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

Singularity is naive

[nuzak]

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?

Re:Singularity is naive

[localman]

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.

My take, which sounds very anthrocentric, is that it won't work like that. I have a belief, which might be scary. It goes like this: we are as smart as it gets.

Before you dismiss, here's the thing: intelligence and processing power are not the same thing. I know that computers will process much more raw information much more quickly than a human mind, but there's no understanding there. I also believe that at some distant point we'll be able to build a computer "brain" that does have the ability to understand as we do. What I don't believe is that just because it can function faster it will suddenly understand better.

Despite the enormous amount of completely idiotic stuff humans do, the best and brightest humans in their best and brightest moments are nothing short of amazingly intelligent. Compared to what? Compared to everything else that we've ever encountered. This very interview is a good example. People like Hofstatder are dealing not with a lack of processing power, but running up against the very ambiguities of the universe itself. You've absolutely got to read GEB if you don't understand what I mean by that.

So yeah: as little evidence as I have, I believe that humans are capable of (though not usually engaged in) the highest form of intelligence possible. I don't think a computer brain that runs 10x faster would be 10x smarter. It'll get the same tasks done more quickly, but it's overall comprehension will be within an order of magnitude of anything the best humans can do.

Let me say this to: while I respect the AI field, we've already got 6 billion and counting super-high-tech neural networks on this planet right now that can blow the pants off any computer in comprehension and creativity. Yet we are shit at benefitting from all that. I don't think mechanized versions are going to cause a dramatic improvement. It's a complex world.

Cheers.

Re:Singularity is naive

[Unnngh!]

"The question of whether Machines Can Think ... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim." - Dijkstra

Would you still be you if the computer was running a simulation of your brain? If you have some sense of "self", that which is aware, how would that awareness be affected by having two or more copies of your mental processes in action at the same time? Is that awareness merely a byproduct of some mental/mechanical process or a chemical process, or is it something else still? Would your brain really be worth running in a computer?

I tend to think, and a "thinking" computer would probably agree, that the computer is probably better off doing other things than running wetware facsimilies that grew out of a willy-nilly evolutionary process over millions of years.

Kind of a strange response really

[the_humeister]

Am I disappointed by the amount of progress in cognitive science and AI in the past 30 years or so? Not at all. To the contrary, I would have been extremely upset if we had come anywhere close to reaching human intelligence â" it would have made me fear that our minds and souls were not deep. Reaching the goal of AI in just a few decades would have made me dramatically lose respect for humanity, and I certainly don't want (and never wanted) that to happen.

Hehe, you mean all the nasty things humanity has done to each other hasn't made you lose respect?

I am a deep admirer of humanity at its finest and deepest and most powerful â" of great people such as Helen Keller, Albert Einstein, Ella Fitzgerald, Albert Schweitzer, Frederic Chopin, Raoul Wallenberg, Fats Waller, and on and on. I find endless depth in such people (many more are listed on [chapter 17] of I Am a Strange Loop), and I would hate to think that all that beauty and profundity and goodness could be captured â" even approximated in any way at all! â" 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?

End of *this* human life...

[lenski]

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.

(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. ...And pollution and loss of habitat, but through all that, they still live amphibian lives.

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.)

Re:End of *this* human life...

[Zarf]

The short answer is that Hofstadter and Kurzweil are both wrong. I think Kurzweil's technological development arcs (all those need exponential curves) probably are disturbingly correct. And Hofstadter is probably right about souls being far more complex things than what Kurzweil believes.

So they are both right in ways and wrong in ways. The real rub is that Kurzweil's future is probably farther away but not for the reasons that Hofstadter thinks. The real reasons are probably based in bad technology decisions we made in the last century or two.

We (humanity) have made several technological platform choices that are terrifyingly hard to change now. These choices drove us down a path that we may have to abandon and thus suffer a massive technological set back. In specific the choices were oil, steel, and electricity.

Oil (fossil fuels) will run out. Steel (copper too) is growing scarcer. Electricity is too hard to store and produce (and heats silicon rather inconveniently). Data centers today are built with steel and located near power plants that often produce power using fossil fuel. That means even a Data Center driven life will be affected by our platform limitations.

When we start hitting physical limits to what we can do with these, how much of these supplies we can get, then we will be forced to conserve, change, or stop advancing. Those are very real threats to continued technological advancement. And they don't go away if you hide in Second Life.

Show me a Data Center built with ceramic and powered by the sun or geo-electric sources and I'll recant.

Re:I liked "I am a Strange Loop"

[thrawn_aj]

You might be right about Penrose's thesis (about the mind being quantum mechanical) in the book - I have no idea, nor do I particularly care. I have read that book several times over my high school/undergrad/grad career (physics) and I have NEVER read it to the very end (so, I essentially skipped over all his ruminations on the nature of the mind :P).

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.

Cyborgs, not AI

[Ilyakub]

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?