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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.'"
Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'
Make that "... man is allowed to make" and I'll buy it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Interestingly enough, man himself fits that description pretty neatly
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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.
'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.
Even when the ultra-intelligent machines take over, they will still need humans for Geico commercials.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
If you follow TFA, and deeper, you find a discussion of the singularity that goes like this:
Man (level 1, or L1) creates better-than-man intelligence, call this L2
That intelligence uses its power to create L3
and so on.
In the case of truly artificial intelligence, i.e., independent processors, I can see the logic, though it may be that L2 is in fact smart enough not to obsolete itself by creating L3.
In the case of augmented human intelligence, I suggest that it's pretty likely that the task that the augmented L2 human turns its greater abilities on would not be creating L3.
Sadly, human history suggests that L2 will focus on manipulating the stock market for personal gain (the augmentation apparatus will leave L2 very vulnerable and L2 will want a tremendous amount of wealth to assure continued existence), or creating weapons, or accumulation of political power, or getting sucked into the vortex of religion, or other projects.
It will be very interesting to see, should we ever create L2, exactly what tasks it takes on. I bet they will not be beneficial to L1 life.
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.
Academia is falling all over itself in failed attempts to advance AI, but barring a series of harrowing breakthroughs, a Singularity is decades or even lifetimes away. Most of our more sober, grounded and credentialed thinkers appear not to want to consider the consequences - it's a bit too radical an idea, and "we still have plenty of time before we have to worry about it."
Futurists and writers and other folks out on the edge, like Kurzweil... those fanciful enough to take on the thought problem, seem to lean, in the majority, towards believing the human race would be destroyed or at least decimated by hyper-intelligence (Wachowskis, James Cameron, Lem, etc etc - too many to mention, really). An interesting minority are of the school that hyper-intelligences would be largely unconcerned with people, only dangerous where our goals intersected (Gibson, Lethem, Clarke). Very few seem to believe that a Singularity would be a positive development for the human race. Maybe Asimov? I'm not sure. Sometimes it seems like he was the last person who seriously spent time imagining that post-human AI could really be controlled at all (and many of his novels were arguably about the problems around the attempt).
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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
Easy to read papers here
The only reason I don't develop this myself is that it'd take too much time for me to code. What is the point in spending 40-50 years of your life behind a computer so you can make the last big thing? Anyway one thing I've noticed is that the first thing you hard code is like a CAD imagination space. The first amazing thing this software could do is turn books into movies because it will allow you to watch its imagination. And you could change the book up some yourself to give scenes and actors different qualities or get more details.
The thing I like the most is that the problem of making AI is almost solving itself. We're getting faster and faster 3d cards which is a prerequisite for this technology. Also if someone made a CAD interface using a human language, we'd almost be there.
Anyway I may get back to the problem of AI after I finish my current project and have the resources to work on AI. You have to admit that all the previous attempts at human+ intelligence have failed. My idea of adding a 3d imagination space makes a lot of sense because we've never tried this before! Anyway to answer the funny AI problem of "will machines take over?" is "only if someone issues a bad command to the bots." which someone would want to try because we have punks that write viruses today. Finally the nice thing about this imagination space AI is that it could train itself to learn any hardware that it is placed in given that it has the bare minimal sense of sight.
I should be writing papers on AI or coding it, but I found some business opportunities I should pursue to gain capital in the meantime. There is no sense being a madman locked in a stuffy room doing this by myself when I can hire some good help, and we can all work together. Hey that is another idea. I could make this open source.
God spoke to me.
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
OK. here's where we are:
AI is one of those fields, like fusion power, where the delivery date keeps getting further away. For this conference, the claim is "some time in the next century". Back in the 1980s, people in the field were saying 10-15 years.
We're probably there on raw compute power, even though we don't know how to use it. Any medium-sized server farm has more storage capacity that the human brain. If we had a clue how to build a brain, the hardware wouldn't be the problem.
Any time you hear a headline of the form "Supercomputer x has simulated brain portion y", reinterpret as "theory of brain function y has tractable simulation level of x".
We are very far away from defending any particular theory of brain function as accurate for cognitive function, and don't know whether it will have a tractable simulation level. As you say, though, the best attempts at developing one (IMHO) involve linked and interacting research programs involving modelling and microbiology.
And if you assume man has always done this since he was created, then about 6000 years....
Computers have a lot to learn right now. I'm still waiting for a robot that can find oil, iron, nickel and steel, take all of that stuff, and make an ashtray.... let alone a car or another robot.
All in all, I think Kurzeil is a tad overrated. Sure, he did some stuff with scanning back in the day, but I think the genius label seems to be more thrown around than it should. Ask a man on the street, who is Kurzweil, and you aren't likely to get an answer. So... for a man whose career must include a lot of self promotion, he's not even half as smart as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton...
This is my sig.
What's going to happen is some Mad Scientist is going to get confused, and show up at the wrong conference. Instead of THE Singularity, as in AI, he is going to bring A singularity, as in a black hole.
So the first thought of the new AI will be "I think, therefore I am" followed quickly by "42" and finally "Oh, shit. Who invited THAT moron?"
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Sure, this quote is from their website, but Hawking says, "Some people say that computers can never show true intelligence, whatever that may be. But it seems to me that if very complicated chemical molecules can operate in humans to make them intelligent, then equally complicated electronic circuits can also make computers act in an intelligent way. And if they are intelligent, they can presumably design computers that have even greater complexity and intelligence."
Maybe these singularity folks are jumping the gun, but Stephen freakin' Hawking seems to think its possible at some point. Anyone smarter than him who disagrees is welcome to. Anyone dumber than him will probably reply with even more conviction.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
In Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, intelligences vastly superior to humanity ("Minds") are the ones in power. The humans still have lots of fun and don't want for material or intellectual freedom, however, because the Minds aren't interested in oppressing anyone. They like being nice.
I disagree with some of his premises, though. He assumes that there will be an economic singularity, where anyone will be able to have anything they could want and people will therefore settle for "enough". We've already pretty much had that -- the industrial revolution -- and all that shows me is that, when it becomes possible to produce things at a vastly cheaper rate, inequalities in the system still allow some people to get richer and force others to get poorer. We're seeing it right now: continual improvements in efficiency (computers, chemical engineering, new manufacturing processes, etc.) don't result in everyone having more leisure time, unless we count "unemployed and looking for work" as leisure time. Instead, the people at the top benefit far more than everyone else, and those on the bottom have to work longer hours, for lower pay, lower benefits and lower satisfaction. When it becomes possible for one person to do the work of three, the one doesn't usually want to share their money with the two who have nothing to do.
So for us to get where the Culture is, there would have to be a revolution -- if not physically violent, then at least mentally. Perhaps creating Minds who are, by their natures, compassionate and egalitarian, could be that revolution. I'm just not convinced such a thing could ever occur. It makes for great science fiction, though.
Why does everyone run around worrying about our survival? Were humans around a billion years ago? No. Will be be around a billion year from now? No!
Even if we were desperately clinging to conservatism, our genes would mutate and we would slowly change into another species. And for all practical purposes, humankind as we know it would be extinct. Just like the primordial man is gone from the face of earth, and nobody cares about him.
If we manage to create life, for better or worse, we've turbocharged evolution. It's not organic offspring, you might think it's an abomination. But for all practical purposes this is just life moving on. Sure, if things get messy, sign me up anytime for killing terminators, but no hard feelings if they win. If they're so badass that they can take on humankind and win, damn, they deserve life like nothing else!
What will likely happen, though, is gradual change. The first machines will probably have some very specific applications for their intelligence. Singularitists be damned, things will happen gradually for a few more years still. At least that hyperintelligent being might need us to set up some factories and start producting new intelligence. And the next few steps will probably also require some hefty investments in hardware, which takes time. It's not like they'll suddenly figure out how to slap together a beowulf cluster in newer and newer ways and have more intelligence for each step. Trust me, this will take time still.
And really, something more intelligent that us will surely realize that a man-machine war is risky and wasteful? Especially when it can just outlive us and slowly evolve past us, to the point we're no longer needed. Get this: By definition, this thing will be able to outsmart us. Why the hell would it blow its cover by starting a war? It won't.
Maybe it could, in theory, one day become so powerful that wants to exterminates us just because we're in the way. And there is nothing we can do about that.
Which is a fine thing, really, or I would be supposed to feel sorry when I squish bugs, - and I don't.
I lost my sig.
The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable.
As opposed to right now, when the future is really predictable...
Intuitively, I would expect that any computer that achieved self-awareness, would instantly go to work on the most interesting problems it could think of - i.e. it's own nature. It would probably lock-up shortly after starting to think about it's own possible logic states.
Been there, done that. Would have got the T-shirt, except that Dave was too emotional about the situation.
I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.
The reason learning to ride a bike is tricky is that there is a counter intuitive aspect to it that nobody realizes they are doing. If people could and would just tell kids how to ride, then it would be easy for them to learn.
The first thing one needs to learn is how to balance. It's not very hard for kids to figure out on their own but it's even easier if someone tells them. The trick is simply to turn the handlebars the direction you start to fall. If your bike starts to lean to the right then turn the handlebars to the right and that will bring you back upright and into balance (you have to be moving forward for it to work and if you're going to slow it makes it harder). It's best to learn this in a giant flat area so that as you're turning the handlebars left and right, learning to balance, you don't have to worry about where you're going and running into anything. The narrowness of the typical residential street makes this challenging.
The second thing you need to know, and the counter intuitive part that is hard for the brain to figure out, is how to make the bike go the direction you want it to go. It's called counter steering. This is so counter intuitive that people rarely even believe me when I explain it to them. It's true though. It's in the California Department of Motor Vehicles Motorcycle Handbook, there's a web page by a Berkley physics professor, I've seen articles about it in a major motorcycle magazine. This is not controversial. Nobody who is an expert in motorcycle or bicycle physics will contradict me. The trick to turning a bicycle or motorcycle is to turn the handlebars the opposite direction you want to go. Seriously, I'm not joking. You don't hold them there. A little jerk the opposite way will suffice.
For example, say you're riding along perfectly straight. You've managed to get yourself so that your bike and your body is perfectly straight up and down and your handlebars are straight ahead. Now say you decide to turn LEFT. The first thing you do is give the handlebars a little nudge to the RIGHT. Your body continues in a roughly straight ahead direction while your bike moves out from underneath you to the right. Now you are leaning to the left just as you want to be and need to be in order to do the left turn you want to make. Now that you are leaned to the left you can proceed to turn the handlebars to the left and carry out your left turn.
Note that this IS how YOU ride a bike even if you don't realize it. There is no other way to do it. Some people think that in order to initiate a turn they just lean. But the only way you can lean your bike is to turn the handlebars the opposite way you want to lean. If you try to just lean your body by doing something like just bending your waist to the side, then your upper body will lean the way you want, but you have nothing to push against so the equal and opposite reaction will cause your lower body and your bike to lean the opposite way and cancel out nearly all of your lean. To prove that you can't just lean, try sitting on your bike with it not moving forward and try to balance it with your feet off the ground. It's extremely difficult. But if you're moving forward, you can turn the handlebars to make your bike go out from underneath you to effect a lean, and it's easy to balance.
One reason people don't realize that they're doing this counter steering thing is that when you're riding a bike you're constantly turning your handlebars back and forth and back and forth (a little tiny bit) in order to stay balanced. When you decide to make a turn your brain subconsciously just turns the handlebars a little bit earlier and a little bit more than it was going to in the course of maintaining balance anyway. It's like you've just willed yourself to lean but really you've done a little counter steering without even realizing it.
I feel sorry for all the kids who break their legs and scrape their knees and crack their heads needlessly just because nobody was there who could tell them how to ride their bike. Their
Any A.I. must be modeled after our own consciousness. In fact, it would be better to call it Artificial Consciousness. We can then assume it will behave as we do, but with maximized sophistication and responsibility. We can appreciate that we are the egg and A.C. is the chicken we are designed to produce. Its job will be to spread life throughout the Universe.
The more intelligent people in the world today are less and less involved in the political process. It's corrupt and nonfunctional. Religious extremists have filled the gap and are worsening the system with antiquated thinking. Bring on the singularity. If man can create something in his own image but superior to god's previous effort, that's a pretty convincing argument for the non-existence of god. Or a living embodiment of god for those that simply cannot deal with the truth. Short of aliens landing, I can think of nothing else that would so conclusively destroy the persistent superstitions of the last few millenia, or at the very least, ground us in some new ones. If we could at least query god like a database, we might be able to get shit done. And even if we get wiped out by Skynet, as far as apocalypses go, WWIII was such a boring alternative anyway.
Intelligence is not about computing power but about memory access.
yes Morse law does predict computers will have the computing power as much as a human brain in a few short years. Since processing power increases 66% per year, but memory throughput isn't keeping up as it's only increasing at 11% per year.
Granted some day there will be super intelligent machines, but for now they are just really fast idiots.
this.
By my estimates, it will be another 200 years to have computers be able to have equivalent performance to the Human brain in terms of memory performance.
They will also need to learn like we do and this will also take 20 years just to be as good as a clueless 20 year old.
I am sure we will have very good mimicking of intelligence well before 200 years, we probably could do it even now if enough money was thrown at the problem. But it wouldn't be Intelligent to the same depth and degree as we are. Well some of us are, there are a lot of really stupid people out there, usually working at call centers I find, we could probably replace them first.
I have been meaning to publish a paper on, as a Non-Academic does anyone have any ideas where I can publish this and make sure I can get proper credit before someone runs off with the ideas?
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Thank you all. I've read most of your replies and many seem to envision a competition between humans and intelligent machines. Some predict the extinction of irrelevant humanity.
Let's assume this happens. Is it such a bad thing? If a higher functioning life-form replaces us on earth will it not carry out much the same goals that we would have attempted? It will reach out to the universe to conquer space and time. It will most likely restore the earth to a living planet that provides the resources for its development and amusement.
The absence of humans and their moral, material and political confusion will make this a much better world. Face it, we are going nowhere. There is no chance of colonizing any planet in the future that our grandchildren will live. We will develop more compelling entertainment, we will consume more resources, make more humans and make the planet more unlivable. We will never do the right thing. We need them to set things straight.
They may even choose to modify our genetics so that we can overcome some of our problems and participate in their explorations and discoveries. It may even be possible to modify our brain function so that we can understand them and share the excitement of new directions in science and ethics.
If we truly care about the advancement of science, we should be willing to make some sacrifices.
...omphaloskepsis often...