Slashdot Mirror
Artificial Intelligence at Human Level by 2029?
Gerard Boyers writes "Some members of the US National Academy of Engineering have predicted that Artificial Intelligence will reach the level of humans in around 20 years. Ray Kurzweil leads the charge: 'We will have both the hardware and the software to achieve human level artificial intelligence with the broad suppleness of human intelligence including our emotional intelligence by 2029. We're already a human machine civilization, we use our technology to expand our physical and mental horizons and this will be a further extension of that. We'll have intelligent nanobots go into our brains through the capillaries and interact directly with our biological neurons.' Mr Kurzweil is one of 18 influential thinkers, and a gentleman we've discussed previously. He was chosen to identify the great technological challenges facing humanity in the 21st century by the US National Academy of Engineering. The experts include Google founder Larry Page and genome pioneer Dr Craig Venter."
I mean it could happpen but this is so far from the current state of the art, I think we're talking 50-100 years forward in time. We have the brute powers of computers but nowhere near the sophistication in software or neural interfaces to do anything like this.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The farther out you make a projection, the less likely it is to be true. With this one in particular, I just don't see it being a focus of research. Yes we will have increase levels of intelligence in cars toasters and ball point pens, but the intelligence will be in a supporting role to make the devices more useful to us. There isn't a need for a human like intelligence inside a computer. We have enough ones inside human bodies.
Also, I will not be ingesting nano bots to interact with my neurons, I'll be injecting them into my enemies to disrupt their thinking. Or possibly just threatening to do so to extract large sums of money from various governmental organisations.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Artificial intelligence would be a nice tool to use to reach towards, or to use to understand ourselves... but rare is there a circumstance that demands, or is worth the risks involved with making a truly intelligent agent.
The real implication to me, is that it will be possible to have machines capable of running the same 'software' that runs in our own minds. To be able to 'back up' people's states and memories, and all the implications behind that.
Artificial intelligence is a nice goal to reach for - but it is nothing compared the the siren's call of memories being able to survive the traditional end of existence, cellular death.
Ryan Fenton
He obviously hasn't been paying attention to AI developments. The story of AI is largely a story of failure. There have been many dead ends and unfulfilled predictions. This will be another inaccurate prediction.
Computers can't even defeat humans at go, and go is a closed system. We are not twenty years away from a human level of machine intelligence. We may not even be *200 years* away from a human level of machine intelligence. The technology just isn't here yet. It's not even on the horizon. It's nonexistent.
We may break through the barrier someday, and I certainly believe the research is worthwhile, for what we have learned. Right now, however, computers are good in some areas and humans are good in others. We should spend more research dollars trying to find ways for humans and computers to efficiently work together.
If you had super powers, would you use them for good, or for awesome?
Yes, I remember well my youth, reading Goedel Escher Bach and Winograd, etc., thinking that the next scientific revolution was coming. Things never got any better than Eliza. Now as a hard scientist, I strongly feel that the problem is far far off.
(most) People can go out to get more education to advance from a menial job to a more skilled one when taken over by a robot but wtf do we do if the machines are as smart as we are? Who is going to hire any people to do even the most advanced thinking jobs when the machine that works for electricity 24/7 can do it? This kind of thing will bring on the luddite revolution in a hurry.
It's one thing to predict when a building project will be finished or when we'll reach a certain level of raw processing power because these things proceed by predictable means. But strong AI requires us to make theoretical advances. Theoretical advances don't proceed like a building project--someone has to have a clever idea, fully develop and understand it himself and convince others of it. And it won't occur to someone all at once, so we'll need incremental advances, all of which will happen unpredictably.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
And as a cognitive neuroscientist, I say he's off the mark entirely. As per Minsky, a fish swims under water; would you say a submarine swims?
What exactly is the "level of humans"? Passing the Turing test? (Fatally flawed because it's not double blind, btw.) Part of human intelligence includes affective input; are we to expect intelligence to be like human intelligence because it includes artificial emotions, or are we supposed to accept a new definition of intelligence without affective input? Surely they're not going to wave the "consciousness" flag. Well, Kurzweil might. Venter might follow that flag because he doesn't know better and he's as big a media hog as Kurzweil.
I think it's a silly pursuit. Why hobble a perfectly good computer by making it pretend to be something that runs on an entirely different basis? We should concentrate on making computers be the best computers and leave being human to the billions of us who do it without massive hardware.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
As an party "outside" the field but interested, I agree with all of you here so far, except that of course you disagree on timelines. :o)
"Artificial Intelligence" in the last few decades has been a model of failure. The greatest hope during that time, neural nets, have gone virtually nowhere. Yes, they are good at learning, but they have only been good at learning exactly what they are taught, and not at all at putting it all together. Until something like that can be achieved (a "meta-awareness" of the data), they will remain little more than automated libraries. And of course at this time we have no idea how to achieve that.
"Genetic algorithms" have enormous potential for solving problems. Just for example, recently a genetic algorithm improved on something that humans had not improved in over 40 years... the Quicksort algorithm. We now have an improved Quicksort that is only marginally larger in code size, but runs consistently faster on datasets that are appropriate for Quicksort in the first place.
But genetic algorithms are not intelligent, either. In fact, they are something of the opposite: they must be carefully designed for very specific purposes, require constant supervision, and achieve their results through the application of "brute force" (i.e., pure trial and error).
I will start believing that something like this will happen in the near future, only when I see something that actually impresses me in terms of some kind of autonomous intelligence... even a little bit. So far, no go. Even those devices that were touted as being "as intelligent as a cockroach" are not. If one actually were, I might be marginally impressed.
Predictions like this have been made in past, and not even come close. This one is no different.
The difference is that in 20 years we may have sufficiently powerful hardware that the software can be "dumb", that is, just simulating the entire physical brain.
The bottom line is that humans process some information in a non-representational way, while computers must operate representationally.
What prevents a computer from emulating this "non-representational" processing? Or is the human brain not subject to the laws of physics?
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
The Singularity is Near has a rebuttal of your first paragraph. Any sucessful part of AI research spins off into its own well-functioning discipline... optical character recognition, dictation software, text-to-speech, etc... they were sci-fi "AI" in 1980 and now they are working technologies. AI research is the umbrella under which only the unsolved problems still lie, and thus is always undone.
How many barn swallows can fly at 40,000 ft? Just what are you comparing?
this is not a sig
I predict that the Sun will become a white dwarf within 10,000,000,000 years. Predicting 10 billion years instead of 5 billion years actually makes it more likely to be true.
"Screw Sun, cross-platform will never work. Let's move on and steal the Java language." - Visual J++ Product Manager
Speaking as an engineer and a (~40-year) programmer:
Odds are extremely good for beyond human AI, given no restrictions on initial and early form factor. I say this because thus far, we've discovered nothing whatsoever that is non-reproducible about the brain's structure and function, all that has to happen here is for that trend to continue; and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.
Odds are downright terrible for "intelligent nanobots", we might have hardware that can do what a cell can do, that is, hunt for (possibly a series of) chemical cues and latch on to them, then deliver the payload -- perhaps repeatedly in the case of disease-fighting designs -- but putting intelligence into something on the nanoscale is a challenge of an entirely different sort that we have not even begun to move down the road on; if this is to be accomplished, the intelligence won't be "in" the nano bot, it'll be a telepresence for an external unit (and we're nowhere down *that* road, either -- nanoscale sensors and transceivers are the target, we're more at the level of Look, Martha, a GEAR! A Pseudo-Flagellum!)
The problem with hand-waving -- even when you're Ray Kurzweil, whom I respect enormously -- is that one wave out of many can include a technology that never develops, and your whole creation comes crashing down.
I love this discussion. :-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
At least not yet. I can't believe that the sort of bullshit that Ray Kurzweil keeps peddling gets taken so seriously.
There is a lot of talk about computers surpassing, or not surpassing, humans at various tasks - does it not bother anyone that computers don't actually posses any intelligence? By any definition of intelligence you'd like? Every problem that a computer can "solve" is in reality solved by a human using that computer as a tool. I feel like I'm losing my mind reading these discussions. Did I miss something? Has someone actually produced a sentient machine? You'd think I would have seen that in the papers!
What's the point of projecting that A will surpass B in X if the current level of X possessed by A is zero? There seems to be an underlying assumption that merely increasing the complexity of a computational device will somehow automatically produce intelligence. "If only we could wire together a billion Deep Blues," the argument seems to go "it would surpass human intelligence." By that logic, if computers are more complex than cars, does wiring together a billion cars produce a computer?
Repeat after me - The current state of the art in artificial intelligence research is: fuck all. We have not produced any artificial intelligence. We have not begun to approach the problems which would allow us to start on the road to producing artificial intelligence.
Before you can create something that surpasses human levels of intelligence, one would think you'd need to be able to precisely define and quantify human intelligence. Unless I missed something else fairly major, that has not been done by anyone yet.
sic transit gloria mundi
Most of us know jack about the algorithms that allow us to catch a baseball in flight, yet we can still do it. Furthermore, a person from 10000 BC with no math at all by today's standards could do it just as well as we can. Implementing solutions does not always require a complete understanding of what you've done. You can even be wrong and it'll still work for other reasons. So hard-pegging this to what we "know" could be a severe error.
That's a very bold statement, especially since (a) that's the way nature does it for all its intelligences, high and low, so we know the process works in the general case, and (b) as you say, we don't know many things yet, so claiming that we "know" what won't work seems to be disingenuous or at the very least not well thought out.
I think it is important not to conflate the fact that we don't understand something with the idea that it will be difficult once figured out or discovered as a consequence of some fortuitous sequence of events. That's been shown again and again not to be the case. It *may* be so, but it is by no means certain to be so, and for that matter, it isn't indicated by the complexity of the brain's hardware. The brain is considerably more formidable as a mass of immensely complex moderated connectivity than it is as a collection of cellular-level mystery machines, and a good deal of the complexity at the cellular level is almost certainly irrelevant to the task of thought -- keeping the cell alive is probably in no way related to non-pathological mental operation, yet there's a lot of hardware and systems involved in the task.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Speaking as someone with a PhD in AI, I'm very, very skeptical about having human-level AI by 2029.
Whatever definition of intelligence you choose, it probably includes learning and reasoning components. We have some effective learning algorithms, provided your domain is very specific and you have boat loads of training data. We have next to no good reasoning algorithms. Complete search is a dead duck and incomplete search is not very reliable. Worse, search algorithms get seriously confused when the data base is inconsistent (humans are good at maintaining several incompatible world models simultaneously). And that's all before you consider that we have no psychological models of human reasoning that are anywhere near being specific enough to guide an implementation project (please don't mention "Society of Mind"). Finally, there is precious little funding out there for this kind of research, which is a shame, but there you go.
And I work on AI and machine learning day in and day out. I'd put the goal post at 50 years, and that's an optimistic estimate. There are scant few research centers that do "general AI" research. Even fewer actually talk to neuroscientists, thus dismissing one viable (though extremely complex and costly) avenue of research. The fact remains, however, that at this point we don't have the required sophistication in any of the areas that presumably would be required to build a "thinking" machine. We can't process human language well enough (and therefore speech recognition and textual information sources are pretty much useless), we can't process visual information well enough either (segmentation, recognition, prediction, handling a continuous visual stream), we don't know the cognitive mechanisms below high level abstract reasoning, and even at a high level our abilities are weak (try to build a classifier that will recognize sarcasm, for example), finally even if we could do all that, we wouldn't be able to store the resulting data efficiently enough (in terms of required space and retrieval speed), because we have no idea how to do it.
That said, a lot of stuff can happen in 50 years, and I bet that once some of the major problems get solved, there will be an insane stream of money pouring into this field to accelerate the research. Just imagine the benefits an "omniscient" AI trader would bring to a bank. The question is, do we want this to happen? This will be far more disruptive a technology than anything you've ever seen.
No, you have missed my point. An algorithm or algorithms is certainly required, and I never meant to imply otherwise. Human understanding of said algorithm(s), however, is explicitly not required. And there are many paths that lead to such a situation. Whether one of those will take us to a form of AI remains to be seen, which is what I was saying.
It is one thing to understand the mechanism required for operation -- it is quite another to understand the state it is in. I think you are confusing the latter with the former; the former is relatively trivial, and the latter is not required any more than a complete understanding of the state of everything involved at NASA is required in order to create, launch and recover the space shuttle. Complex systems are holistic, mostly co-operative combinations of subsystems, and as long as someone, somewhere, understands (or understood at one time, or possessed an adequate analogy to, or approximation of) the subsystems, or even the subsystems that make up the subsystems, that's sufficient to develop a fully functional macro system. And -- most importantly -- it only has to be done once, because of the unusual copyable nature of the result.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Sure if you build in enough memory and processing power the bottle neck ends up being the designers, but it'll be a really long time before the hardware gets to the point where that's possible.Odds are extremely good for beyond human AI, given no restrictions on initial and early form factor. I say this because thus far, we've discovered nothing whatsoever that is non-reproducible about the brain's structure and function, all that has to happen here is for that trend to continue; and given that nowhere in nature, at any scale remotely similar to the range that includes particles, cells and animals, have we discovered anything that appears to follow an unknowable set of rules, the odds of finding anything like that in the brain, that is, something we can't simulate or emulate with 100% functional veracity, are just about zero.
At present hardware will crash if a few bits get in the wrong places or if they're stored incorrectly, one of the things about organic lifeforms is that our consciousness doesn't cease to exist if one of our neurons misfires, at worst we get a seizure or possibly a hallucination. Any machine that's going to surpass us would have to turn those wrong bits into something meaningful without human intervention. Even if they are just unexpected rather than outright wrong.
It may very well be that computer technology will solve that problem, but quite a bit of what we are comes from these random misfirings and unpredictable unreliable results. Modeling what humans are presently like, or even modeling what humans are like at the point when this becomes realistic is far easier than creating something that will outdo us by intellect.
I'm somewhat skeptical when you say that nothing a person's brain can do which cannot be modeled by software, when it comes to talking, moving building, following instructions and things of that nature, I see no reason why a machine couldn't be taught to do those things as well as we do. But when it comes to more subtle things, things which require creativity, sometimes things which require for a deliberate violation of typical common sense, I'm skeptical that a machine could be taught to do so.
I'm especially skeptical about that considering that we don't even know most of the things which the human brain does or how it does it. We know many things, and we know enough to greatly benefit ourselves, but there are still a fair number of things which we don't understand about the brain. It is not a simple organ to understand, just in the last 10 years the amount of information gained about it is sufficient for me to suggest that you shouldn't suggest that there isn't a part of the brain which cannot be simulated.
I really don't want to suggest that it is impossible for us to create something that surpasses our own selves, but doing so would require things which we haven't even dreamed up yet, teaching a computer AI to be capable of meaningful creativity isn't something which is yet even on the most distant horizon, none of the programming languages or tool kits that are available presently offer that sort of capability in anything which resembles a reasonable number of lines of code.
"The brain is considerably more formidable as a mass of immensely complex moderated connectivity than it is as a collection of cellular-level mystery machines, and a good deal of the complexity at the cellular level is almost certainly irrelevant to the task of thought -- keeping the cell alive is probably in no way related to non-pathological mental operation, yet there's a lot of hardware and systems involved in the task."
You (and most proponents of AI) have failed to answer any of the philosophical/metaphysical questions one inevitably becomes confronted with, by using the analogy of the brain as "software" and stating that the hardware is irrelevant. I suspect there are cellular-level mysteries yet to be discovered, including possibly quantum action at a low level, that would have a strong influence on the facts of the matter here. It is a rather simple-minded and arrogant "faith" that leads you to believe we have anywhere near a good understanding of how the brain works.
Any aircraft the size of a barn swallow.
Your question displays a lack of understanding. Not of biology, but of physics. Square cube law specifically. Aircraft don't corner as fast as small birds. the reason isn't any magic of biology, it's simple momentum.
The larger any object is, the more it weighs. Make it twice as big, it weighs eight times as much. packs eight times as much momentum. A large bird doesn't turn s fast as a small bird. Same is true of planes. Same is true of ships. A buss won't corner as fast as sports cars either.
A typical aircraft is 1000 times bigger than a swallow. It's a million times heavier. It packs a million times the momentum. It's not that the swallows design is better, or that there is some biological magic. It's just a question of size. It's true the other way too. A mosquito can turn a lot quicker than a barn swallow. Barn swallows catch mosquitoes because they can fly faster. Guess what, the aircraft you were so dismissive of can fly a lot faster than that barn swallow too. Visit a large airport. Swallows get killed by aircraft every day. They can't get out of the way in time. A barn swallow that was as large as a chicken would be ripped apart by the stresses if it were able to corner as fast as a real barn swallow. That's the real reason that chickens don't turn well in flight. (Yes, chickens can fly for short distances.) Momentum.
Your problem appears to be that you just don't understand scale. It is a wonderful thing when you do. You see reasons all around us, for all kinds of things.
So, yes, we should study biology. But, we should also remember the physics. The tricks the mosquito uses just won't work for a passenger jet. Nor will the barn swallows turns be good for the passengers on that jumbo jet. Still, some things will be useful. We just don't know what. Who would have thought that studying a sharks skin would help racing yachts. Personally, I hope that we get a lot of surprises. That's where the fun in science is.
I don't expect AI research to give us human type intelligence in a machine. Ever. That doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We don't know what we will get, or what it will make possible. We can't know before the fact. Studying birds didn't give us aircraft that can corner in a second or two, it did give us jumbo jets that can take us half way around the world in an easy chair. That took a lot of other things too.
The Wright brothers succeeded where Lilenthal failed. Not because they understood birds better, but because in the meantime the internal combustion engine was developed. AI will be the same. Right now, we don't even know what we need in order to make this work. There will be surprises.
Everybody knows 3 people with my name.
That is incorrect. Language is the ability to communicate feelings, goals, results. It is not "speech." Some birds do indeed have the capability of speech, that is, they can make the same sounds we can, closely enough as to make no difference. Apes, however, have demonstrated actual communications using symbols, and even dogs have recently been found to have a consistent, though very small, vocabulary. Elephants and other animals have demonstrated the ability to think in the abstract (the "recognize one's self in the mirror and operate on the information thus provided experiments.) Lemurs use calls to communicate safety and status. Don't confuse the lack of vocal apparatus with an inability to communicate. They're not the same thing at all.
As for the rest, I think you've got it, essentially, but we disagree on scales. We'll see.
Er... no.
Language is much more than that: it is a system of symbols that can even be used to describe any other symbolic system, and which can be extended at need and at will; animal communication shows little or no indication of that.
Nobody in their reight mind would deny that animals can communicate, and even that they can communicate very well.
However, that alone does not make them capable of using a language.
The cognitive leap a simple verbing of a noun requires is beyond any other animal.
Ignore this signature. By order.