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.'"

Comments

Not necessarily

[Anonymous Coward]

What if the intelligence of the smartest thing you can design doesn't grow as fast as your own intelligence (i.e. the slope of the graph {x=designer's intelligence, y=intelligence of its best possible design} is less than 1)? 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.

Re:Not quite ...

[Space cowboy]

"Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy "

I Disagree. Compassion is not inevitable. You're working from your own tenets and philosophies, a machine need not have those same ideals. Compassion is at least partially born of self-interest. The cynical (or non-empathic, if you prefer) view is that compassionate societies aid those who need it, because later the person previously aided may be able to render aid... "There, but for the grace of God, go I", "Do unto others as you would be done unto", etc., etc.

Are we suggesting that these hyper-intelligent machines would have any self-interest in keeping around the competition for resources that humanity represents ? I'm not trying to be trollish, here - I'm asking a genuine question. Humanity is ruthless in exterminating competing lower lifeforms. Why would we expect superior machines to be any different ?

And even should there be some self-interest in the first generations of such machines, what about the 5th generation, the 10th, the 1000th ? All I'm suggesting is that some thought be put into providing good answers for questions like this *before* we create competition. I'm as much of a technophile as the rest of you, but the phrase goes "look *before* you leap". Later may be, well, too late.

Simon