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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
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
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.