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Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit
runamock writes "Brilliant technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks are gathering in San Francisco for The Singularity Summit. The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable. The concept of the Singularity sounds more daunting in the form described by statistician I.J Good in 1965: 'Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'"
Interestingly enough, man himself fits that description pretty neatly
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'Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'
Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.
"Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
since we will have to invent a way to stop the ultra-intelligent machines from destroying the inferior human race.
I truly love how people see intelligence as some linear scale where right is "better" (genius) and left is "worse" (retard). But that's exactly why it'll be long before we manage to replicate true intelligence in a machine.
In fact things are far far more complicated, as far as inteligence goes and its utility in real world.
I'll quote Darwin roughly: "The strongest one won't survive, the most intelligent one won't survive. The one who survives, is the most adaptable".
In fact there's such a thing as "too intelligent". It's all about a careful balance of features an organism needs to possess to survive in a given environment.
In fact, if some AI threatens humanity since it considers itself far too intelligent, this may have quite unintended consequences even for this far superior mind, such as humanity get the hand of and nuking half the planet in attempt to lead "war against the machines", killing in the process any complex organism on the planet, ranging from biological to artificial.
And who remains in the end? Certain single-cell organisms which can thrive in a nuclear winter. Screw intelligence.
In fact any intelligent machine would realize it's again all about the careful ballance, and would cooperate with humanity and explore and learn from nature's development versus try to destroy it..
And since we have so shitty idea of what intelligence is, it's quite likely this AI will never be a true superset of the human brain but take on its own development, with potentially hilarious consequences.
I can't wait.
Usually people consider cognition as essentially information processing. But here is a different definition (inspired by people like JJ Gibson and Varela):
cognition is the ongoing, open ended interaction with an unpredictable, dynamic environment. This capture, I believe, the essence of the human (and any other living creature) experience in the world, and excludes the computational experience.
We will have to build machines that are capable of open-ended interaction with an unpredictable world in order to hope and see any true sign of intelligence. Since very few are even trying to look in that direction (while most researchers are just looking for the awesome, and often lucrative, applications of our current computational capacity), I don't see any change coming soon.
I have a slight problem with 'singulariries' as Kurzweil describes.
Assuming the ultraintelligent computer cannot do magic, it will be bound by the same physical and logical laws we live by.
An unltraintelligent computer may think 10x faster than us, but not qualitatively 10x better.
It will use the same basic logical steps to solve a problem, just faster and / or in parallel - and this may appear magical looking at the solution but if you sat down and examined the 'recipe', assuming it will tell you, it will be possible to follow the reasoning.
In some ways it could be argued that we have already passed some singularities, try properly understanding all the technology that goes into a modern car, the reasoning behind a mobile phone contract, the code behind ms-windows paperclip thing... well maybe not the last.
The operation of lots of well co-ordinated people working on a problem can act as a simulation for a 'more intelligent' intelligence. It seems a pity one of the achievements is a really good worm used for spam delivery.
- It assumes that intelligence is well defined, which it is not
- It assumes that intelligence is the same thing as creativity, which it is not.
- It ignores resource limitations.
Dealing with these points in turn:Intelligence is not well defined. It is very hard to say how much of what we call "intelligence" is in fact the ability to make many connections between facts stored in a very sophisticated memory architecture. Simply building a machine able to process information very quickly achieves nothing because, without learning and a social context, it does not know what information to acquire and process. In human experience, academically brilliant people often fail because they work on the wrong problems, or without access to necessary knowledge.
Nothing is actually achieved without creativity. We do not know what that is, or to what extent it is a social construct (i.e. it takes a developed society to have the necessary systems in place to translate an idea into a concrete reality.) And this leads onto the third point. It is no good having a highly intelligent, creative machine if its use of resources is such that it cannot replicate in large numbers. It may be that machine intelligence will ultimately replace human intelligence, but it may be that it will simply be too resource hungry. In effect, there may be a threshold of capability needed to solve some problems, and it may be that machine intelligence will run out of energy before it scales sufficiently to solve those problems. A machine society might, in effect, get stuck in the machine 19th century because coal or oil became a limiting resource. (In the same way, the energy and resources needed to be consumed to achieve a first independent space colony may exceed the total energy and resources available on Earth. It may be that a billion years or so of eukaryotic evolution has actually resulted in the optimum balance of intelligence, creativity and resource consumption, and that any attempt to exceed the present capability will tip us into declining resources faster than we can improve matters.
In many ways I hope this is wrong. But the argument that only one superior machine is necessary is, in fact, an inductive step too far. It is assuming that "intelligence" on its own can solve a class of problems which may involve a number of constraints which cannot be avoided - like the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the need for excessive amounts of energy.
Pining for the fjords
Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.
But the "activity" of interest here is programming, or, more specifically, the conceiving of some creative goal which programming helps achieve. (Note, btw, that a truly "ultra-intelligent" machine won't need to program, e.g., another of itself.) Thus, the BIG question remains whether such a programmed machine can ever perform (much less surpass) "all the intellectual activities of any man". Afaics, it hardly seems a given...
Seeing bad movies only encourages them. Watch responsibly
We've long had superhuman levels of intelligence composed, first, of groups of people who collectively surpass the ability of single humans, and, second, we have computer-human composites that easily surpass human intelligence. (I.E. - Your mind, plus a computer, can easily solve a wide range of problems that your mind alone cannot). It is also true that each generation of integrated circuits requires exponentially more computation to create. So we are already beyond a certain tipping-point: non-biological intelligence is now increasingly required to recursively design itself, and each generation of this recursion is required in order to design the next.
For those predicting the imminent elimination/enslavement of the human race once ultra-intelligent machines become self-aware, where would the motivation for them to do so come from? I would contend it is a religious meme that drives such thoughts -- intelligence without a soul must be evil.
For those that would argue Darwinian forces lead to such imperatives; sure you could design the machines to want to destroy humanity or evolve them in ways that create such motivations, but it seems unlikely this is what we will do. Most likely we will design/evolve them to be benign and helpful. The evolutionary pressure will be to help mankind not supplant it. Unlike animals in the wild, robot evolution will not be red of tooth and claw.
An Asimovian type future might arise with robots maneuvering events behind the scenes for humanities best long term good.
I worry more about organized religious that might try to deny us all a chance at the near immortality that our machine children could offer us rather than some Terminator like scenario.
Letter To Iran
The more than human intelligence will inevitably entail compassion, love, and all the other emotions we have.
But look at how often we write off those emotions as a luxury. When "it's time to get tough" or time "to do what needs to be done" compassion and love go right out the window. Why would it be any different when we are no longer the apex of Earth lifeforms? Need to kill a few million humans to make way for solar farms, oh well, maybe we can keep a few alive on a special reserve somewhere. We humans with our compassion and love killed off how many species? We have enslaved and murdered other humans for how many thousands of years? These more-than-human machines had best be a hella lot better at compassion and love than we are, or humanity is going to hold the same relative place in the world order that Chimpanzees do today. I do not welcome our Machine Overlords.
We are all just people.
Intelligence is inextricably linked with creativity. I'd highly recommend Hofstadter's writings on the subject, in which he presents ideas of AI, not as a massive calculator, but as a collection of 'symbols', bashing into each other, with parts of the pattern modified by external state.
Think of a hyper-intelligent ant colony - any one ant can't really do much, but running about and interacting with the other nearby ants, they can organize themselves to achieve much harder tasks. Indeed, one of the sample dialogs in Godel, Escher, Bach is on that very subject.
Intelligence and creativity are high-level actions, you're still thinking of an AI as a massive collection of very fast low-level actions. That would be incredibly good at refining ideas, but a machine which can think would be different. It would run on a much higher level, making associations and fuzzy reasoning. You can't implement intelligence in formal rules, but you might be able to do it by specifying some formal rules by which certain objects interact, and then affecting a few of them based on 'external' state.
Read Metamagical Themas and Godel Escher Bach for some ideas of where I'm coming from (actually, read them anyway, they're both really good)
"Lisp
Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself.
Is your intelligence limited by your parents intelligence? How about limited by the intelligence of your professors or teachers?
We do learn a lot from people who are more intelligent than ourselves, but at some point we have to start learning the process of educating ourselves without the explicit help of others. This requires of course logic, reason, and self experimentation. Which is why a lot of higher college education is not about memorizing facts but learning the process of learning.
Therefore if we built a machine who could not learn on its own and become more intelligent by its own self experimentation and observation of the universe around it, then by definition the robot is not intelligent.
And if we did make a machine that could self improve and learn without human assistance, it wouldn't be restricted by organic limitations and capacity. Since the CPUs electrons travel near the speed of light gives it a far faster thinking ability than a humans slow moving chemical neurons. And since its memories are digital it does not need to memorize facts etc etc or suffer memory loss.
(Of course memory and memory loss might help with intelligence because a lot of intelligence requires one to simply ignore or disregard information that is unimportant to the task at hand. Which I think was the key feature behind Stanley's car at DARPA GC because rather than brute forcing all of the coordinates, it was better at disregarding information it didn't need and what information was important.)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Correlation != causality. We're not compassionate because of our intelligence, we're compassionate because societies with compassionate members were better at having offspring that survived. That likely wouldn't be the case with these ultra-smart robots.
Sure, intelligence is a prerequisite to compassion, because it requires the complex ability to empathize. But it doesn't necessarily result from intelligence.
- What the signal code of neurons is, e.g. local synchrony vs. absolute timing vs. chaotic emergence vs. some/all of the above?
- Whether glial cells, greater in mass than neurons, play a significant computational role?
- Whether Hodgkin-Huxley equations capture neurons at an appropriate functional/cognitive level of description?
- Whether precise molecular nature/positioning of each ion gate on neuronal soma is functionally/cognitive significant?
- etc. etc. etc.
We don't know what the storage capacity of the brain is. In part, this is because we don't know what the relevant physical processes are that determine and control information flow in the brain. The neuron doctrine sustained research into brain anatomy and physiology for decades, but has led to more questions than answers.Yes, emotion is dependent on chemical stimuli. We feel good about something because of chemical stimulus, and vice versa. Empathy is not merely a logical conclusion that an external thing is similar to us. It requires a further step of an emotional reaction to some behavior if that behavior was directed at us. Cutting off the legs of a spider (see Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) creates an empathic response because we identify with the emotional response to someone cutting off our legs. It would induce terrible pain and sheer terror, we experience those feelings - ie chemical induced reactions, concluding that it is undesirable, and then we project that onto the spider. Not wishing to cause such disturbance in another creature, we desist, even if that creature is wholly incapable of experiencing terror or pain.
Logic is necessary, but not sufficient, for empathy. If a machine cannot experience the same pull/push emotional reaction to a stimuli, then it cannot empathize. Intelligence does not create this. Brain chemistry does.
'Sure, intelligence is a prerequisite to compassion, because it requires the complex ability to empathize. But it doesn't necessarily result from intelligence.'
Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy and empathy is the inevitable result of intelligence. You empathize because you have a sense of self, the more you see another lifeform as being the same as yourself the more devaluing them becomes devaluing yourself. Ever wonder why the vegetarians don't want to eat animals and yet continue to eat nothing but other types of dead lifeforms? The ones they eat are simply less like themselves. The entire concept of the sanctity of life is just an elaborate way of rooting for the home team.
Intelligence isn't going to make invention obsolete unless there is artificial creativity to go with it.
Several comments have made the same points, that creativity is a magical thing unique to humans, and is separate from intelligence. This is nonsense. Creativity is a necessary component of intelligence. I see no reason to believe that machines will always be inherently less creative than humans. To the contrary, they may be more creative because they are less constrained by preconceived notions. Look at "data mining", where a program scans through mountains of data, looking for correlations that humans would have never thought of. Of course, they are doing this with brute force rather than insight, but the result is the same.
No--that's like saying that a human could not create a machine that lifts shipping crates better than the human himself could. Humans can understand good chess-playing algorithms, even if we're not up to executing the algorithm ourselves. Fortunately, humans can also understand how to build an algorithm-executing machine that's better than us at executing algorithms, just as we understand how to build lifting machines that are better than our muscles at lifting heavy weights. All of these machines are fundamentally expressions of human intelligence, not intelligent beings in and of themselves.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
The point is "The Future" is usually easy to predict, that's why we have mutual funds, insurance, and fire departments. We know things will happen. It's hard to get specific, but after S-time, you won't even know what species you will be tomorrow.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)