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

Hail to the robots

[oever]

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.

Re:I liked "I am a Strange Loop"

[Angostura]

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.

Re:Singularity is naive

[magisterx]

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.

"Overproduction" did not cause great depression.

[joebob2000]

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.

Re:Singularity is naive

[khellendros1984]

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.

A lack of vision...

[Genda]

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!

1. A sigularity is completely unpredictable... " 'X' divided by '0'" has no sane meaning... you can't understand it "By Definition", at best you can talk about it. So those speaking of utopia, dystopia, and autotpia are simply clue free. The question of will it be "good" or "bad" for humanity, will be for some souls "yes", and for others "no", and it will be a great cosmic crap shoot, and speaking generally, I would recommend you listen to Ford, and just keep your towel close by.
2. The rate of "All Human Knowledge" now doubles in just over four years. That rate is accelerating and has been for some time now. This is the fundamental driver behind all other asymtotic trends in human evolution. So As our knowledge grows, our ability to create ever more powerful tools grows, the tools expose more knowledge and the probability that we'll either significantly reengineer ourselves, or create a new sentience on the planet becomes a simple numbers game. Not if, but when. Subsequently, if you give a human level intelligence the necessary tools to build it successors, it will be a very short matter of time before you are confronted with a world of unrecognizable smart babies indeed. At that point history is pointless, and the future get's really fuzzy.
3. "Careful Analysis", shows these trends have been at work since simple amino acids and sugars joined to make the earliest life. You can trace all the way back from where we are today all the way to the very beginning, and looking at it from multiple contexts... as information, biological diversity, complexity, intelligence, the growth of sentience, autonomy, the ability to go futher and futher from the planet, sentience and cognitive capacity, as many different points of view as you like. You can see a clear trend, a predictable process of accelerating evolution, ultimately reaching the point at which the information density meets and possibly exceeds the capacity for quantum space time hold it. That would be by definition a singularity. Human beings (as we konw them) would have been gone for a very long time (computationally speaking) before that happened.
4. As our technology blossoms, and accelerates at ever greater velocity, we will enhance ourselves, augment ourselves, reengineer ourselves, to keep up with our toys, and reap the benefits of more personal time, and greater productivity. By virtue of this pressure, as in any approaching singularity, tidal forces will quickly begin to smear out the flavors of humaninty until they are quickly unrecognizable from one another. First adopters will evolve faster and faster, while Luddites will fall further and further behind, and those in the middle will fall into the multitude of discrete states within the growing gulf formed by the two desparate entities at either end. Do not worry, if you don't want to become a godling, there will be all kinds of human variations you can play with, consistent with the degree with which you've chosen to reengineer yourself.
5. So it is primarily ignorance, xenophbia, and hubris that speaks when most folks express fear and concern with a singularity. We are already at the verge, and we are no less human than our great-great-grand parents (and you'd just have to take my word for it when I say the elder one's still walking the world are intrigued by the odd folks that now people the planet.) To the catepillar, the buttle-fly looks like dying. Making summary judgements about giving up your humanity to become something more doesn't sound the least like bad news to me. You just want to begin looking now at how and where you want your trajectory to run you through this process. You might not want to end one with a huge artificial brain. Maybe a quasi-human super-sentient who overcame death, skipping around the universe with a few close friends sounds more like your heart's desire. Like I said just know where the towel is, and keep it close.

Re:Kind of a strange response really

[hypomorph]

... I would hate to think that all that beauty and profundity and goodness could be captured; even approximated in any way at all! in the horribly rigid computational devices of our era.

When you boil it down, humans are just collection carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen (and some other trace elements). What difference does it make if an intelligence is made of mostly "natural" carbon entities vs. mostly "unnatural" silicon entities? I believe this misses Hofstadter's idea. That the "horribly rigid computational devices of our era" are currently implemented with silicon, is immaterial. He means that our minds and consciousnesses are such beautifully complex machines, that the crude computational devices and formal languages we have so far developed are insufficient to model them. Hofstadter shares your sentiment that the medium in which his `strange loops of consciousness' are realized makes no difference at all -- it is the pattern that matters, and only the pattern that matters.

Re:Singularity is naive

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Singularity is naive

[aproposofwhat]

The future computers/robots better keep on functioning when 40% of their brain is destroyed

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.