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.'"

Comments

Re:Singularity is naive

[bunratty]

You're not understanding what the singularity is about. What you're describing is a dumb extrapolation. The singularity, in contrast, is the idea that once we develop artificial intelligence that is as smart as the smartest scientists, there is the possibility that the AI could design an improved (i.e. smarter, faster) version of itself. Then that version could design a yet more improved version, even more quickly, and so on. That will mean the rate of scientific progress could be faster than humans are capable of, and we could find ourselves surrounded by technology we do not understand, or perhaps we cannot possibly understand. The idea behind the singularity is feedback, such as the recursion that can be created by the Y combinator in your sig.

Re:It's even funnier

[scottyokim]

The current Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, would disagree with you about the causes of the Great Depression. He says that it was the fault of the Federal Reserve. http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm Check mises.org for other economic information.

Re:Singularity is naive

[sjhs]

Imagine the size of big blue if it had to actually see the board and physically move the pieces. Actually, those two tasks are fairly easy compared to the task of winning a game of chess. This is because chess boards all have a fairly consistent look, and even if presented with a strange, unfamiliar-looking chess board, a decent "chess vision" algorithm should have relatively little trouble inferring what the pieces are etc. Similarly, good robotics coupled with a good 3D world model should take care of moving the pieces relatively easily. So, your home computer with a webcam and a nice USB robotic arm attached could take care of those two tasks. Now, to deal with the 10^123 game-tree complexity...

Re:Hail to the robots

[AnyoneEB]

I know, I know... Asimov's laws, etc etc.

A lot of people seem to misunderstand Asimov's Laws of Robotics. They are not a suggestion for what laws real robots should follow. They are used to demonstrate that no simple set of rules could possibly make robots "safe". See the Wikipedia article, which mentions that.