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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.
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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.
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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.
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...
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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.
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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.
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 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)