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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.'"
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.
I found The Emperor's New Mind a remarkably irritating book. As far as I could tell, the whole tome basically boiled down to 'Consciousness is spooky and difficult to explain, Quantum effects are spooky and difficult to explain, ergo human consciousness probably has its basis in qyuantum effects'. I didn't read any of his books after that one.
I like Hofstadter a *lot* though. His book of essays from SciAm: Metamagical Themas is still woeth grabbing if you ever see a copy.
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I believe that something like the singularity will come to pass, in the sense that super-smart machines will quickly develop. On the other hand, the whole idea of copying human brains just strikes me as silly. I'm really not sure what the interaction between humans and super-smart machines will be. That's one of the key points of the singularity; things will change so much so rapidly that we cannot predict what will happen.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Just to clarify this excellent post slightly, the concept of a singularity does not entail AI per se. It requires an intelligence capable of enhancing itself in a recursive fashion, but this could in principle be achieved in a number of ways. Genetic engineering which then permits the development of better genetic engineering, or the direct merging of biological and computer components in a fashion which permits developing better mergers, or in principle taken to the extreme even simply ever better tools for the use in developing technology to make better tools yet.
If a singularity does occur, it will likely emerge from multiple paths at once.
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.
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And the philosophers have been working on all of those questions for far longer than we've been systematically trying to understand the brain.
I believe that we'll gradually come to understand the brain better, and from that, how the mind arises from its physical functioning. *That* is where an artificial intelligence can be designed, when we understand the cognition provided by the brain.
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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!
Hell, there are no rules here-- we're trying to accomplish something. --Thomas A. Edison
The point is still valid within the context of the idea that whatever input required for a human to develop healthily is far beyond staring at a chess board and moving some pieces for 100 years.
We'd need robots who could design equipment for themselves, to scale mountains. To invent instruments. To scour the depths of the ocean. The point is still valid in the sense that people are a product of their environment, and what makes the human experience so unique is that we're constantly attempting to gain more access to more input. Presumably, any old brain in a box placed in a single room, unable to move, would cease being healthy after awhile, and probably even recognizably human after years because I would have to imagine that some part of the programming of the human mind requires or in the very least infers the ability to alter and modify our environment to a satisfactory degree.
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It's easy to see what will happen. Just look back at the development of technology. The Industrial Revolution changed the way people work, but it did not change the goal people were working towards.
We will always create tools to accomplish specific work and our tools (assuming they become aware) will do the same.
Quite frankly, I don't care if some CEO can pay to upload himself into some AI construct. I will believe that the singularity has created true advancement when "the other 85% of humanity" has adequate access to clean water, nutritious food, and medical care.
I don't know what the record is for the longest uptime of a computer system, but it's surely less than a normal human lifetime - hardware wears out, and without infrastructure to support it, the 'singularity' will die through disk/memory/processor/whatever failure in fairly short order.
I think Hofstadter's spot on when he refers to it as 'the nerds rapture' - it's bollocks on the scale of Drexler's imaginary nanorevolution, and should be treated as such.
AI in itself is a noble field of research, but pointless speculation such as Kurzweil's makes the whole field poorer.
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