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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.
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 personally believe that AI will never happen with us humans at our current level of intelligence.
To build a machine that is intelligent, we need to understand how our own intelligence works. If our intelligence was simple enough to understand and decipher, we humans would be too simple to understand it or decipher it.
Ergo, we humans will never ever build a machine that is intelligent. We can build a machine that will simulate intelligence, but never actually make it intelligent.
That's what mathematician Roger Penrose thinks also, in case you weren't aware. You may want to read his book "The Large, the Small, and the Human Mind".
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.)
Hofstadter, for one, does _not_ welcome our new AI overlords.
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.
Sould shards?
NERF LOCKS!
Neurons are far too large to be affected by QM effects.
If I disagree with you it's because you are wrong.
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?
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.
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!
being killed by a super-intelligent robot, if I had some hand in creating it? Think how awesome that would be - you build something intelligent enough to not only not need you anymore, but that also determines the world is actually better off without you. Maybe it's just because I figure, if I helped create it, I'd be pretty damn far down on the list of people the robots figured the world would be better off without.
And don't give me any of that, "Oh, it'll kill coders *first* because they represent the biggest threat" nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to exhibit anything *remotely* resembling intelligence? If you created something capable of even *reasoning* that you were a threat, you'd have created something smart enough to deal with that deduction in better ways than killing you. And if it's not really smarter than you, but just more dangerous - like those automated border guard robots they had to turn off because they turned their guns on the engineers during the demo - well, the world probably *is* better off without you. *First* you make it intelligent, *then* you install the guns. Jeez - how hard is that to figure out?
Or maybe it's just that running from Terminator style robots would be far more exciting that sitting at this freakin' desk all day. But to me, dying at the hands of creation that surpassed your intelligence would be right up there with dying of a heart attack during your honeymoon with Jessica Alba. The kind of death where the epitaph on your tombstone could be: "My work here is done!"
I was looking forward to hearing a coherent rebuttal of the singularity, because it seemed to make so much sense to me once I heard the theory completely laid out. This is Hofstadter's response - I can say I was not impressed by his argument or rationale. In fact I can say I don't recall seeing either in his presentation... just an "it's not possible" attitude.
http://singinst.org/media/tryingtomuserationally
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
Some people seem to think that the singularity will result in a matrix like virtual world, which wouldn't impact on the real world. This is simply not right. As by definition the singularity is the point at which we can't know or understand what's really going on, then there will be real world consequences that may be staggering. Imagine if the singularity figured out that all thinking was a subset of a larger mind, and then pushed a button to connect it all, permanently. We would become 'one' with the whole universe. Sounds a bit wanky I know, but it's that kind of thing we're talking about, not just a good version of the internet with a neural interface. More likely the result will be something that we simply can't conceptualise rather than the example above. Something that we just couldn't imagine no matter how smart we are or how we try. Imagine being an ant coming across a jet engine. What does it make of it? That will be us versus the singularity, and I suspect it will have the same effect as a jet engine would have on an ant if it were to pass through it. The rate of change is getting faster. More people are getting technofear as the rate increases. I think the singularity might happen over days or even hours when it happens, with the world/universe/dimensions/whatever_else_we_can'_think_of maybe changing in the blink of an eye. This is based on the idea that the singularity is unknowable, and will change things as radically as can be changed, and I can't think higher than that. I don't mind it happening, but it is the end of my life as I run it. I'd just like to get a bit more drinking time in before it.....
I couldn't disagree more. I was so enthused by this book that I went to University to study AI. After a couple of years of that I decided that what I was being taught was a load of rubbish and that as Penrose had claimed, "machines" (i.e. computational devices such that exist today) could not "think" (i stil graduated with a first however and it was some use to me in my future career). The problem I had with Hofstadter was that he assigned the concept of recursion an almost magical property. Dennett does a similar thing with his "multiple drafts" theory. They may in themselves be enough to describe complex functioning in the brain (or any other system come to think of it), but as Chalmers points out, at present a Materialist model of thought (or rather, consciousness, which we assume is required for thought) is impossible. I find Penrose and Hameroff's ideas of conscious action in the brain to be both fascinating and intuitively correct, even if the evidence does not exist at present. I noted with interest that scientists have recently discovered large-scale quantumn effects in the leaves of plants when photo-synthesizing. However, any such action in the brain will be difficult to pin down, for obvious reasons. I expect the science of consciousness to progress rather more slowly than other fields for this reason.
What's to add? But since I'm always ready with a slap at Kurzweil, I feel that Hofstadter has him pinned:
1. "Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality", and
2. "Rather ironically, [Kurzweil's] vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI"
It is exactly this complex and elusive puzzle of "I" and "consciousness" Hofstadter explores that Kurzweil hopes we can conquer without having to think about it at all. Which I scorn as "magic science".
I have to say I find the cyberpunk vision more appealing than Hofstadter. It would be "the end of humanity as we know it." I'm not sure it would be "the end of human life." It might be evolution. I just think it is many hundred years in the future at the most "optimistic" (depending on your viewpoint).