Slashdot Mirror
Douglas Hofstadter Looks At the Future
An anonymous reader writes with a link to this "detailed and fascinating interview with Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel Escher Bach fame) about his latest book, science fiction, Kurzweil's singularity and more ... Apparently this leading cognitive researcher wouldn't want to live in a world with AI, since 'Such a world would be too alien for me. I prefer living in a world where computers are still very very stupid.' He also wouldn't want to be around if Kurzweil's ideas come to pass, since he thinks 'it certainly would spell the end of human life.'"
Is it just me or does the Singularity smack of dumb extrapolation to me? "Progress is accelerating by X, ergo it will always accelerate by X".
I mean, if I ordered a burrito yesterday, and my neighbor ordered one today, and his two friends ordered one the next day, does that mean in 40 more days, all one trillion people on earth will have had one?
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Perhaps Hofstadter has no need for AI or robots, but I would love to see robots reach our level of thinking while I'm living. Work on AI shows us how we think and that is very fascinating. The rise of the robots will be *the* big event in our lives.
DNA is the ultimate spaghetti code.
For Kurzweil to buckle under the amount of vitamins he's taking. That'll teach him for taking the future seriously.
The discussion of souls, should shards, etc. was not what I expected but I enjoyed this material anyway, and I enjoyed the entire book.
I like and more or less agree with Hofstadter's general take on AI also: I have been very interested in AI since the mid-1970s when I read "Mind Inside Matter", but I also appreciate the spiritual side of human life and I still look at human consciousness as a mystery although attending one of the "human consciousness and quantum mechanics" conferences sort of has me thinking that quantum effects may be part of the mystery.
I personally believe that AI will never happen with us humans at our current level of intelligence.
To build a machine that is intelligent, we need to understand how our own intelligence works. If our intelligence was simple enough to understand and decipher, we humans would be too simple to understand it or decipher it.
Ergo, we humans will never ever build a machine that is intelligent. We can build a machine that will simulate intelligence, but never actually make it intelligent.
I agree with Douglas, I expect I would be uncomfortably unfamiliar in a world shared with AI beings. Then again, based on my understanding of Kurzweil's Singularity, it's unlikely to affect me much: I plan to live out my life in meatspace, where things will go on much as before.
...And pollution and loss of habitat, but through all that, they still live amphibian lives.
(Also according to my understanding of Kurzweil's projections,) It's worth noting however, that for those willing to make the leap, much of the real growth and advancement will occur in Matrix-space. It's an excellent way to keep "growing" in power and complexity without using more energy that can be supplied by the material world.
Here's my analogy explaining this apparent paradox: Amphibians are less "advanced" than mammals, but still live their lives as they always have, though they are now food for not only their traditional predators but mammals too.
In fact, I can't help but wonder how many of us will even recognize when the first AI has arrived as a living being. Stretching the frog analogy probably too far: What is a frog's experience of a superior life form? I am guessing "not-frog". So I am guessing that my experience of an advanced AI life-form is "whatever it does, it/they does it bloody fast, massively parallel, and very very interesting...". Being in virtual space though, AI "beings" are likely only to be of passing interest to those who remain stuck in a material world, at least initially.
Another analogical question: Other than reading about the revolution in newspapers of the day, how many Europeans *really experienced* any change in their lives during the 10 years before or the 10 years after the American revolution? We know that eventually, arrival of the U.S. as a nation caused great differences in the shape of the international world, but life for most people went on afterward about the same as before. The real action was taking place on the boundary, not in the places left behind.
(Slightly off topic: This is why I think derivatives of Second Life type virtual worlds will totally *explode* in popularity: They let people get together without expending lots of jet fuel. I believe virtual world technology IS the "flying car" that was the subject of so many World's Fair Exhibits during the last century.)
Hofstadter, for one, does _not_ welcome our new AI overlords.
. . . at about the same time as we get . . . um, excuse me, doorbell . . .
. . . oh, shit, a UPS guy in a flying truck just delivered a jet belt and a robot ma[USER STEFANJ UNDERGOING UPGRADE]
In the impending robot wars, this guy will be hailed as a champion of humanity. Or just be the guy who said "I told ya so!".
Obligatory xkcd plug.
The game.
I watch TV, I know what's going on, and quit trying to fool us! Forget whatever Douglas Hofstadter says, the future is now!
Actually, even if it kept accelerating, singularities (as some fancy world for when you divide by zero, or otherwise your model breaks down) so far never created some utopia.
The last one we had was the Great Depression. The irony of it was that it was the mother of all crises of _overproduction_. Humanity, or at least the West, was finally at the point where we could produce far more than anyone needed.
So much that the old-style laissez-faire free-market-automatically-fixes-everything capitalism model pretty much just broke down. There just was no solution to how much a country should produce. Hence my calling it a singularity.
By any kind of optimistic logic, it should have been the land of milk and honey. It was actually _the_ greatest economic collapse in known history, and produced very much misery and poverty.
And the funny thing is, the result was... well, that we learned to tweak the old model and produce less. We still go to work daily, and a lot of companies still want overtime, and a whole bunch of people still are dirt-poor. We just divert more and more of that work into marketing, services and government spending. It's a better life than the downwards spiral of the 19'th century, no doubt. But basically no miracle has happened, and no utopia has resulted. The improvement for the average citizen was incremental, not some revolution.
That was actually one of the least destructive "singularities". Previous ones produced stuff like, for example, the two world wars, as the death throes of old-style colonialism. When the model based on just keeping expanding into new territories and markets reached the end, we just went at each other's throats instead. A somewhat similar "singularity" arguably helped the Roman Empire collapse, and ushered in a collapse of trade and return to barbarism. The death throes of feudalism created a very bloody wave of revolutions.
All the way back to the border between Bronze Age and Iron Age in Europe, where... well, we don't know exactly what happened there, but whole civilizations were displaced or enslaved, whole cities were razed, and Europe-wide trade just collapsed. Ancient Greece for example, although most people just think of it as a continuous "Greece", had a collapse of the Mycenaean civilization and Achaean language it had before, and after some 300 years of the Greek Dark Ages, suddenly almost everyone there speaks Dorian instead. The Greeks and Greek language of Homer, are not the same as those of Pericles. (An Achaean League was formed much later, but apparently had not much to do with the original Achaeans.) And, look, they displaced the Ionians too in their way.
We recovered after each of them, no doubt, but basically the key word is: recovered. It never created some utopian/transcendence golden age.
So, well, _if_ our technology model ends up dividing by zero, I'd expect the same to happen. There'll be much misery and pain, we'll _probably_ recover after a while, and life will go on.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
For anything to understand and identify what constitutes a human life and what would threaten it requires a level of sophistication equivalent to that of a human. The three laws are a fairy tale and can't be encoded. To be able to discern the general shape of such a creature, Apes would fit the category as well. However there is more forms for intelligence besides human on this planet. Consider the various other members of the animal kingdom. Lack of verbal skills do not mean they are simply flesh machines. The likely early models for AI would be drawn from the modeling of animals and their behaviors.
I am going to point to a few books and leave it at that.
the Matrix/Animatrix cycle
Dune (look into the back story on why they didn't like thinking machines)
Blood, the last vampire (night of the beasts) by Mamoru Oshii (of Ghost in the Shell fame) and Ghost in the Shell as well.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
There's an optimist for you... 6.6+ billion humans and he can name but a dozen he admires (less than 0.0000002% of the population, all of whom are dead by the way) and then draws the conclusion that humanity as a whole is worthy of deep admiration.
I would argue that is not a very scientifically accurate conclusion based on the evidence available.I will never live for sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.
Old people often see new things as being unnatural and weird.
I don't think that a transhuman intelligence would spell the end of humanity any more than humanity spelled the end of mammals. In fact, in my own crystal ball, I don't see super machines that are smarter than we are so much as super mind-machine networks (matrix style) in which genuine consciousness is provided by jacked-in human brains (jointly forming a metabrain). We will be cells in its body, and can expect to be treated as such.
Personally, I can't wait.
Second that! How is secure text == to DRM? Weird. Oh, here's my ob. on-topic blob:
I once looked at the future, but it was so bright that I had to put on shades.
This is the NSA, we're gonna geet U h@x0r5! Also, what is a h@x0r5?
We're charging our battery
And now we're full of energy
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots
We're functioning automatic
And we are dancing mechanic
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots
We are the robots
Ja tvoi sluga, (I'm your slave)
ja tvoi Rabotnik (I'm your worker.)
we are programmed just to do
anything you want us to
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots
we're functioning automatic
and we are dancing mechanic
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots
we are the robots
Ja tvoi sluga, (I'm your slave)
ja tvoi Rabotnik (I'm your worker.)
Ja tvoi sluga, (I'm your slave)
ja tvoi Rabotnik (I'm your worker.)
[repeat to fade]
We are the robots
Anti-Globalism, Traditionalism, and FreeBSD.
The future you're looking at is one of ever decreasing living of standard to the point of having to hungry in tents,
a vast increase in mortality across due to malnutrition and vitamin C deficiency, an even greater drop in male
fertility as water supplies are tainted by even more artifical estrogens. Expect a lot of wars, epidemics, forced
innoculations, radioactive material releases and be prepared to have your jaw broken with a steel rod because you couldn't
produce identification fast enough for the officer or because you have been hoarding food or Mother Gaia forbid(!)
hunting rats.
Here's your future, punk moron, and it is one YOU RICHLY DESERVE for sitting on your ass and watching TV.
.
Cognitive science is something many AI people don't consider. What makes up the human mind? Are emotions really needed? I've recently started a blog dealing with these sorts of things that a few of you may find interesting. http://www.eatheists.com/2008/05/the-challenge-of-mind-duplication-and-transfer/
Believe me, if I started murdering people, there would be none of you left.
From the sucking article: [quote]"Do I still believe it will happen someday? I can't say for sure, but I suppose it will eventually, yes. I wouldn't want to be around then, though."[/quote] I am sorry for saying, but based on your own affirmation, then I hope you die soon enough, because I want to be here when FULL AI happens. And come on, you clearly are not even close to be an expert on this domain, so please shut up.
I am far more interested in digitally enhancing human bodies and brains than creating a new AI species.
Consider this: throughout the eons of natural and sexual selection, we've evolved from fish to lizards, to mammals, to apes, and eventually to modern humans. With each evolutionary step, we have added another layer to our brain, making it more and more powerful, sophisticated and most importantly, more self-aware, more conscious.
But once our brains reached the critical capacity that allows abstract thought and language, we've stepped out of nature's evolutionary game and started improving ourselves through technology: weapons to make us better killers, letters to improve our memory, mathematics and logic to improve our reasoning, science to go beyond our intuitions. Digital technology, of course, has further accelerated the process.
And now, without even realizing it, we are merging our consciousness with technology and are building the next layer in our brain. The more integrated and seamless communication between our brains and machines will become, the closer we get to the next stage in human evolution.
Unfortunately, there is a troubling philosophical nuance that may bother some of us: how do you think our primitive reptilian brain feels about having a frontal lobe stuck to it, controlling its actions for reasons too sophisticated for it to ever understand? Will it be satisfying for us to be to our digital brain as our primitive urges and hungers are to us?
I think it'd be very difficult to simulate a mind like Einstein's, but to simulate your average person seems like it'd be do-able. You forget that most people are actually pretty stupid. They have very simplistic rules in their mind and their end goal is really just to make money. Creating a system that would simulate a dumb person doesn't seem like it'd be that difficult to do. Insert probabilities of things occuring into the system, start off with "I don't know anything", and then let it build it's knowledge itself. I graduated with a degree in Cognitive Science w/ an emphasis in computer science from Berkeley, so it's essentially Artificial Intelligence. Dumb people would not be hard to mimic. The hard part comes in recognition of the real world by the computer
To say that the advent of powerful AI will spell the end of human life is to misunderstand humanity.
Humanity is an evolving entity, not a static and stagnant one. It has been evolving beyond its mere animal origins for a long time now, and the rate of change is increasing exponentially in step with our mastery of technology. In fact, through our intelligence, we have taken control of evolution away from nature (a very haphazard director at best), and are beating a path towards a very engineered and steadily improving future humanity. It's a continuous process, and it continually redefines humanity through tiny improvements which are often seen as mere remedial changes, such as vitamins and denture correction.
This isn't going to stop, and the machinery of the brain is no exception to this. Yes it's complex, but so is everything else. We're not put off by complexity. In fact, it's a strong driving force for study and mastery, a challenge for our technological capability. While I understand that some people have a natural preference for the things and ways of the past, some of us look forward very optimistically to a future humanity that would be unrecognizable today, a humanity that is physically more robust and capable, mentally expanded through integration with computing machinery, more logical, and far less driven by animal instincts, delusion and hysteria.
It might be valid to claim that technology spelled the end of the 1st phase of human life, perhaps, but that happened a long time ago now, whichever way you measure it. We're nothing like the initial homo sapiens that nature conjured up. And good riddance too. The fleas were probably annoying.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Hugh Tracey, who traveled Africa extensively in the mid-Twentieth Century recording it's indigenous musicians, once recorded an obscure thumb-piano player who, upon hearing his music played back (his first exposure to such technology), exclaimed: "I can die now, it does not matter, because I am inside that (record) now". That to me is Hofstadter's idea of "soul-shards" to a tee.
It seems somewhat tragic to me that, in the West, it takes someone of Hofstadter's intellectual stature to realize and put across an idea that is as natural as the air we breathe to people in cultures that we regard as hopelessly backward.
If (when?) AI exceeds human intellect, it seems to me that there are two possible outcomes. If they are amoral intelligences, what's to stop them from deciding that human life is detrimental to earth's biodiversity and climate (remember V'ger's "carbon infestation" diagnosis?), and in the worst case scenario, exterminating the bulk of humanity and keeping a few specimens in some sort of reservation for posterity's sake?
If on the other hand, they do have a well-developed sense of morality (by human standards), then they will make sure that they have absolutely no contact with us. Anyone remember the video from a few weeks ago of that tribe in Peru shaking spears and shooting arrows at the helicopter flying over their territory? Even we humans consider contact with groups at a much lower level of development detrimental to that group, hence the efforts to preserve the territories of the estimated 100 Stone Age tribes worldwide, and limit or prohibit contact with them. Wouldn't AI consider contact with a group at such a low level of development (humans) to be potentially devastating to humans, and that no contact whatsoever would be in our best interests? Any anthropologists out there care to comment?
It was caused by a shortage of money. The Fed tightened, causing a deflationary collapse. Without a certain critical mass of money, the economy will not function. The speculative excesses of the 20's were caused by a loose monetary policy that was then whipsawed to an overly tight policy. Ironically, the entity responsible for these actions, the Fed, was supposedly created to "smooth over" business cycles, not exacerbate them.
This topic seems to make the nerdy and the not-so nerdy alike, a little crazy. Let's see if we can't illuminate this conversation just a wee bit? Eh!
being killed by a super-intelligent robot, if I had some hand in creating it? Think how awesome that would be - you build something intelligent enough to not only not need you anymore, but that also determines the world is actually better off without you. Maybe it's just because I figure, if I helped create it, I'd be pretty damn far down on the list of people the robots figured the world would be better off without.
And don't give me any of that, "Oh, it'll kill coders *first* because they represent the biggest threat" nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to exhibit anything *remotely* resembling intelligence? If you created something capable of even *reasoning* that you were a threat, you'd have created something smart enough to deal with that deduction in better ways than killing you. And if it's not really smarter than you, but just more dangerous - like those automated border guard robots they had to turn off because they turned their guns on the engineers during the demo - well, the world probably *is* better off without you. *First* you make it intelligent, *then* you install the guns. Jeez - how hard is that to figure out?
Or maybe it's just that running from Terminator style robots would be far more exciting that sitting at this freakin' desk all day. But to me, dying at the hands of creation that surpassed your intelligence would be right up there with dying of a heart attack during your honeymoon with Jessica Alba. The kind of death where the epitaph on your tombstone could be: "My work here is done!"
Cybernetic enhancement which would parallel such AI development would enhance our ability to understand the technology as its development accelerated.
The world would never devolve into air heads praying to vaal while the machine overlords tended us, nor do I believe it will devolve into the matrix where our weak mortal flesh is crushed beneath the iron tentacles of the machine empire.
of course, until certain copyright interests die there is still the threat of having DRM embedded in our cyberbrains by law to prevent unauthorized memory recall.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Excuse me, but WTF, Kurzweil's singularity? I think Vernor Vinge has dibs on that idea.
Fools, there is no singularity. The evidence: S=k*log(W). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_in_thermodynamics_and_information_theory If anything we're on the left edge of the log curve, which would make the derivative look exponential.
Title read incorrectly in the first post. The singularity was in the past (big bang). Inflation was period during when W 1. Future growth should level off as a horizontal asymptote.
Nothing to get worked up about. Our knowledge is expanding and along with it comes all the worrying what ifs. We all know we are going to die sooner or later. This fact we can have complete confidence in. Nothing else deserves such confidence. Kurzweil , all of us, have inner thoughts which can grow into full on notions of what may be in future. The choice of thought we take in absorbing these theories from such obviously talented individuals is between a new kind of worry to live with or of a useful foresight. Anything is possible but it does not make it so. It may rain tomorrow, it may not. It was predicted to rain tomorrow, yesterday. But it didn't. The singularity future may include me or may not in this reality. It may be that it does in an alternative reality. All these things can really keep the mind busy. We have to have something to think about whilst we kill time until we die. It stops us sensing our end.
If everything is information anyway? That makes them as real as anything else? Consciousness is not physical, but neither is the information that the mind is made up of. Thoughts interacting with each other are analogous to physical objects doing the same.
Hofstadter has been stuck in a strange loop since GEB so I think we need to look elsewhere.
Goetzel the Novamente guy has some good ideas, but he seems to be foundering at the moment for some reason. He speaks of "re-entrant loops" (surprise) of neurons. While this is a throwback to cybernetics, I think there's still much more good development to be done there. In fact I think it's the best approach.
Conventional computational GOFAI (using Simon's physical symbol system hypothesis) hasn't yet produced a model that nearly captures human thought. But neuroscientists have such a model - a time-dependent recursive network of neurons with varying firing rates and connection parameters). Although it seems difficult to model the brain, I believe we'll have to do that first and only develop a computational model _after_ we have a working neural model. Thereupon the computationalists will break the neural model down into modules, write the equations for each and declare that they were right all along!8-))
robotic overlords welcome YOU!
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Irritating was my opinion too, though my summary has always been "It's very difficult to explain, but I am jolly clever, so you'll have to take my word for it". It's well written and there's plenty of interesting material if you can ignore the fact he's selling you a lemon.
So it seems based on the comments here. And a pretty goofy one at that. I understand there are some serious people doing research in this so-called AI. What exactly do they mean? I mean the I part - how do they define it? Help out an ignorant geezer.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Before anything that is even vaguely reminiscent of a "Singularity" takes shape, we must work towards increasing our emotional intelligence and our moral depth. Whether or not we have strong AI or swarms of omnicompetent nanobots in 2029, our command of information and control over basic biological processes will be far ahead of where they now stand. Within the next two decades, we (or at least some of us) will have access to far more power than many of us could be trusted with.
Huge intellectual and physical resources will be available to people out of proportion to their intellects but in proportion to their access to money or state authority. Really, that's the case now, but in twenty years how much further will we be in surveillance, biological augmentation AND disruption, and so on? The intelligence and the "levers" with which to move the environment will be there for the grasping, but without broader minds and deeper souls (Hofstadter's ideal) to define the goals and guide the work, a utopia could turn rancid literally overnight.
We need to begin fostering the growth of humanist moral guides. Ethics and political philosophy will be hot topics when we can do almost anything. Religion will appear quaint to more and more of us, so it will be harder to look to preachers for specific guidance, but Joe Six-Pack-of-Gene-Therapy-Derived-Abs (and his prospective AI minions) would pose far less danger to himself and to us if he could be convinced of the profound lessons to be found in the reflective, gentle and self-effacing thoughts of the best religious leaders. We will have an embarrassment of intellectual riches, but our test will lie in whether we are smart enough to subjugate those riches to the service of wisdom.
811.29.3.2
Ok, I had a bit more than a hand in creating them, but still.
Have you seen the cost of schooling lately! It's killing me.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I have no use for him or his famous book.
He's gotten all this fame but his famous book has not a single line of code, just lots of recursive nonsense. Not even a lousy Lisp function so people could try out his nonsense.
Worthless - while the real AI researchers
toil on in anonymity.
The robots are just there to protect you from the terrible secret of space.
The real question as far as I am concerned is "What is artificial intelligence?"
...?". How does it come up with those suggestions? Is it a human reading your query and correcting your spelling mistakes? Is it a set of static rules of the form "if they wrote X, suggest that they might have meant Y"? Does it match what you entered against commonly entered words? Is it AI? The end result is the same: you get offered your suggestion. I think that is the way a lot of AI works. It's exciting to fantasize about talking computers or machines ruling the Earth, but, for the most part, artificial intelligence is just another way to program machines.
What I think it boils down to is automating things that we don't know how to automate. If we know the rules that determine which decision must be taken, we can construct a machine that makes those decisions correctly. This is already happening on a large scale. But, sometimes, the rules are unknown, too hard to define, too complex, or too volatile to simply embed in a machine. In those cases, we use humans to make the decisions. Artificial intelligence, then, would allow a machine to take these decisions. We don't write the rules into a computer program, but we write a computer program that _somehow_ makes the right decisions. Since it wasn't our intelligence that came up with the rules for these decisions, we ascribe it to artificial intelligence.
I also think artificial intelligence is already there. It isn't something that is suddenly going to come around and cause machines to talk to us or take over the world. It's something that slowly gets introduced in more and more places and allows machines to perform more and more tasks without human intervention.
Now, I could cite a number of examples of things that I think are artificial intelligence. But instead I am going to ask you a question: does it matter? When you enter a query on Google and you misspell one of the words, it often offers you a suggestion of the form "Did you mean
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Yes, but the point was that it was incremental. It was the steady progress that eventually made us live better than those Achaeans, not the "singularities" which plunged us into chaos.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wonderful. ENM is about as good a book about physics as is possible without (much) actual mathematics. Wish I had mod points today.
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice; in practice there is.
Clearly you know what you're talking about... even more clearly GP doesn't. We "overproduced"?! Give me a break... what economic theory does this originate from?
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I was looking forward to hearing a coherent rebuttal of the singularity, because it seemed to make so much sense to me once I heard the theory completely laid out. This is Hofstadter's response - I can say I was not impressed by his argument or rationale. In fact I can say I don't recall seeing either in his presentation... just an "it's not possible" attitude.
http://singinst.org/media/tryingtomuserationally
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
The problem with the great depression was the money supply. Banks created a monetary bubble, which eventually broke. Something like what is happening right now. The only diff is that now the bubble is even bigger, as banks are more deregulated, global and powerful. So the eventual collapse will be breath (and life) taking.
34
Huh? He wrote a whole book about his lousy Scheme function, and you can in fact try out the code.
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Some people seem to think that the singularity will result in a matrix like virtual world, which wouldn't impact on the real world. This is simply not right. As by definition the singularity is the point at which we can't know or understand what's really going on, then there will be real world consequences that may be staggering. Imagine if the singularity figured out that all thinking was a subset of a larger mind, and then pushed a button to connect it all, permanently. We would become 'one' with the whole universe. Sounds a bit wanky I know, but it's that kind of thing we're talking about, not just a good version of the internet with a neural interface. More likely the result will be something that we simply can't conceptualise rather than the example above. Something that we just couldn't imagine no matter how smart we are or how we try. Imagine being an ant coming across a jet engine. What does it make of it? That will be us versus the singularity, and I suspect it will have the same effect as a jet engine would have on an ant if it were to pass through it. The rate of change is getting faster. More people are getting technofear as the rate increases. I think the singularity might happen over days or even hours when it happens, with the world/universe/dimensions/whatever_else_we_can'_think_of maybe changing in the blink of an eye. This is based on the idea that the singularity is unknowable, and will change things as radically as can be changed, and I can't think higher than that. I don't mind it happening, but it is the end of my life as I run it. I'd just like to get a bit more drinking time in before it.....
In the interview I got the feeling that Hofstadter prefers to not look at the future. I respect him very much and GEB will always be dear to my heart but "Catcher in the Rye"? Seriously!? It's not a very good book in my opinion and listing it as your favorite is a cliche I didn't think Hofstadter would fit in ... for christ sake, it's required reading in school!
...
Being critical of Kurzweils scenario is important if just to avoid a big nerd circle jerk but dismissing it as "I don't like it"? I'd prefered something more substantial
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
...is motivation. Whatever humans and animals do, it's because they are motivated to do it. Something pushes them to do what they do. But machines don't have that, unless we build it in them. So any machine, no matter how high it's intelligence is, it will not move unless we give it a command.
In almost every discussion, most people automatically connect AI with motivation. Motivation in humans comes from physical, emotional and mental needs. But I don't see how a machine with even the highest AI could do anything if not given an order, unless it is programmed to move by itself.
It'll go something like this:
The highly-advanced future human race finally creates a sentient device after years of research and development. They ask it one question to test its super-intelligence: "What is the meaning of the Universe?"
The computer 'thought' for a while and replied: "Say, that reminds me of a story."
What? He used a figurative term, the 'soul,' and didn't say any of the other stuff you are attributing to him. He criticizes Kurzweil for specfic ideas...you criticize because you read more into a statement than is reasonable.
What's to add? But since I'm always ready with a slap at Kurzweil, I feel that Hofstadter has him pinned:
1. "Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality", and
2. "Rather ironically, [Kurzweil's] vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI"
It is exactly this complex and elusive puzzle of "I" and "consciousness" Hofstadter explores that Kurzweil hopes we can conquer without having to think about it at all. Which I scorn as "magic science".
I have to say I find the cyberpunk vision more appealing than Hofstadter. It would be "the end of humanity as we know it." I'm not sure it would be "the end of human life." It might be evolution. I just think it is many hundred years in the future at the most "optimistic" (depending on your viewpoint).
http://sifter.org/~simon/AfterLife/index.html
Wonderful online scifi book. The author, Simon Funk, copes with many such questions with incredible imagination and vivid narration.
I don't feel like it...
(Offtopic? Sure. Troll? WTF?!)
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I suggest there is an chance chance of a third(*) dark age reversing much of the industrial revolution and returning much of the world to framing villages as there is reaching the Singularity in the next millennium. There's all kinds of potential boogeymen out there- overpopulation, running out of cheap stored energy, climate change, AIDs-like/SARs/Bird-flu super-pandemic, end of Moore's law and cheap technology, fundamentalist religions conquering most of worlds governments, another world war, volcano or meteor disaster, etc. Any single one of these may be insufficient, but what if three or more occur together?
(*) The first dark age is around 1000 BCE - 500 BCE when there is a lot less written history than the centuries before or after in areas of Greece, Egypt and Mesopotamia. Some historians posutlate the rise of iron & horse & boat warfare, or a large volanic eruption, etc.
The second dark age is around 500 - 1000 CE, sometimes called the low Middle Ages between the collapse of Rome and the rise of high medieval culture. Relatity few inventions and writings then compared to surrounding centuries.
The hard-core singularists deny death. Either the biotechnological problems of aging will be solved or here will be some Borg-like hybrid of human machine immortality. Kuzweil suggest this will happen in the 2040s, so his taking 200 anti-aging pills a day to be around.
Show me a Data Center built with ceramic and powered by the sun or geo-electric sources and I'll recant.
...and each data center largely houses the sum of human knowledge by mirroring nearly the entire Internet.
Google is well under way toward making their data centers completely solar-powered.
Silicon - forming the essence of their data centers - is little more than refined sand.
While metal is used for much of the building out of convenience, most of that could be replaced with ceramics.
Much of the remaining metal is used for wiring and hard drives, both of which could be largely replaced with flash (silicon) drives and radio/optical interconnects.
Maybe not all ceramic-and-solar now, but that's more a matter of current convenience instead of lack of technology.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The entity in AI must have a stake in the outcome of its "intelligence". No consequence to the answer? No intelligence. The burden of consequence creates what Hofstadter refers to as "soul".
I followed this thread for awhile, then I had to stop and read the posters' names to see if any of them were Achilles or the Tortoise.
"he thinks 'it certainly would spell the end of human life.'""
You say that like it's bad thing.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
OK, I'm not an economist, or even a commerce major. But I've heard this sorta argument made before, that the fed should've loosened the monetary policy.
But the thing is, there's more to whether or not a business makes new investments than the monetary supply or interest rate. Business invest based on (at least, partially) what they expect to see in the next few years. So even if the interest rates are really low, or the supply of money is high/plentiful, I can still see a lot of ways where businesses might hunker down.\
Am I missing something? I've never been able to get my head around the "mechanism of action" of how adjusting the monetary supply would've stopped the Depression.
Can anybody help me out here with the 'mechanism of action'?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
I don't know, all I know is there's no consensus amongst scholars as to what was the cause.
And, I can see how, you could get a situation where production goes up, but given a really skewed income distribution across society, the majority of people don't have their wages going up, so nobody buys any of the cool new stuff being produced, can't you?
Am I missing something here? Economics isn't my strong suit, but I could see how given an income distribution like you see in 3rd world countries, overproduction/underconsumption could be a problem, couldn't it?
I also can't shake the suspicion that part of the reason this debate is so murky is that you have various different economic "schools of thought" who wanna attribute a single cause to the depression, where it's really a matter of all the competing theories being partially right.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
My confession is that I'm not an economist, but I follow business regularly and consider myself to know something about economics.
Anyway, my line of thought is that "overproducing" on a major scale (a scale large enough to create the Great Depression) is impossible. The situation was one of "under-demand". The lack of demand was caused by the reckless policy of the fed of the 30s which refused to help the banks out of the pickle (they created for themselves) in order to teach them a lesson - the Fed was also not as liquid then. Through mismanagement of (an admittedly, relatively new) agency, they caused 25% unemployment and IMO contributed significantly to WWII ever taking place.
This is why I find the economic hawks talking about how the fed is fixed, we should go back to a gold standard, blah, blah, blah so irritating. Their opinions have very little basis in fact. Economics prior to going to fiat currency were many times more destructive and non-productive as ANYTHING the Fed has ever cooked up (except, perhaps the Great Depression). Markets, by definition, swing to excess and without quasi-political office oversight (read: Fed) markets will go nuts. No, markets do not have some kind of inalienable right to go nuts... it causes massive unemployment, unspeakable social issues, and world wars -- this is why the Fed was created.
If you know very little about economics, let me tell you... listen to what the gold standard folks have to tell you, then reject it, because it makes no sense based on economic history.
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Heh, I at least understand enough about macro-economics to know that gold standard is, um, not desirable.
I think your point about over-production is probably true.
Back to my conjecture that the reason why there's no consensus amongst economists as to the causes of the Depression is that there's actually probably about 1/2 dozen causes, that were all happening at the same time.
Economists from various "schools of thought" (i.e., ideologies) examining causes of the depression are like that parable about the 3 blind men trying to examine an elephant and describe it, where one guy's holding the trunk, one has his hand on a leg, and one has his hand on the tail.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Eh, I dunno. Where did you hear there's not a consensus on the cause of the Great Depression? I think it's pretty well been attributed to mis-actions on the Fed's part (at least in the mainstream of economics) -- though as you say other factors did contribute, but not nearly to the extent of the Fed's misaction.
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I know wikipedia is far from the final word on stuff (I like to think of it as a starting point, not an end point), but there's this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_great_depression
It's um, the first line. "The causes of the Great Depression are still a matter of active debate among economists. "
The article lists about 1/2 dozen competing theories. There's more to economics than the Monetarist school of thought.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Meh, yeah... I've actually browsed that article. There are more than monetarist thoughts out there, but they're all fringe elements. Putting them all together implies that the competing ideas are on equal standing with one another... they're not. Milton Friedman based economics rules the day, and has for decades. Witness the fact that every major (maybe even every minor) country has a central bank based system.
These competing theories are intellectual backwaters. Also consider the fact that whoever is editing that page may (and IMO probably does) have a bias against fiat currency policies.
So if being anti-establishment is sexy to you, those competing theories will probably ring true because they are heavily against the current grain. But in terms of current economic thought, they're not worth much.
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Yeah, well, you know what Friedman's ideal society was? Chile under Pinochet.
Take Friedman with a grain of salt. Sanity is not statistical.
I agree with you on the anti-fiat bias though. Fiat currencies aren't perfect, but what the hell is? Fiat currencies are like that line about democracy being the worst of all systems, except for all the others.
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
Hmm, I can't say I know anything about Pinochet and Friedman (other than what I just read). But my bias is in favor of Friedman, from what I've read and seen of him on other topics -- I'd like to know your source for that; there's always a possibility of crazy things.
This is what he had to say on the subject...
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/int_miltonfriedman.html#10
See 'On His Role in Chile Under Pinochet'
Fiat is far from perfect, government thinks they can pull value out of their asses, but they're just contributing to a system of inefficiencies. (Gold bugs call it a house of cards, pyramid scheme.. I don't think it's nearly that bad)
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