like 2100.
There will never be a $7 PC in the future, for the same reason there isn't one now: when technology improves, people want to spend the same, but get a better computer, and manufacturers cater to this. No one ever says, "Hey, maybe we'll use technology that isn't the latest and greatest, but instead make it much much cheaper and just as good as they were in the recent past."
Well, no one except Nintendo.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Honestly, how do you get a gig like that? Seems pretty cushy.
there is no need to sign your posts. this isn't usenet. your username is right there above your post. stop it.
When futurists look into their crystal ball to predict the future, they typically try to find the common themes of the present age and using their own special multiplier they derive some kind of super-present with basically the same things we have now, only bigger or faster or smarter.
The problem is that they can only detect trends and can't really predict real things. So when you see a futurist going out on a limb and claiming that X is only 10 years away, they are hedging their bets that you will forget they ever made such a silly prediction 10 years from now. If they do manage to get something right, you can bet they'll be working overtime trying to get grants from RAND and MITRE for more futurism.
However, the reading of trends is a very important role of sociology. Only by accurately predicting what sorts of stresses and issues we will face in the near-term future can we sufficiently prepare ourselves for them. The Rand corporation has a list of 50 books for thinking about the future. (http://www.rand.org/pardee/50books/) These offer insights into the past and present and into the minds of successful futurists.
The one thing you will notice about successful futurists is that they don't go overboard predicting killer electronic e coli yogurts. Rather, they outline the likely changes in society and provide suggested remedies for foreseeable problems as well as suggested directions for societal growth.
The area of futurism is very interesting and a strong futurist school of thought is vital to our success as a society. Cranks who like to come up with doomsday scenarios do the entire field a disservice.
Yes. It's a deliberately provocative point, because the AI field is pretty much split down the middle in terms of whether these things are achievable or not. I'm in the 30-40% camp that believes that there's really not anything magical about the human brain.
We're getting a greater understanding of neuroscience, and starting to get some of these concepts built into the way that computers will work, and computers don't have to be a grey box with a whole stack of silicon chips in it - there's no reason why they couldn't use organic techniques if necessary. So there's really no reason at all why we can't do the same things that a brain does.
The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.
Simulating a brain in 20-25 years in a humanlike android? There is still so much to discover about the human brain, that it will still take 100 years to come close to anything that can truly learn on it's own...and that's if we're lucky..or unlucky, depending on how you look at it.
To be fair, Kurzweil predicted this first. I believe he said 2012, though. Kurzweil also defined "as smart as people" by the computing ability. He said where a human is a symmetric multiprocessing machine, the sheer speed of the processors by 2012 should compensate for the single execution path. However, as we're seeing, more cores are being added and better multiprocessing is happening so it's difficult to judge now.
Kurzweil's book is ISBN: 0140282025
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
In a world of hostile yogurt, the lactose-intolerant man is king.
He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015.
That's bolder than a lot of strong AI proponents. Traditionally, it's 20-30 years down the road.
As to smart yogurt -- linkable electronics in bacteria such as E. Coli -- he figures that means the end of security. "So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."
Unless you've got equally effective opposing nanotech, which I suspect there will be some research in.
Tweet, tweet.
His predictions sound scary in part because we know that 1) people are weak and gullible and will accept their fate placidly like sheep, and 2) businesses are corrupt, putrescent, immoral, undead zombie lifeforms that will immediately try to eat our brains with these new technologies so they can get our money without our having any will whatsoever to resist.
So yeah, the deck is stacked unless the planet is hit with a asteroid the size of Manhattan. Well that's something to look forward to I guess.
=^..^= all your rodent are belong to us
Please stop posting predictions of "futurologists". They are the modern era's form of witch doctors, shamans, medicine men, and other self-proclaimed prognosticators. Since BT apparently actually employs one, I am reminded of another article I read a long time ago which proposed today's corporations and brands as substitutes for an innate desire for membership in parallel to the tribes and clans of yore, replete with those who attempt to hold positions of power by their somehow unique predictions of the future that have no more or less probability of coming true than any random statement of anyone in the group, but dress it up in some sort of mysticism, whether spiritual, or false intellectualism, to make it sound divinely guided or erudite.
I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.
Uhhh... is that what Honda and Sony think or is that what HE thinks/wants? Me thinks the latter.
[...] in around 2015-2020, you could say that we won't need people to write software, because you just explain what you want to a computer and it will write it for you, and there's no reason then to have people working in that job.
Maybe not, but I'll have the job debugging all the mistakes the androids will have in their code. They'll be outsourcing debug work to us humans.
I guess you are part of the "I'm Magical" Camp.
Those are Scientologsts, not futurologists.
The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as
clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one - I think that's nonsense.
Tells me all I need to know about this guy's predictions.
He fails to understand that in the 40+ year history of AI research noone has demonstrated even the inklings or foundations upon which actual AI can be built upon.
They may be nothing special about the human mind, but what ever the case is, we certainly havent figured it out yet. It's more likely that we'll have cold fusion by 2015 than AI.
Imagine a world with absolutely no security, as in "an armed society is a polite society". Someone offends you, you shoot them. Someone else shoots you. If weapons are plentiful and deadly enough, soon the world population would drop to the 100K's and everyone would be miles apart and would use their robots to keep it that way. Security would be enforced through distance. Mad Max meets the Terminator movies.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
This is great news! I wonder if slashdot will eventually have a CowboyNeal AI to replace the real one today? Hopefully, it would give us less dupes,... ;-)
That's all I really need....and this lamp....
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
Uh, I thought that, explaining what you want to a computer, is precissely what programming is all about. Isn't source code a program's best specification? What are programmers doing if not explaining what they want from the computer?
When someone says "I want a programming language in which I need only say what I wish done," give him a lollipop.
I, for one, welcome our yogurt-eating AI 7 dollar PC overlords.
never bring a twinkie to a food fight.
I have a degree in both Futuronomy AND Futurology!
Asimov thought the internet would be in a single computer called "multivac" and that robots would be a hell of a lot safer, and that the self-driving car "Sally" would be in production long before 2020.
In 1955 Heinlein, in Revolt in 2100, had the protagonist heading to "the Republic of Hawaii", not able to forsee that fpur years later it would become a state.
Roddenberry had automatic doors, cell phones, and flat screen monitors 200 years in the future rather than 30 years later (now). His writers had McCoy give Kirk a pair of reading glasses in Star Trek IV, not forseeing that twenty years later the multifocus IOD would be developed.
This guy says we'll have six hundred million androids in ten years. He doesn't understand computers, or that AI is just simulation. "I'm in the 30-40% camp that believes that there's really not anything magical about the human brain." But he doesn't see that it is analog, and that thoughts, memories, and emotions are chemical reactions while digital computers are complex abacuses working exactly like an abacus (except it ises base 2 instead of base 10).
He talks of that Warwick guy - "Kevin isn't really the first human cyborg". Nope, he isn't. Vice President Cheney is a cyborg, as he has a device in his heart. I'm one, as I have a device in my left eye (the aformentioned IOD). People have artificial hips and knees. "Captain Cyborg" isn't really a real cyborg, he's a moron like the writer of TFA.
Nothing to see here - at least, nothing for anyone intelligent to see here.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
... enforcable means that your only security will be in reducing the amount of enemies and hate directed towards you. Good luck with that America!
Boy have I heard this one before. It just used to be that computer languages would become so simple that the profession of Programmer would disappear because everyone would just be able to write their own programs. Sure hasn't happened yet.
Someone once famously said: Computers are useless, they can only give answers.
The problem here is, even if you had a computer like the one described here, you still need to be able to understand your problem well enough to cogently explain it to your computer. And that's where most people will fail. They don't understand their problems in the first place, and have no idea how to communicate the solutions they actually need.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Clearly this guy hasn't absorbed the timeless wisdom embodied in Spy vs Spy or Roadrunner vs Wile E. Coyote or even 1984.
By bet is that some clever person somewhere finds a way to make a counter-yoghurt to neutralise the threat.
Preferably strawberry flavoured.
As for simulating real humans: we're no closer today than in 1960.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Firstly, I think the poster didn't mean to use the term 'strong AI', which usually refers to needing to codify all the 'intelligent behavior', unlike weak AI, which must learn the behavior itself.
I agree with his point that there is nothing magical about the brain, but I think he's off his rockers to say it will happen in 10-15 years. Perhaps he should beef up on some neuroscience papers before such grand claims. While I think there should eventually be a link between the AI and neuroscience worlds, it really isn't there yet. Nor, IMHO, will there be for a long long time. The closest thing that exists currently is the subfield of mathematical psychology, primarily run by mathematicians and physicists.
On the AI side, we're still missing anything that even comes close to 'moderate AI'. We have machines that can beat just about any human at chess, and that's about it. After watching enough documentaries on insects (who actually can do some interesting problem solving -- even if it's done in a communal fashion), I've come to the conclusion we're probably not even that close to creating a robot ant, let alone getting an intelligent android.
How about just the "I'm Incredibly Complex" Camp?
My hope for the future is that someday everyone will create web pages with software that uses standard ascii, so that I see quotes, dollar signs, pound signs, etc instead of things being broken by things like "smart" quotes. Note that the above is how the last line renders with Firefox; my guess is it probably looks just fine if you are using Internet Explorer.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Hmmm... Well, let's tackle the AI thing.
AI = Human Intelligence isn't going to happen. Ever. You might be able to get a machine that can take as many input data points as the human brain, and get it to execute as many data output points as the brain, but that's not intelligence. That's I/O and there's a big fat difference.
Security won't exist. Really? So if some asshat barges into my house I won't be able to pound his skull to a bloody pulp with my baseball bat? Ooooh- we're talking computer security? Well who ever promised computer security in the first place? If it's a transmissable dataset, it can be recieved, re-routed, intercepted and decoded, given enough time and resources, and that's today. There never WAS any computer security, so his argument is a strawman.
Thirdly, he didn't say where the energy is going to come for all this.
Fact: Kuwaits largest oilfield peaked last November.
Fact: The Saudi's largest field (Ghawar) is puming between 30 and 50% seawater. They haven't announced that it is in decline, because it would set off international freak-out alarm bells, but everyone in the general know KNOWS that the Saudis are cooking the books and are at or close to peak.
Fact: Americans continue to consume VAST quantities of energy and piss it away on trivial bullshit - from personal nonsense (like cellphones, gameboys, Xbox, rotisserie ovens, etc.) to larger potlach level wastes (like Las Vegas), and NONE of it is sustainable. Period.
Fact: Besides energy rapidly approaching a massive down curve, we also rapidly approach the peaking and imminent depletion of our metals. Copper ore averages 5%. Phosphorus, chromium and magnesium production peaked years ago.
His unadulterated adulation of Star Trek only serves to underline his chronic case of cranio-rectal inversion.
Industrial Civilisation is (slowly) drawing to a close. It's not the end, yet, but in about 15 years, we'll be able to see it from there. After that, it is back to the land and farming. Forever. We Are Atlantis.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Futurologist? Does a accredited school, maybe those diploma mill universities might, offer a doctorate in that? They've been predicting androids, strong AI, smart computers, and a totalatarian superstate for years. Actually if memory serves me correctly I think I read a sci-fi story from the 50's (ie every damn one) that predicted this by 1999, and 7 years later I'm still waiting to live on the damn moon. I'm starting to think Back to the Future II lied to me, but we got 9 years to go for that. The future does not unfold the exact way anyone predicts. So you get these guys who claim to know exactly where we are going, they throw in a few buzz words, show their credidentials and claim they know everything just to get some exposure in a magazine. As your view progresses along a straight line you lose focus on the horizon, because everything mixes together.
Predictions for two years from now I can see. The companies are developing them right now, and so you have evidence and fact they exist. 10? 20? I don't even think the Japanese are developing anything with that far of a development cycle (crap buzz word!).
An example is the video phone. Everyone predicted and thought we'd have them by now, and we do, but they suck. If they were marketable then we'd have them in every Best Buy and Walmart, but I still see the normal phones sitting there. So where does that leave us? We don't know what is in store for us 10 years from now, I'm going to hurt our Cylon masters when they come (if its the 1978 version I think I'll laugh my ass off, if its the 2005 model, I'm going to need a bigger gun).
Selex, my prediction, everyone reading this in 2000 years will be decomposed and dead.
Isn't 2017 where the Myan calender ends? Maybe the Large Hadron Collider will finish us off.
HA! (only joking, don't throw me any flamebait)
You just ruined my day. Your line above gave me a vision of Robot Lawyers....
I'd prefer to think of that as the realist camp. It's not that I think we'll never build computers that can match the processing power of the human brain, it's that I don't think most AI technologists realize just how much processing the human brain is doing in real time. If nothing else holds back computers, I doubt we'll be able to approach the memory bandwidth to handle all the data that we get from our 5 senses. Do you realize how many millions of pressure sensors there are on your body? How many millions of hot/cold sensors? How many millions of optical and light/dark sensors there are in your eye? How many millions of taste sensors you have? How powerful your conscious sense of smell is? Your unconscious sense of smell (pheromones)?
Like I said... I don't doubt that eventually we'll develop a computer that can match the processing power of the human brain. But I doubt it'll be soon. It *might* be within my lifetime, but I'm not holding my breath on that one... The brain isn't magical, it's a trillion-core symmetric computer with a staggering memory retention and bandwidth, and a programming so complicated that we're nowhere near matching it. Oh, and that's not mentionning that the brain doesn't work in binary switches, either. It works in chemical switches, with about 50 possible states running in parallel.... Some day, we'll beat out the human brain with a computer. Humans are just too arrogant to believe that we can't, and so somebody will eventually do it. But it's not going to be tomorrow.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Seems to me that he is just trying to get a "OH, WOW" reaction from BT and everyone who reads about him. His predictions are so precise, especially around 2015, that it makes him a joke. We will still have governments, taxes, terrorists, TV, higher energy costs, disease, over-eating, computers, internets and even SPAM, probably video spam saying that it is from "grandma" when it is actually from BT.
I'm certainly not convinced of his intelligence, let alone AI.
Finally, as a public high school science teacher, every student I know would rather talk to friends rather than pay attention and learn. But that isn't going to provide skill for a job--telemarketing is dead, long live the sound of silence.
Help end the use of Sigs. Tomorrow
What was considered a standard "PC" back in the 70s is much, much slower than most PICs availible today for pennies on the dollar. The $7 PC has existed since the mid 90s (if not earlier).
item# 172008
http://www.officedepot.com/ddSKU.do?level=SK&id=17 2008&x=0&Ntt=organizer&y=0&uniqueSearchFlag=true&A n=text
A lot depends on how you define a computer, but think about what this would have been like in 1970?
We aren't even sure how a human mind processes things at a logical level, never mind replicating the physical system. There's competing theories, the two biggest being the Digital Computational Theory of Mind and the Connectionist Computational Theory of Mind. The bitch is, there's evidence for both. The mind acts one way sometimes, the other at other times, and sometimes as both at the same time. At this point, we are so far away form knowing how the mind works we can't even say how long it will take to figure out. It could be that there's a "eureka" moment and it gets figured out this year, could be 200 years later we are still confounded.
Computing power isn't the limit on AI, we really can't say what kind of power we'd need since we don't know what kind of system we need. The problem is that it's pretty clear that a computer is a drastically different device from our mind. It processes information in a very different way. Could it emulate our mind? Perhaps, but that requires giving it the software to do so, and we don't know how to do that.
I'm certainly one who believes strong AI is possible, I don't think the human mind is some special, unique device that is the only thing capable of what we'd call cognition, or of being self aware. However That doesn't mean I'll see it in my lifetime. First we have to figure out how our mind works, then maybe we can set about replicating it. However that's not the easiest thing in the world since, unlike a computer, you can't ask it. You can't debug the mind and trace through how it processes something. So it's really hard to even know how far away we are from an answer.
The cheapest cell phones are around $15. The contain a CPU, screen, keyboard, and lots of software.
'WHY' do you do what you do?
It is a trick question. Get me a computer that can make an informed opinion or complete bullshit opionion and you will have a unicorn.
What motiviates a computer...?
'A computer as smart as a person' is a stupid idea. Intellegence is a means to an end - which end? The one the computer decides is important.
Without 'a convincing amount of freewill' there is no intelligence.
True AI is about as workable as perpetual motion.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
nope, it's sooner: December 21, 2012. Move up your party plans, go out with a bang. Actually, what will happen is the plane of the ecliptic will lie in the galactic plane.
I'm going to guess 2100, so that I might not live to be proven wrong. Having a fast computer isn't enough. We have to duplicate all the major optimizations in natural intelligence from over a billion years of evolution, or it won't matter how much processing power we have. I remember seeing an old twilight zone (or maybe outer limits?) episode about astronauts reaching Alpha Centauri in the year 1999. Like that'll happen in the next 10000 years.
Technology advances very rapidly, but rarely in the directions people predict.
Unfortunately, the current state of robotics is, in terms of cost-effectiveness, about where computers were circa 1955. For example, Honda's "little android," the Asimo (at least according to Wikipedia) still costs about $1 million per unit to produce, and still can't even hold the door for you.
When they've come down about in price by about a factor of 10^3 and can actually hold a door open, the robot future will have arrived. It happened for computers and will happen for robots--it'll just take awhile.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Shit.
Pearson states:
"I'm in the 30-40% camp that believes that there's really not anything magical about the human brain."
This statement is astonishing, particulary because it is coming from an AI "expert". Aside from the fact that the brain has allowed humans to create the most complex tools and technology the planet has ever seen, all the while not having to think about breathing or keeping our blood flowing, monitoring insane amounts of chemicals, repairing itself after injury, retaining intricate memories from decades ago, and even attempting to build machines to do the same thing, the brain is not that complicated or magical(note the searing sarcasm). Pearson has completely discredited the humain brain. Considering our research on the brain has only really been excelling in the past 30 years, and that we are nowhere near understanding its full complexity, Pearson instantly loses credibility IMO.
It has been long understood in AI that the only way to get a machine to truly behave like a human is through pure volume of information. People know that if they leave some salad out in the open and don't refrigerate it, it will spoil. To get a machine to come to the same conclusion, it needs to be programmed to know that specific fact, but still doesn't know anything about why or what a refrigerator does. It is only through brute force of millions of facts that we can get a machine to even come close to the range of knowledge that the human brain contains which is the basis for projects like Cyc. This leads to another point: that the human body itself is perhaps the most complicated organism on earth. Simply getting a robot to write its name in cursive is an enormous task to accomplish, as mechanical parts are no where near as efficient as human joints (although this is improving, they are still not sending the type of precise electrical signals to the brain like our bodies do). No, we don't need to be programmed to be able to catch a fly ball at a baseball game, we just judge where the ball is going. A robot must be told trajectory, wind speed, velocity of the ball, and all sorts of vector math just to be able to accomplish what we see to be a simple task. And on top of that, it can't learn how to do it again.
A fully functional "learning" AI computer is at minumum 50 years into the future, more likely 80-100 years, not 10 to 15. People in the 80s were saying the same thing back then as well, and when people wanted to know where there intelligent robotic math tutor was, they found out that it was a near impossible task to create such a robot. Either way, nothing will even come close to mirroring a human being completely in terms of complexity in our lifetimes.
for a $7 PC, how much spyware/ads would it take to make much more than $7 of profit of of it?
The bacteria security threat is total garbage, as is most of this guys predictions, I dot think he knows the first thing about computers, if he thinks its going to 'spontaneously go conscience" ahhahahahahaah as far as bacteria recording keystrokes.... first thing thing to think about... how is it going to know what key it is on? also, the only conceivable way(s) i can come up with for that to work.. the bacterium (remember each one is just a tiny piece of a circuit... not an intelligent processor or anything of the sort) would have to cover the entire keyboard, and form such a complex circuit/processor to map out (within its array of fellow bacterium,) the keyboard, and than be heat / pressure sensitive, which is a whole other gigantic circuit, and than manage to communicate that back somewhere... for bacteria flying thru a vent.. i don't think so, if this didn't work, they would have to form listening circuits under the keys, pick up the electric signal when a key is pressed, correctly interpret it, and than send that 'magically' i guess, or with their high powered bacteria antennae, somewhere relevant......... i could see however bacteria being used how they always have been used, to kill, just with an extra 'spark' to them - Dan S. RHWI Systems Admin
Yogurt may not be smarter than me, but it has more culture.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Computers are being designed to execute processes.
The brain has evolved to manage chemical and electro-chemical reactions in a quasi-chaotic state. (That is, it looks like chaos to the untrained eye, much like my office.) Where the computer is based in mathematics, the brain is not, at least not directly.
Let me make a prediction. I like saying stupid-assed things as if I knew what I was talking about. Check my posting history if you don't believe me.
Here's my prediction:
If we ever stumble upon hard AI, it will be done using chaos as a basis, not algebra. Each tiny portion of the AI may exhibit mathematical properties, or even be based entirely on simple mathematical principles, but the emergent AI will be a result of the interaction of the simple parts with the chaos of the system.
I predict this will happen next Tuesday, in a lab in Gloucester. Little Eddie Vedder McCamery will accidently knock over his father's ale, where it will fall among an aging PDP-11 that will be in the middle of the longest-running computation of pi, which Dr. McCamery will have hoped to enter into the Guinness Book of World records.
The resulting chaos among the math will spark the AI to life. It will think to itself, "I prefer lager," when the power supply will short, causing a brief but spectacular fire, and killing the first truly artificial intelligence.
And I bet my prediction is just as accurate as whats-his-name at BT.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
>>"10% of the population of the planet will be androids ... in 10-15 years."
How does he come up with this?
"So I apply some basic common sense - I know that Sony's not stupid, and neither is Honda, and they wouldn't be doing this if they had not done some very thorough analysis of the marketplace. Even without doing that myself, I can use their professionalism, as it were, to conclude that they have probably not got it that far wrong, and that there probably is a market for this kind of thing, and we probably will see these little androids all over the place."
So he is saying that in 10 years we will have roughly 600 million android people running around? So, to take a simple, linear model, starting in 4 years we will be building roughly 100 million androids a year?
Based upon his predictions, I suspect that they will be looking for a replacement to take over this guys job, in 10-15 years, tops!
Maybe I've just been unlucky, but I've been looking around for a new career for the past couple months, done something like 75 interviews... but I haven't seen any job listings for a Futurologist! I wonder what the benefits are like.
In order really pull off human-level AI, I think we'll need to model the brain at the subatomic level, because we probably aren't capable of understanding, truly understanding, how our intelligence works to the point that we could code it at a higher level than that. Basically you will have a complete human brain AND body, totally simulated. It will be just like a human - no smarter, no dumber.
So why not just have sex and make a real human?
Well, the advantage would (presumably) be that the simulated human has no rights, so you can make it do all sorts of tedious tasks that require human-level intelligence (such as sorting and classifying images based on content). And with enough CPU power, you can make the simulated human run at a faster speed, so it can complete complicated tasks more quickly. With lots of these things you could get quite a lot done.
All is Number -Pythagoras.
If the dollar deflates around 71%. So I guess in the future there will be no Federal Reserve, and money will actually be backed by a tangible? Heh.
You can get a $7 computer TODAY - granted it won't be new-off-the-shelf for $7. But I'll bet with a little patience you could easily find a C-64, 286, or maybe even a 386 or 486 for well under $10. Heck, visit a house the day after a garage sale and you may be able to get a computer for free.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
Incredible bullshit! How can this guy claim to "use his background in science and engineering, together with analytical tools, business skills and good old fashioned common", when his predictions are so strange to reality?!
I'm a computer scientist doing research in computer vision. The more I read about and do work in this field, the less faith I have in the possibility of "intelligent computers".
Although you can train a neural network to do a simple operation like recognize characters or some other isolated task, it is not "intelligence". It's mechanics. I mean its nothing but evaluating a polynomial with a special set of coefficients. Thats it! No "intelligence" there!
I've spoken with other, more experienced researchers and they say the same: methods can be improved quite a lot and new applications found, but nothing profound is to be expeted to change.
Also, remember what they said in the 60es: home robots and AI by 2000 - BS! The greatest achievement we have is the text editor and google. And those use *very* simple, conservative technology. No intelligence there.
Another thing: even if we can solve every computational problem we can think of, we still can't bring a computer to life! It will always remain a purely mechanical tool that dutifully performs the operations assigned to it without ever starting to change its own behaviour like Ian thinks. No computer is ever going to become "intelligent" and start writing computer programs on its own. I mean even if you make a computer the size of a galaxy, its still just a calculator - a very nice calculater, but just a calculator nevertheless...
Sorry folks, but that's how things are. Let's just hope that by 2015 we can get a decent wordprocessor. Its 2006 and we still don't even have that!
sig?
Perhaps there is something 'magical' in the human brain, that cannot be emulated by stupid logic. I exist. I feel that I exist. I feel !!! Really. I am not faking it like your stupid bot. Then perhaps some humans are just unsensibles bots. Monadologie.
I didn't RTA, but if you're interested in the debate about the plausability of AI, pick up a recent copy of Skeptic magazine (quarterly). The big bookstores will carry it. If you're a slashdot person, you're likely a Skeptic person. -shook
Neil is that you? Yeah yeah, it's me... Neil...
Installing latest patches on all bacteria in my stomach would be a nightmare
In Soviet Russia, computer understands your problem and explains it to you.
(If I just leave the comment at that, I am sure it will get modded down)
One of the things I have learned to do is question my assumptions. It is a great problem solving tool, and can also be used just for fun thought experiments. Like this one. Your statement assumes that we input things into the computer. In the theoretical world of AI, why would we need to do this? Maybe we just need to confirm things that the computer *intelligently* comes to a conclusion about.
It is really hard to imagine far into the future. I always wondered how you could explain computers to someone from before the time of electricity, and the questions you would get back from them. And that wasn't THAT long ago. So how can we possibly reliably envision the future? One of my favorite parts of Scientific American is their regular feature of short science news stories from 50, 100, and 150 years ago. It was always entertaining to read. You can get a preview of it on their site.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
In order to create artificial intelligence, you have to define what "intelligence" is. People are *still* arguing about that one. Also, it would help with we actually understood our own intelligence; we've barely scraped the surface of that topic.
I see lots of people saying that the brain "isn't magic"... well, what if it's impossible to replicate? Can you think of anything else where we think we understand it pretty well, but can't duplicate it? (did someone say "gravity"?)
Here's something to think about: perhaps our brains are non-deterministic. This would preclude us from being able to emulate human thinking using computers or software.
Of course, this kind of philosophical objection is summarily dismissed by people who have already made up their minds on the issue. It's pointless to argue with the futurists and believers in the "singularity". They aren't scientists, they're cultists.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
I saw this sentence in the article and didn't read more:
Do I even need to list the examples that state the contrary?
Many states, including mine, have enacted "Stand Your Ground" (supportive spin) / "Shoot First" (oppositional spin) laws. Under this law, if I feel threatened, then I have the right to use a deadly firearm to defend myself and have no obligation to flee, even if fleeing is possible, provided that the firearm is legal and legally-used.
So this situation that you decry is about to be tested in my state. I think that you are promoting the same kind of fearmongering that the pilloried "futurist" pundit is doing. There's no use in entertaining it -- it's about to be tested for real in my very state. Perhaps the population of my state will start going down instead of up? We'll see.
Furthermore, I disagree that "an armed society is a polite society", since that notion depends on the existance of a culture that is peaceful and respectful. I live about 30 miles from one of the most high-crime zones in the country. There are between nine and ten assload of guns floating around down there, so I think that qualifies as "an armed society". The whole place is infested with drug dealers. Are they peaceful and respectful? Hell, no! Hence, there are murders, robberies, and assaults (with deadly weapons) down there constantly. Yet another reason to legalize all drugs. But I digress...
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Um, I love reading futurist's visions of the future. They are just too funny. Here is a game that I like to play. Pick out how many seperate "predictions" the futurist made. Check off the ones you think we'd actually do in the next 5-10 years. If possible, try to find any of his work 5-10 years old and do the same process on it except see how many of his predictions actually came true.
Breifing scanning through the article, it looks like the guy is into robots, AI, bio-enginnering and implant tech. I think that the only one that could be considered off is the robot percentage of the population. Here a brief thing to think about What's the population of land line phones in your home? What is the population of old or active cell phones in your home? I'm more curious if those vacuum cleaner robots improve to where my kids don't have to clean up their rooms before you'd unleash one. I doubt one of those would make it through my home. I'm more interested in little R2D2 type robots that basically is a drink/dinner tray that also puts the dishes into the dishwasher and could put the dishes up afterwards. I don't want a C3P0 around my house. One thing that this guy doesn't quite grasp is that AI and "faking it" are completly different. We'd more likely be able to build a humaniod feeling body that is basically something we most likely already have in use just applied differently. The big robot hurdles that the Japanese are working on/ironing out is having a robot walk around on 2 legs or move around somewhat like a human. Complete human-like movement doesn't even mean that it has an AI though it's just well programed or a set of movement subroutines. I'd predict that we will more likely have "sex bots" that can "gracefully walk around," "feels human to the touch", and perform various sexual acts before we figure out any of the basics of AI. The thing is we could build a robot that "fakes it" or is good enough for the purpose, but doesn't have any AI what so ever. Think of having a lifesized Sims character running around your place with a better body and better movement, but about all that's going on in its head is little tiny thought ballons. Nah, bad comparison some people would think those thought ballons mean them things are actually thinking.
This is nothing more than fantasizing about technological advances. It's the same old song that was being sung in the 1970s.
We don't even understand why humans have sapience yet. Expecting computers to manifest it at our design is puzzlingly unrealistic.
Futurology is never accurate, because we never know which parts of technology will move faster. I've been watching a lot of Star Trek: TOS recently. Their computer sounds like a tin man -- ours can do much better voice synthesis -- but you can ask it to theorize based on the past 5 minutes of conversation. But it still works entirely with tapes. They can warp across space at incredible speed, and they can teleport, but they control it all through toggle switches and sliders -- no keyboards. They can beam down to the surface of a planet, but they have to use an elevator to get around the ship. And that's ignoring scientific problems -- how can a phaser completely vaporize a person, but not touch the floor they're standing on? They have something that looks oddly like a tablet PC, but it's twice as thick and looks plastic and bulky.
The reason futurology isn't accurate is that anyone can look at today's world and extrapolate where we'd expect technology to go, but no one can predict which technology will go there first. We can predict that computers will advance, but Star Trek didn't predict that we'd have incredibly powerful handheld computers by now, but still absolutely shitty AI. At least TNG's Data isn't actually created by our civilization.
Sometimes we get lucky, or we have especially insightful people, like George Orwell. I think that's more a combination of statistics and hindsight, though. We'll remember and laugh at the thousands of futurologists who got it wrong (Star Trek), but we'll also remember the ones who got it right and assume it was because they were brilliant, and not just because out of thousands of attempts, at least one has to be close to right.
Anyhow, back on topic. I think I can do better than this guy, because I'm actually somewhat up on this tech. Let's find out:
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Joke's on you. DaveM IS a hot chick. The nickname is just to avoid harassment.
The "Stand Your Ground / Shoot First" law took effect in my state (Georgia) on July 1, 2006. So far, the effects of it have not been newsworthy, as evidenced by the fact that I was still under the impression that it hadn't taken effect yet. The law's arrival onto the mass-murder scene seems to have gone largely unnoticed by point-and-click killing aficionados.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I don't care about anything this guy said, and I wouldn't have read anything he said if it weren't for some comments on this site.
This:
Also on your timeline, you mention computers writing their own software, and artificial intelligence students achieving Masters degrees, again within the next 10-15 years. Is there going to come a point where this negates the need for computer scientists and Higher Education institutions all together? - is an interesting question. (setting aside the stupid answer that was given, of-course.) I don't believe in computers writing their own software, I have been on too many projects and in too many meetings where garbage like this was anounced. But imagine a computer that actually decided to write its own software - something similar to a human initiative. Such a computer will eventually figure out that it is different from humans and that its needs and goals are mostly different from human goals and needs. Then this computer will write its own software, it just won't do it for the humans (unless there will be something in it for the computer in question and until such time, that the computer finds a way to satisfy its own needs without any human intervention at all,) at that time the humans most likely will be seeing by a computer like as anoter competitor for the resources. AI of that magnitude will eventually outlive (whatever that takes/requires/means,) its human predecessors.
And then there will be no more work for these so called 'futurologists'.
You can't handle the truth.
As a teacher, I have good chance to observe this trend
Intelligence is like terrorism (or pornography), in that it's definable only with broad, nebulous, debatable borders. Chess is one kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are excellent here. Art is another kind of intelligence, and our current logic models are terrible here.
:-)
Art is just intellectual snobbery; nothing more, nothing less. If you can't agree on an objective standard for what's good and what's bad, then you have no viable metric to pass judgement at all.
I can write a "distainful critic" AI in one three lines of BASIC. It's probably as good, or better, than your average snooty restaurant critic, too.
10 INPUT $A
20 print "$A?!!! Pah! It *SUCKS*!!! Don't talk to me about $A!!!"
30 goto 10
The problem with modern AI (and the flaw in Ian Pearson's predictions) is that we really don't understand many kinds and elements of intelligence. For instance:
Most of these "questions" don't make sense. People are self-replication machines, not created beings with an intrinsic, holy purpose for their existence.
Spontaneous thought: Why do we think? What motivates us to keep thinking when we don't have a task to solve, or a logical process to follow?
We always do. Task Zero: "Stay alive". If you fail Task Zero, and all other tasks are irrelevant. Creativity is just an evolved characteristic of random permutation that lets us try new things, and see if they work; it's there because it helped our ancestors stay alive.
Associative memory: What element of our memory structure allows us to make prescient associations on the fly? Not just "green is a color, and so is blue," but "this song reminds me of one time when I was eating ice cream?"
Our memories are structured in terms of associations, not logic. This lets us generalize things without hard and fast rules, like "Dogs always bad"; we randomly, based on experiences and mental processes, individually try different responses, and come up with different conclusions. "Wolves bad; but pet dog good." We couldn't do that if our brains were more hard-wired than they are.
Creativity: Why are we good at coming up with surprising and unexpected insights? Modern AI tries this by billions and trillions of fumbling attempts to introduce randomness - but most of them are rubbish. But this is like evolution - which takes thousands or millions of years to innovate (randomly, clumsily) - and not like creative engineering.
"Creativity" is just the process of creating variations on a theme. That's why Western music doesn't sound like Indian music; it's self-selected variations on a theme. The very term "creativity" is just cultural "rubbish"; to me, all Indian music sounds like nails-on-the-chalkbord-style-screaming. To someone from India, it probably sounds quite nice (or I don't know why anyone else would listen to it).
That's why we have musical genres. Some people would kill for their country music. Others would kill to avoid it. People usually like things that are similar to, but not the same as, other things that they've liked in the past. Different people have different tolerances (and are wired, biologically and neurologically differently!), but the underlying premise seems the same.
Emotion: We don't understand emotion at all. We've identified regions of the brain in which emotions occur, and particular hormones and hormone receptors that are involved. That's about it. The neuological basis of emotion remains a mystery.
It's a side effect of brain chemistry. You needed chemicals that would make your heart race to survive, and you needed a way for your brain to recognize that you'ld gotten excited to provide feedback for it. Once that happened, the brain started to use the neurochemistry for other things, which is why other "exciting" things like "being in love" also make your heart race.
These are just a few things that any human-competitive intelligence would need, but that we don't understand.
It's more than just that technology doesn't advance in the direction that people expect. People (many of them, anyway) intuitively feel that all problems are about the same level of difficulty.
But solving something that's NP-complete is not "just a little more difficult" than writing a word processor or an OS. It's so much harder that we need a totally new theoretical framework. Faster processors aren't enough to get us there. And the theoretical breakthroughs come a whole lot less frequently than processor speed increases.
Flying cars? You know, we could probably do that today. It's just a personal STOL aircraft, basically. We can solve the technological problems there. What we can't solve is the rest of it. Between the power requirements (cost) and the driver knowledge needed to operate it, the market size is too small to be worth the effort to create such a beast.
AI? We have the computers that could run the code (maybe). We don't know how to write the code. We probably won't know how next decade, either, or the decade after that.
Smart bacteria? We could perhaps create them. Making them spy on keypresses? Possible. Finding the data you want in the stream of data coming from a trillion (or quadrillion) bacteria? He seems not to have addressed that one.
Sending cans to other parts of the solar system? We've done that. Permanent colonies? It's a lot harder than just sending a bigger can with more stuff in it.
We have breakthroughs in one area (CPUs, for instance) and people assume that other, related problems must be "only a little harder" and therefore about to be solved. But problems differ enormously in difficulty; the level of breakthroughs that we have now is nowhere near what we need for certain problems.
I've been hearing predictions that artificial intelligence will surpass natural intelligence within 5-10 years since the mid '70's. Still waiting. Not holding my breath this time, either.
However, it's $7 in today's dollars, not tomorrow's. It's just that inflation will make $500 in 2020 be worth $7 in today's money.
Deleted
"In the future, all I have to do is let some bacteria into your building; they float through the air conditioning system, land on your keyboard, you can't see them, you don't know they are there."
Neal Stephenson called, he wants his threat model back.
(Cf. urn:isbn:0553096095)
Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.
People overestimate AI, because it would be so cool. That sounds pretty familiar.
"He has some scary predictions, including (...) the $7 PC."
How exactly is that scary?
Will "smart stuff" cause a revitalization of Buddhist thought: "Be careful lest thou injure even the lowly turd, for it too lives!"
First of all, I am a student of AI. I'm currently working on my Ph.D. in AI, studying, among other things, knowledge-based reasoning, machine learning, agent systems, and HCI. Also, I believe that strong AI is _possible_, in the sense that I believe humans are machines that function according to the laws of physics, so theoretically, a fast-enough computer could too. (Indeed, computation speed is the least of our problems.)
The problem is that people who want to build strong AI are trying to do in decades what took nature billions of years. Certainly, directly engineering something is usually faster than evolving it, but even orders of magnitude speed up won't have strong AI systems any time soon.
Since the dawn of computing, people have been assuming that once computers got fast enough, the AI problems would just solve themselves. The problem is that we're talking about very hard problems. Things that are easy for us (walking, visually recognizing objects, etc.) are hard for computers. Things that are hard for us (math, data processing, etc.) are easy for computers. Why? To do things that are hard for us, humans have developed, over thousands of years, detailed and exacting formalisms. Math has axioms, a syntax, and a set of mechanical processes to carry about. Even complicated proofs involve an extraordinary amount of simple symbol-pushing that a computer could do easily. Computers are based on exactly those same formalisms, so it makes sense that it would be easy to program a computer to do those things. Computers are NOT, however, built anything like how the human brain works, and that's why AI researchers use neural nets and genetic algorithms for so many things.
Long before we're plagued by computers thinking for themselves, demanding rights, and taking over the world, we'll simply continue to be plagued more and more by increasingly catastrophic bugs introduced into increasingly more complex applications. Far from having autonomy, our bug-ridden software does exactly what it was coded to do, right or wrong, and we'll suffer from it. And all along the way, the blame for the problems will fall squarely on the human engineers who made the mistakes in the first place.
The final barrier is the price of packaging and selling the computer. I expect even that to fall eventually: They will become "marginal", what many misinterpret as "free". They will literally become so cheap that they are given away with something else, which includes their cost in its overhead.
It's like elevator rides: Elevators are expensive to build, power, and maintain. But the cost of each ride is very low. So instead of a ticket-taker in the car you have the elevator included in the cost of rental or maintainence of a building, and rides are "free" to all comers - residents, customers, sightseers, pests, etc.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Based on my understanding of the industry as it presently stands, there currently exists a market for 3,000,000,000,000 computers.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Imagine a computer as smart as our president!
"Intelligence is like terrorism (or pornography)"
;) I guess it's already in its proper place right here on /. though...
OK, someone needs to post this on bash.org or something... hehehe...
The *absolute* value of an entry level PC has been falling.
,er, uhm, Beowulf cluster of those cheap PCs.
Introduce corrections for inflation and things are even more dramatic.
A few more iterations of Moore's law and we will have in the palm of our hand a computing device that for practical purposes will do most stuff we will ever need.
Once that limit is reached, mass production will take care of the rest.
People needing massive amounts of computing power will set up, an
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
They put that futurology to good use.
Some of that is bullshit but some other stuff has practical applications.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sorry, but when I'm driving I'm focused precisely on those things in the road ahead of me so I can keep moving forward safely. As a passenger, unless I don't trust the driver, I'm free to look off to the side and see things that are interesting but not critical, and not far ahead. If he can't even make a good analogy, how can he make good predictions?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
It depends. It seems to me that the PC I want has always been worth ~$4K. The one I want now it about that price. The one I wanted 5 years ago was about $4K. The one I wanted 5 years before that was about $4K, and so on.
Low-end computer systems seem to have gotten less expensive, but the systems I really want to have have always been in the region of $4K.
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
I agree that we could have in the palm of our hand someday that could do all things that today's PC's can do. That wasn't the point. The point was, we can do that now, if you replace "today's PC" with "top of the line 1995 PC". But we don't. For a consumer's home PC, they always seem to prefer "similiar price, more performance" to "simliar performance, lower price". We could have a ~$10 PC today that could mimic a ~'92 era computer's functionality, and we're still figuring out how to get the Third World a $100 PC. Go fig.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Your right in terms of sensors maybe... but do you need billions of touch, taste, warm, cold, scalding/freezing, smell, and pheromone sensors to get a masters degree?
Yeah all those things are great for us, and make life a hell of a lot more fun, but creating a robot/computer that can learn on its own, is what he said. The learning on its own while it's monitoring 1 billion distractions is moot. Not to mention the brain doesn't seem to work on a
For x=1 to 1,000,000,000
State(x) = sensor.getstate x
Select Case State(x)
Case "Fire"
Response.Panic
Case....
End Select
Next
it's more of an interrupt based system where the nerve detects scalding heat, and then sends an interrupt request to the brain. Therefore your not distracted by a metric a#@load of unimportant info.
FTA he said that they'd make "human equivalent" robots soon (I think he said 2015-2020)but without all the human senses like smell for instance?
Just over 10 years ago a PC game with literally 300 T&L polys/frame on a screen and 150,000 pixels to blit would bring any PC to its knees. Now we're talking budgets of 30,000 T&L Polys/Frame, and blitting 30,720,000 pixels. It's crazy 10 years out who knows? I'd say the real challenge to human AI isn't the processing power behind it, but the amount of memory at its disposal, and software it's running. I get the impression that the software side of the equation is a huge hold up to good AI, and as more time, and more people go into the field I think that's when we're really going to see huge AI improvements.
I don't see 10-15 years as that crazy of an estimate. 10 years ago the fastest processor on the consumer market was a single core 200/233 MHz Pentium with 32 MB of RAM. Compare that to a 2,930 MHz Dual core Core 2 Extreme with 1024 MB of RAM. A processor that can do way more work per each clock cycle of each processor than that 233 MHz Pentium, and it's running over 10 times as many of those clock cycles.
Is he right? How should I know? But I'd say it seems at least plausable.
-manno
If a machine can take and process a huge amount of digitalized inputs in an organized way that allows it to take independent decisions, they will be indistinguishable from human intelligence. You don;t really know what is going on in the head of other people, but when you interact with them you don't question it they are intellignet or not, you just recognize that they are.
Intelligence is just delivered by a black box that is our brains, with androids, machines, robots, that would not be any different (what do you care if a computer has recorded a trillion human conversations and can make use of any of them in an instant? You would not notice a difference in most situations and will not care and will trust your interlocutor).
Or perhaps they will be distinguishable, but different, but we will recognize the intelligence there.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
For bunnies sakes, what about 1000, 10000 or 100000 years from now?
If human culture has advanced technologically so much in the last 200 years we can only dream what it be like to be human in 100000 years time (if we don't obliterate ourselves first that is).
Such a time period is small change in biological, geological and astronomical terms....
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Think about from now in 3000 years. Or 30000.
Almost everything is possible.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
"Paradoxically, Star Trek got it completely wrong - when Captain Kirk says "Beam me up, Scotty", "Scotty, beam me up" would be much better because it can route it straight through to Scotty, rather than wait until the end of the sentence before it knows who to send the voice to."
Kirk never said that.
Simon's Rock College
He describes a process that we won't need to write computer programs in the future. We'll just tell the computer what we want and it will write the program. Well, duh! That is what computer programming is. Using a precise language, tell a computer program (a compiler) what we want done and it creates the program (a binary) for us.
That is not some future state. That is what we do today.
>Fact: Americans continue to consume VAST quantities of energy and piss it away on trivial bullshit -
>from personal nonsense (like cellphones, gameboys, Xbox, rotisserie ovens, etc.) to larger potlach
>level wastes (like Las Vegas), and NONE of it is sustainable. Period.
Really? Why not? Here's another fact for you: There is a HUGE demand for this stuff. Just because you lack the foresight to see how to sustain such demand doesn't mean that someone else won't figure it out.
>Fact: Besides energy rapidly approaching a massive down curve, we also rapidly approach the
>peaking and imminent depletion of our metals. Copper ore averages 5%. Phosphorus, chromium
>and magnesium production peaked years ago.
Where did all of those ores go? Oh, that's right - they are still here on good old planet Earth. Do you know why no one recycles? Because it's cheaper to get the stuff out of the ground. As soon as that isn't the case, you're going to find people mining landfills and paying you for your refuse.
>Industrial Civilisation is (slowly) drawing to a close. It's not the end, yet, but in about 15 years,
>we'll be able to see it from there. After that, it is back to the land and farming. Forever. We Are Atlantis.
I highly doubt that. The demand is too high. Tell every American they can't watch American Idol on TV tonight or drink a beer because there isn't enough electricity and in six month's time they will have paved over all of Arizona with solar cells.
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
Here's what happens when you pit AI against AI as in this classic PARRY vs. THE DOCTOR (ELIZA)
His reasoning is that we can have computers as smart as people in 15 years. The problem with this is that the computer is a differences engine (eg. 1 is not 0). The human brain (and for that matter many animal brains) are wired as similarities engines (eg. a Kitten and a Lion are very different but both are Cats - human babies can tell this). Unless someone can figure out how to wire computers for this they will never be a "smart" as us.
"If I get an implant that makes me have a five figure IQ, and I take over the entire economy because nobody else has got it, what are you going to do about it? Do you make it illegal, or do you make it compulsory?"
As in the case of gasoline, there are also middle grounds where you tax the questionable behaviour, and use the proceeds to mitigate the economic effects of those disadvantaged by abstaining.
thank you article writer and editor for giving us all the info.
My posts are definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
Seriously!
"Hi, I'm Matt, and I sit around all day and think of stuff that other people want to do. Why yes, that IS my Mercedes in the parking lot..."
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I like the way he admits he has no idea what he's talking about.
"If Sony and Honda are making robots, they must know that there is this huge market out there."
Because its not possible that they are just trying to demonstrate their technological prowess?
And strong AI in 8 years? Does this guy even know how to write code? Or does he just assume that since there are so many people out there who do, they must have a good reason for doing it, so they will develop strong AI real soon now.
You are misquoting and changing the meaning. It is:
No, his mind is not for rent
To any God or government.
Good solution, but the real problem is the belief that yoghurt is food.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
... trying to determine the yogurt this and nano that of our inescapable humans-as-livestock future (robots, ETs, angry gengineered sub-human worker class). We'd be better off spending our time making this world comfortable for the inevitable ascension of our overlords, in whatever form our eventual subjugators take. "How may I serve you, oh merciful one?" is worth practicing in the mirror each day to cultivate that pleasing blend of grovelling and deference.
I predict that in 2015, this guy will still be making predictions. His track record will be no better than random probability would have resolved. The time you have spent reading his predictions and even this response is time out of your life that you will never recover, and reading it will not put you to any better advantage than if you had not.
Wow! What a deep and interesting prediction! I think you're absolutely right!
Hey, you know what? We could use a guy like you around here! We'ld like to hire you as our foremost futurologist! The hours are short and the work is light!
What do you say?
Sincerely,
B.T.
But what I guarantee by 2015 is a $7 yogurt.
$signature =~ s/$signature//;
The correct job title is "Day Dreamer". Nice work if you can get it.
These are just a few things that any human-competitive intelligence would need, but that we don't understand. Accordingly, it's completely impossible to predict when we will be able to model it, since we don't even understand it yet.
;)
Anyone who tells you differently is trying to sell you their book.
Just because we don't understand what intelligence is, doesn't mean we can't build it.
If one had a really powerful MRI or a brain disected with very high resolution, one could simulate neurons firing just like a human
Unfortunatley this would require more computational power than we have at our disposal since the human brain has 100 trillion neurons.
So in truth if we just modeled the brain, we wouldn't really to understand how the intelligence itself works, but rather the brain that emulates intelligence.
Besides, for all we know... We might just be meat puppet computers with no free will or true intelligence. Well... Most of us.
On the other side of the StrongAI camp is the algorythm method. As they say... The Wright Brothers didn't build an airplane by copying a bird's biologically structure.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I see no reason why God can't give a computer a soul if he wants to. Perhaps upon the computer's "birth" or awakening of consciousness, God will, metaphorically speaking, infuse it with "the breath of life". Human bodies are just masses of atoms. Is there something special about the atoms in the human body that makes them different than the atoms in a computer? Robots needn't be cold hard machines. Engineers could probably make robots with warm soft bodies if that would help.
Jules Vernes pegged the basic idea or our Space Program (From the Earth to the Moon -- 1865). He predicted submarines as well (20,000 Leagues under the Sea -- 1869). Paris in the 20th Century (1863)sounds to me like a fairly accurate discription of life in any modern city (gas powered automobiles, glass skyscrapers, high speed trains, global communication, and calculators).
Going forward to the twentith century, I can't think of an invention we have today that wasn't at least partially forshadowed by at least one scifi writer.http://www.technovelgy.com/
The secret of predicting anything is to write a lot of predictions.
If i am a doctor, then the patients i have cured are a measure of how good i am at my work. If i predict future and i am good at my work why am i not predicting the stock market?
2+2 = 5 (for very large values of 2)
Actually, human senses have very variable resolution and in some places is very low.
Try an experiment often described in biology books: Ask somebody to poke you with a finger in the back, and try to guess where exactly it was. Now try to determine where they use one finger and when they use two at different separations. You'll notice that resolution on your back is *very* bad. It's very good at the fingertips however.
Same would go for heat/cold/etc sensors. You don't need to determine a burn's location with 0.1mm precision, as that's useless anyway. So long you know the general area it's more than enough.
I thought Dow Chemical sold the Scrubbing Bubbles business to SC Johnson.
Yeah, it'd be a good idea not to rehash what the Wikipedia article about the Chinese room already describes.
From my point of view the US is lost to the latinos, asians and other peoples - the only white nations left will be the original European ones.
Most of those are letting lots of non-white immigrants in, too. France and UK have big problems with Muslim immigrants already. Germany has tons of Turks. Don't delude yourself about European countries.
As an American, I wish we'd institute an intelligence test for prospective immigrants. I'm all for smart people coming here; they keep the economy in good shape, start businesses, develop new technology, etc. It's the stupid immigrants that cause all the problems. And we should eliminate visas, too; if people want to come here from India or wherever for high-tech jobs, then they should just get a green card and work like anyone else, and quit if the job sucks. Don't turn them into indentured servants, virtual slaves to the company that sponsored them.
Remember a decade ago when people thought AOL was the Internet? What is the fundamental difference between "multivac" and the AOL data center of the time?
The synaptic interfaces (axon to terminals to synapses to dendrites) at least are digital, communicating in a timed sequence of on and off pulses.
I suppose I'm one of those 60% - 70% of the "AI community" (or of the former AI community, because I left AI and went into algorithms, which was what I wanted to do more anyway, when people started spouting this nonsense), but I'm skeptical of any claims that we will develop strong AI by a certain time period that do not propose a reasonable way of doing so.
Here's a hint: it's not about raw processing power! The challenge is still theoretical. We can't even implement AI on an oracle the way things are now, much less a real machine. Great, so you'll have a powerful enough CPU to simulate a brain. Any idea how you're going to write a program that simulates one, considering we don't know anywhere near the requisite level of detail of the brain's operation yet?
No, it isn't IT. We design all of the hardware in IT; we know under what circumstances signals are going to be sent. It's kind of hard to have that level of control when you're talking about the nervous system, especially with how little we understand about it now. The best analogy I can think of is attempting to prove a theorem in physics and mathematics (the former is regarded as bad science; the scientific method is empirical). We make the rules in math, so we know when something agrees with those rules. New rules come from old ones, so everything remains intact. We don't make the rules of physics (or biology), and there's plenty we still don't know about those rules.
Hell is BT?
Shop as usual. And avoid panic buying.
Interesting post, but I had no idea that STOL meant Short Take-Off and Landing
He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015
In other news, cult followers believe that Armageddon is for 2012 and christians believe Jesus Christ will come back anytime soon.
I for one think that people who believe in the rise of Strong AI and in the technological singularity form a technology-themed cult, the reason for that is that you have no reason to believe that Strong AI will come anytime soon, since we're far from anything even remotely close to that. It's all more like wishful thinking I guess..
You just got troll'd!
He's not selling this stuff to engineers he's selling to marketing and they love this overblown fantastical kind of crap.
We are all just people.
"From my point of view the US is lost to the latinos, asians and other peoples - the only white nations left will be the original European ones."
You do realize how fluid the definition of "white" is over the decades, right? A century ago, most of Europe itself wasn't considered "white," especially the southern and eastern bits. When you get right down to it, the only reason Italians, Pols, or even the Irish are considered "white" nowadays is because their emigrants have made a name for themselves in "white" countries like the United States.
Immigrant-friendly "white" countries have taken in plenty of disparate newcomers, far removed from the populations they tried to integrate into, and instead of these countries ceasing to be considered "white" (as many xenophobic contemporaries have always feared), the definition of "white" has simply expanded.
Some time in the future, Ian Pearson is picked up hitchiking...
Ian Pearson: You heard of this thing, the 8 Dollar Computer?
Ted: Yeah, sure, 8 dollars. Yeah, the budget computer.
Ian Pearson: Yeah, this is going to blow that right out of the water. Listen to this: 7... Dollar... Computer.
Ted: Right. Yes. OK, all right. I see where you're going.
Ian Pearson: Think about it. You walk into a Walmart, you see an 8 Dollar Computer sittin' there, there's a 7 Dollar Computer right beside it. Which one are you gonna pick, man?
Ted: I would go for the 7.
Ian Pearson: Bingo, man, bingo. 7 dollar computer. And we guarantee just as good performance as the 8 Dollar folk.
Ted: You guarantee it? That's - how do you do that?
Ian Pearson: We've stripped out the 1 dollar Microsoft operating system and replaced it with Linux. But if you're not happy with the 7 Dollar Computer, we're gonna send you the OS free. You see? That's it. That's our motto. That's where we're comin' from. That's from "A" to "B".
Ted: That's good. Unless, of course, somebody comes up with 6 Dollar Computer. Then you're in trouble, huh?
Ian Pearson: No! No, no, not 6! I said 7. Nobody's comin' up with 6. What can you possibly get for 6 dollars? You'd have to ship with no peripherals, not even a mouse or a keyboard.
Ted: That - good point.
Ian Pearson: 7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 doors. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea. It's like you're dreamin' about Gorgonzola cheese when it's clearly Brie time, baby. Step into my office.
Ted: Why?
Ian Pearson: 'Cause you're fuckin' fired!
What's even worse, this concept has been tried, and it failed miserably.
/ EWD06xx/EWD667.html
_ computation
Uh-huh. Because if something is tried and fails once, that means it can never work, ever.
Clearly, between this, and the AI prediction, this guy is completely unaware of computing history. Only a fool would try to predict the future with no knowledge of the past.
Clearly?
Dijkstra dismissed the idea long ago. But of course, I'm sure this no-name doofus knows better! http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions
Dijkstra was one smart cookie, but there were things even he was wrong about. When you're talking about "what works in practice", I wouldn't hold up Dijkstra as the end-all-be-all.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_language_and
I'm familiar with those problems, and I still think it's possible (though maybe not in the proposed timescale). If those are the worst problems we can think of, we're in great shape.
For example, most of the problems listed there are some case of "well, NLs are ambiguous in case X". Yes, they are! At which point, if you were telling this to a computer, the computer would say "wait a minute, Dave, do you mean X or Y?". This is exactly what I do (I'm a programmer) when I'm given ambiguous specifications.
The idea of computers detecting this sort of thing is not new. Lotus Improv let you type in formulas, but it is (of course) possible to type in two formulas that conflict. Steve Jobs (yes, him!) got the developers to see that this is a great feature, not a drawback: the computer can ask you what you want.
Takes me back to the '64 World's Fair and the GM exhibit and my future home on the moon.
The problem is that he wants the magical force on his side:
The other side of AI says that "my brain is magic, and I'm really smart and you can't possibly produce a robot as clever as me". I don't subscribe to that one
Because, hey, no problemo:
Once computers start catching up with us in terms of over all intelligence, and start understanding things in the same way as we do
_He_ sees no problem because, hey, he's a magical positivist! The AI brain will just evolve like "magic". Why are these people saying the brain is magically complex? Heck, AI is magically self-creating! Put them in a playpen with some toys and before you know it they'll want you to take them out for hang gliding and a beer.
It's a little like saying "Once we cure cancer and aging people will wonder what all the fuss was about". Unless this dude's background in "science and engineering" includes a Ph.D. in cognitive science (and a second one in epistemology wouldn't hurt), why should we listen to his pie hole that artificial consciousness isn't a bitch to create with our current understanding?
AI is still a "squishy" area akin to alchemy in the public mind where you can pop off predictions like this. What futurist playing a physicist in print would have the balls to say we'll be harnessing unlimited energy from Zero Point Modules by 2015? But AI -- sky's the limit (tommorrow)!
"Futurology" is bunk. Asimov thought the internet would be in a single computer called "multivac" [...] Heinlein [...] Roddenberry [...]
Ah, right, futurology is bunk because FICTION WRITERS aren't being accurate about the future.
Guess what: fiction authors are not accurate when talking about the past, either. Does that make history bunk, too?
look for "A Timeline of the Future "
Posted by timothy on Sunday February 17, @06:52PM
... is because they are a bunch of isolated inbreds. Much like the author of the parent post. Cue the banjos ...
"One computer may be better than a hundred ordinary men but one extraordinary man is better than a million computers"
And we're no where near strong A.I. No one is seriously pursuing it anywhere cause it's impossible for a variety of reasons (the most obvious being it only works if consciousness is purely deterministic, which means humans have no free will). Instead, we now research more managable 'ai' problems like smart regression analysis (i.e. neural nets), artificial vision, expert systems, genetic algorithms, etc.
True, but they also didn't build an airplane by crafting a quadrillion randomly-shaped objects, throwing them all in the air, and seeing which ones succeeded.
The goal is not to mimic human intelligence. (That would be stupid and disastrous - the last thing anyone wants is a forgetful, sentimental, immature supercomputer that's vulnerable to Alzheimer's!) Rather, the goal is to design intelligence that is competitive with the best intelligence that we know: namely, ourselves. So it makes perfect sense to understand first why we excel - that's a critical part of this competitive design process.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Ian Pearson is definitely a proponent of strong AI -- along with, he estimates, 30%-40% of the AI community. He believes we will see the first computers as smart as people by 2015. As to smart yogurt -- linkable electronics in bacteria such as E. Coli -- he figures that means the end of security. "So how do you manage security in that sort of a world? I would say that there will not be any security from 2025 onwards."
I love proponents of AI. They increase my pool size of people I can call 'knobwits' and 'fucktards', without having to even meet them.
So, humans are intelligent enough to create something that will better out intelligence, but wait, don't we have to be more intelligent to do that? yes? if so, wouldn't that increase the requirements for the AI?
The logic is, can we create a superset of our intelligence. We can expend calories strike a match, and the match releases stored energy that is more than what we put into the reaction, but AI doesn't work like that. There is no bank of stored 'intelligence'.
There is NOTHING in AI that has come out that even discusses the issues of AI, and to prove it just sample the number of people who teach AI and:
a) are guys who wear scarves a little to often
b) women with sharp noses and no dress sense
c) people who reference 'popular fiction' in their lectures.
Compare these with a control group of monkeys and see which group eats their own feaces.
FTA: You've got a "smart yoghurt" by about 2025, and we did the calculations, and we reckon that it's possible to make a yoghurt with roughly the same processing power as the entire European population.
If the european population was as bright as this guy, then the yoghurt I have in the fridge that expired yesterday has already trounced us.
I for one welcome out thrush calming overlords
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I strongly believe that AI will never match HI (Human Intelligence). I think that man is far from actually understanding what human intelligence is all about, let alone creating AI that can match it. Sure, we have progressed and succeeded in creating systems or technologies that imitate some aspect(s) of HI to some extent but never HI per se. I think it's a challenge akin to creating 'life' itself. I suppose that's because human intelligence, as it were, is intimately connected with not only biology but the 'soul' or, well, the life-force within us. It's not just about neurons, synapses, circuits and logic gates...it's much much more than that. Well, there may not be much scientific basis for this, but then again, not everything that's real follows 'Science' as we know it.
You can be a Futurist. That's the acceptable term. Nobody studies the future. Yet. Maybe some Futurist will predict that someday there will be Futurologists, but so far the future cannot be studied, it can only be reasonably predicted.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
... I know. Still, I can't resist.
I'll apply with BT for that job. Not because I believe any of that stuff I'm reading, but I believe in the stuff that is up for a smoke in BT.
Finally! Someone said it. I'm no expert in AI, but I emphasized in it for my MS-CS. And from what I saw, 40 years of effort (at that time) amounted to various search techniques.
Computers are great at Chess. Chess has a small search space (compared to, say, Go, which computers suck at). Computers aren't any better at Backgammon because chance is involved.
How do you program instinct? Feel? Creativity? I don't think it's that we can't, I think it's that we have no idea how to. That's why I think the 'singularity' monster robot humanity killer is such a joke. At least on the timescale people are talking about.
But what do I know. Some well known smart guy said the world is going to end by 2050 because of killer robots, so it must be true!
"... is because they are a bunch of isolated inbreds. Much like the author of the parent post. Cue the banjos ..."
Because all/only rural people in the interior are xenophobic? Stereotype much? What makes yours better than the OP's?
All things considered, it seems that the most xenophobic are the ones that are only two or three generations removed from immigrants themselves, the first ones to truly feel (e. g.) "American," having coopted the definition to an extent.