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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.'"
Hofstadter, for one, does _not_ welcome our new AI overlords.
You're not understanding what the singularity is about. What you're describing is a dumb extrapolation. 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. Then that version could design a yet more improved version, even more quickly, and so on. That will mean the rate of scientific progress could be faster than humans are capable of, and we could find ourselves surrounded by technology we do not understand, or perhaps we cannot possibly understand. The idea behind the singularity is feedback, such as the recursion that can be created by the Y combinator in your sig.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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.
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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.
The current Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, would disagree with you about the causes of the Great Depression. He says that it was the fault of the Federal Reserve. http://www.federalreserve.gov/BOARDDOCS/SPEECHES/2002/20021108/default.htm Check mises.org for other economic information.
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.
One swallow does not a fellatrix make