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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.'"
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.
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.)
I know, I know... Asimov's laws, etc etc. But... for a being to be sentient and at the same time reach the same level of thinking that we enjoy, you must given them the freedom to think, without any restrictions... as humans (ostensibly) do. This requires a level of both bravery and of careful planning that is far greater than we as humans are capable of today.
I'm not predicting some sort of evolutionary re-match of Cro-Magnon v. Neanderthal (where this time the robots are the new Cro-Magnon), but it does require a lot of careful thought, in every conceivable (and non-conceivable) direction. When it comes to building anything complex, it's always the things you didn't think of (or couldn't conceivably think of given the level of technology you had when designing) that come back to bite you in the arse (see also every great engineering disaster since the dawn of history).
Best bet would be to --if ever possible-- give said robot the tools to be sentient, but don't even think of giving them any power to actually do more than talk (verbal soundwaves, not data distribution) and think.
It reminds me of an old short story, where a highly-advanced future human race finally created a sentient device out of massive resources, linked from across every corner of humanity. They asked it one question to test it: "Is there a God?" The computer replied: "There is... now."
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
BUT, I think that his chapters on math and physics and their interface (everything prior to the biology chapters) constitute the SINGLE GREATEST and only successful attempt ever to present a NON-DUMBED DOWN layperson's introduction to mathematical physics. I gained more physical and mathematical insight from that book than I did from any other source prior to graduate school. For that alone, I salute him. Popularizations of physics a la Hawking are a dime a dozen. An "Emperor's new mind" having (what I can only describe as) 'conceptual math' to TRULY describe the physics comes along maybe once in a lifetime.
His latest book is the extension of that effort and the culmination of a lifetime of thinking clearly and succinctly about math and physics. He is the only writer alive who imo has earned the right to use a title like "The road to reality: a complete guide to the laws of physics".
As for Hofstadter, GEB was merely pretty (while ENM was beautiful), but essentially useless (to me) beyond that. Perhaps it was meant as simply a guide to aesthetic appreciation, in which case it succeeded magnificently. As far as reality is concerned, it offered me no new insight that I could see. Stimulating prose though - I guess no book dealing with Escher can be entirely bad. I haven't read anything else by Hofstadter so I can't comment there.
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?