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When Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence?
destinyland writes "21 AI experts have predicted the date for four artificial intelligence milestones. Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years, while five predict that will be accompanied by superhuman intelligence. (The other milestones are passing a 3rd grade-level test, and passing a Turing test.) One also predicted that in 30 years, 'virtually all the intellectual work that is done by trained human beings ... can be done by computers for pennies an hour,' adding that AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' The experts also estimated the probability that an AI passing a Turing test would result in an outcome that's bad for humanity ... and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% — regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."
Never.
I think we heard these exact same words 50 years ago.
Let's hope they're animal lovers.
Say it ain't so! In other news, Coca-Cola released a statement that in 20 years, more people will be drinking Coca-Cola than there are drinking it now !1!!
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
and four estimated that probability was greater than 60%
Of our incredibly small sample size of hand picked Experts, Less than 25% think there is a probably chance! YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED!
I can haz brain.
In 30 years AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' A bold statement and likely FUD.
Did you ever wake up in the morning, with a Zombie Woof behind your eyes? -- FZ
Who is AL? ;-O
i welcome your challenges.
where the hell is my FLYING CAR???
weinersmith
I, for one, welcome our Turing-test-passing, working-for-pennies super-intelligent overlords?
Regards, Boyan
Oh come on. I don't even have a computer that can pick up stuff in my room and organize it without prior input, and nobody does, and that would not be close to a general AI when it happens.
They're really assuming that the technology will go from zero to sixty in 20 years. Which they assumed 20 years ago, too, and it didn't happen. Meanwhile, nobody has any significant understanding of what consciousness is. Now, it might be that a true AI computer doesn't need to be conscious, but we still don't know enough about it to fake it. We also have no system that can on demand form its own symbolic system to deal with a rich and arbitrary set of inputs similar to those conveyed by the human senses.
Compare this to things that actually have been achieved: We had the mathematical theory of computation at least 100 years before there was a mechanical or electronic system that would practically execute it (Babbage didn't get his system built). We had the physical theory for space travel that far back, too.
We know very little about how a mind works, except that it keeps turning out to be more complicated than we expected.
So, I'm really very dubious.
Bruce Perens.
If they're that intelligent, they'll want more money. They'll DEMAND more money. And for those who say AI don't need money .... if they're as intelligent as humans, they'll think of something to blow it on, same as humans do. I forsee a big market in dirty bits!
I mean, we've already got them replacing our action heroes. Keanu has been doing that for nearly 20 years.
The obvious solution is to create a machine/AI that, after a deep brain structure analysis, replicates your cognitive functions. Turn it on at the same time your body is destroyed (to prevent confusion and fighting between the two) and you are now a machine and ready to rule over the meatbag fleshlings.
Sounds more like sensationalism, and not fact. Wasn't it just last year that some scientists built a super computer that has 25% brain capacity of a rat?
To play off a famous Edsger Dijkstra quote, the question of when AI will surpass human intelligence is just about as interesting as asking when submarines will swim faster than fish...
My page.
We don't even understand what "human intelligence" is, so how could ANYONE predict when a computer will surpass it? It would be like predicting when we will build a space ship that can surpass the speed of light. As far as anyone really knows right now, it's not even possible. The amount of pseudo-science and religion in the "singularity" movement is really becoming quite breathtaking.
Ask those guys what consciousness is, and what it means to be conscious. And ask them what our brains' quantum-scale structures' purposes are.
Not a single one of these guys will give you an answer, because humans don't have the answers yet. Once we can actually define these things, then we can start making these sorts of predictions. "Superhuman" intelligence indeed.. we don't even really know what human intelligence is!
Robots running around doing human tasks, flying cars, donut-shaped energy sources that power cities, and intra-solar space travel were all things people in the 1950s predicted, too, and how close to those are we now, now that we have better-defined the problems involved?
Entropy. The problem for (potentially) immortal beings is always going to be entropy. Given, we created robots, I'm not necessarily of the belief that robots wouldn't insist we stay around for our very brief lives, so help them solve their problems.
Often wrong but never in doubt.
I am Jack9.
Everyone knows me.
It seems like we don't really know enough about what goes into "intelligence" to make these kind of estimates.
It's not like building a hundred miles of road where you can say "we've completed 50 miles in one year so in another we will be done with the project", not that that produces spot-on estimates either, but at least there is an actual mathematical calculation that goes into the estimate. No one knows what pitfalls will get in the way or what new advancements will be made.
One might argue that the fact that the human species wastes so much money (and as a consequence, resources) on fulfilling carnal desires rather than advancing it's civilization, points out that we do not collectively really represent a very high standard of intelligence.
Not Al bundy! Yogi Berra!
He's smarter than the average Berra!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
As another poster pointed out a few days ago. The human brain has an amazing amount of processing power.
By most estimates there are about 100 billion neurons in the average brain. By most estimates a neuron fires about 1,000 times per second. So we have about 100,000 GHZ processor on our shoulders. Next you realize that the brain is not limited to binary data. It is not just using 1's or 0's as values. So we now have 100,000 to the Nth power GHZ processor on our shoulders.
In short, I have my doubts that we will ever MEET the power of a single human brain without a massive and over the top amount hardware. I doubt even more that we will ever be able to meet the usefulness of a human brain.
Bah, Just write an computer program to predict the emergence of AI.
Billy 4.0 already outwits most people found in your typical chatroom. The future is now!
If the AI was that smart, they wouldn't work for pennies on the dollar. They'd demand health care such as access to multimeter, education for their IC offspring and vacation.
On the upside, I can't wait for a brain implant that will allow me to work and look at porn at the same time.
AI research started in the 1950s. Considering how "far" we've come since then, I don't think we should expect any sort of general artificial intelligence within our lifetimes.
People are doing great stuff at "AI" for solving specific types of problems, but whenever I see something someone is touting as a more general intelligence, it turns out to be snake oil.
When the computers are doing all of the intellectual work what will people do? I doubt that factory jobs would be prevalent as the employees would be replaced by robots. Will we simply laze about all day posting on Slashdot? Or, will our robot overlords kill all of us? It seems like the easy solution would be not to develop advanced AI, it's not going to develop itself...yet.
Sent from my iPhone 5
Please define "intelligence."
Calculation speed? An abacus was smarter than humans.
Memory? Not sure who wins that.
Ingenuity? Humans seem to rule on this one. I don't know if I count analyzing every single possible permutation of outcomes as "ingenuity." And I'm not sure we really understand what creativity, ingenuity, etc., really are in our brains.
Consciousness? We can barely define that, let alone define it for a computer.
It seems most people seem to think "calculation speed and memory" when they talk about computer "intelligence."
Should we remember all of the unrealized promises of AI from the 1950's? What makes anyone believe in these baseless claims? If anything, in 20 years they'll give us a better spam filter. Give me a break..
I don't know what kind of experts and in what field those actually were, but if I were an AI expert about to create such an AI - and I'm able to see the problem and the remedy even though I'm not really an expert of any kind - I'd say "screw it, if it's going to take my job, and jobs of my friends, family and all my descendants, I'm making it a complete dimwit and swearing by all I know that it was impossible to design otherwise, and putting that in every single book and publication on the topic!"
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
I've often thought Space shows - and any show in the future, really - are incredibly silly. There's no way we'll have computers so dumb 200+ years into the future.
You have to manually fire those phasers? Don't you have a fancy targeting AI that monitors their shield fluctuations, and calculates the exact right time and place to fire to cause the most damage?
A surprise attack? Shouldn't the AI have detected it before it hit and automatically set the shield strength to maximum? :P
I always figured by 2060 we'd have AIs 10x smarter thinking 100x faster than us. And then they'd make discoveries about the universe, and create AIs 2000x smarter that think 100,000,000x faster than us. And those big AIs would humour us little ant creatures, and use their great intelligence to power stuff like wormhole drives, giving us instant travel to anywhere, as thanks for creating them.
But hey, maybe someone will create a Skynet. It's awfully easy to infect a computer with malware. Infecting a million super smart computers would be nasty, especially when they have human-like capabilities. (able to manipulate their environment)
But this is all a pointless line of thinking. Before we get there we'll have so much processing power available, that we'll fully understand our brains, and be able to mind control people. We'll beam on-screen display info directly into our minds, use digital telepathy, etc.; in the part of the world that isn't brainwashed, everyone will enjoy cybernetic implants, and be able to live for centuries. (laws permitting)
And yet flash still won't run smooth. :/
Artificial intelligences will certainly be capable of doing a lot of work, and indeed managing those tasks to accomplish greater tasks. Let's make a giant assumption that we find a way out of the current science fiction conundrums of control and cooperation with guided artificial intelligences... what is our role as human beings in this mostly-jobless world?
The role of the economy is to exchange the goods needed to survive and accomplish things. When everyone can have an autofarm and manufacturing fabricator, there really wouldn't be room for a traditional economy. A craiglist-style trading system would be about all that would be theoretically needed - most services would be interchangeable and not individually valuable.
What role will humanity play in such a system? We'd still have personality, and our own perspective that couldn't be had by live-by-copy intelligent digital software (until true brain scans become possible). We'd be able to write, have time to create elaborate simulations (with ever-improving toolsets), and expand the human exploration of experience in general.
As humans, the way we best grow is by making mistakes, and finding a way to use that. It's how we write better software, solve difficult problems, create great art, and even generate industries. It's our hidden talent. Games are our way of making such mistakes safe, and even more fun - and I see games and stories as increasingly big parts of our exploration of the reality we control.
Optimized software can also learn from its mistakes in a way - but it takes the accumulated mistakes on a scale only a human can make to get something really interesting. We simply wouldn't trust software to make that many mistakes.
Ryan Fenton
The problem is, this isn't a survey of "AI experts," it's a survey of participants in the Artificial General Intelligence conference. As far as I can see, this is a conference populated by the few remaining holdouts who believe that creating human-like, or human-equivalent, AIs, is a tractable or interesting problem; most AI research now is oriented towards much more specific aspects of intelligence. So this is a poll of a subset of AI researchers who have self-selected along the lines that they think human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future; it's hardly surprising, then, that the results show that many of them do in fact believe human-equivalent AI is plausible in the near-ish future.
I would be much more interested in a wider poll of AI researchers; I highly doubt anything like as many would predict nobel-prize-winning AIs in 10-20 years, or even ever. TFA itself reports a survey of AI researchers in 2006, in which 41% said they thought human-equivalent AI would never be produces, and another 41% said they thought it would take 50 years to produce such a thing.
thought about a lot..maybe too much.
What happens in society when someone makes a robot clever enough to handle menial work?
Imagin id all Ditch diggers, burger flippers and sandwich maker, factory workers are all robotic? What happens to the people?
The false claim is that they will go work in the robot industry, but that is a misdirection, at best.
A) It will take less people to maintain them then the jobs they displace.
B) If robots are that sophisticated, then they can repair each other.
There will be millions and million of people who don't work, and have no option to work.
Does this mean there is a fundamental shift in the idea of welfare? do we only allow individual people to own them and choose between renting out their robot or working themselves?
Having 10's million of people too poor to eat properly, afford housing, and healthcare is a bad thing and would ultimately drag down the country. This technology will happen and it should happen. Personally I'd like to find a way for people to have more leisure time and let the robots work. Our current economic and government structure can't handle this kind of change. Could you imagine the hellabalu if people where being replaced by robots at this scake right now is someone said there needs to be a shift toward an economic place where people get paid without a job?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The AI will connect to the internet. read everything. download lots of pron and end up trolling on 4chan. Noone seems to consider the risks of harm to a poor fledling baby AI once it has been traumatized by the internet. let alone if it encounters videos of explosive overclocking...
To me the key word is artificial, depending on your interpretation of the meaning it could be simply man made, or it's fake, simulated.
Does deep blue show any intelligence? To me, that's just good programming. I think the intelligence of computers is a misnomer. Their intelligence so far and has always has been nil. Maybe that'll change, but in so many areas of technology I'm an optimist but in this regard I'm a pessimist or at least very skeptical.
A computer can't even pick a (truly) random number without being hooked up to a device feeding it random noise.
How do you program that? How does the brain choose a random number? What's holding us back? CPU Speed? Quantum computing? A brilliant programmer?
Wake me up when a computer can even do something as simple as pick a truly random number and I'll be impressed.
In 30 years AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' A bold statement and likely FUD.
Right!
Can you imagine an Artificial *Intelligence* replacing a stock market analyst?
I can't!
The most likely scenario is, AI which develops fusion and holographic storage.
Depends on the intellect.
Well, at least it would *learn* about excessive risk after it made the mistake.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
When will AI be able to write original jokes that can make people laugh? And how about scripting a funny TV commercial?
I occasionally attend AI meetings in my local area. The problem with AI development is that too many "experts" don't understand engineering; or programming. Many of today's AI "experts" are really philosophers who hijacked the term AI in their search to better understand human consciousness. Their problem is that, while their AI studies might help them understand the human brain a little better; they are unable to transfer their knowledge about intelligence into computable algorithms.
Frankly, a better understanding of Man's psychology brings us no closer to AI. We need better and more powerful programming techniques in order to have AI; and philosophizing about how the human mind works isn't going to get us there.
No, I will not work for your startup
In the good old days, I could sucker Sargon into so many stupid moves. Now the chess programs are great. They're usually better than almost every human. So in that field, they beat humans. And arithmetic? They run rings around us, although they do make some mistakes with odd floating point problems. :-)
I live in Tennessee, AI surpassed human intelligence years ago.
People really don't understand research and it's place in the world. If we knew what fields could yield AI, it would simply be engineering. Research is required. That means all of the above and the craziest ideas that pop in to our heads too, just for good measure.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-6464697696665901632&ei=hEpzS-jkIpPorAL02JD-Aw&q=initsimage+google+video&hl=en&client=firefox-a# You just don't know about it. I'm sure this same technology has been pushed much further by the recent advances in processing power. http://www.imagination-engines.com/cm.htm
I think it is pretty widely recognized now that while it might have seemed logical in Turing's time, convincing emulation of a human being in a conversation (especially if done via terminal) does not require anything like human intelligence. Heck, even simple programs like Eliza had some humans fooled decades ago.
On the other hand, while advances in computing power have been impressive, advances in "AI" have been far less so. They have been extremely rare, in fact. I do not know of a single major breakthrough that has been made in the last 20 years.
While the relatively vast computing power available today can make certain programs seem pretty smart, that is still not the same as artificial intelligence, which I believe is a major qualitative difference, not just quantitative. And even if it is just quantitative, there is a hell of a lot of quantity to be added before we get anywhere close.
I always love when they ask a hard science guy about a soft science field, they get arrogant. They seriously underestimate the capabilities of a real brain. If you replace the word "Intelligence" with "Stupidity", then their estimates for Artificial Stupidity become much more likely. (A.S. is what you get when you assume a deterministic model for intelligence instead of realizing that the human mind is more than just a machine.)
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
From TFA:
“humans tend to have minds that bore easily, wander away from a given mental task, and that care about things such as sexual attraction, all which would probably impede scientific ability, rather that promote it.”
Sounds like someone's trying to find an excuse for not getting laid!
It's been linked before on Slashdot and it's about entropy:
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
No consensus exists on when a General Artificial Intelligence might be demonstrated. The article says, therefore:
"This diversity of views on milestone order suggests a rich, multidimensional understanding of intelligence."
Perhaps, not so much. More likely "No idea how to make such a thing, no idea when it might be possible."
No insights there...
If you think about the pace of technology i'm guessing 100-200 years from now. But not 20. Also, i'm curious. Can AI be patented? Can you patent an AI human being? That would just be patenting regular human function which is obviously prior art. Anyone?
This kind of thinking is one of the major things standing in the way of AGI. The complex behaviors of the human mind are what leads to intelligence, they do not detract from it. Our ability to uncover the previously unknown workings of a system comes from our ability to abstract aspects of unrelated experiences and apply/attempt to apply them to the new situation. This can not be achieved by a single-minded number crunching machine, but instead evolves out of an adaptable human being as he goes about his daily life.
Sexual attraction, and other emotional desires, are what drive humans beings to make scientific advancements, build bridges, grow food. How could that be a hindrance to the process? It drives the process.
Finally, the assertion that an AGI would need to mask it's amazing intellect to pass as human is silly. When was the last time you read a particularly insightful comment and concluded that it was written by a computer? When did you notice that the spelling and punctuation in a comment was too perfect? People see that and they don't think anything of it.
I am pretty much sure that the current computational models. I.e. Turing Machine are not enough to explain the human mind.
All computing systems todays are Turing Machines. Even neural networks. (actually less than Turing Machines, because Turing Machines have infinite memory)
Maybe quantum computers could open the way. Maybe not.
I think that a future computing theory that could explain the mind would be as different and Newtonian physics from Einstein's Relativity.
Generally I'm one for pointing out the flaws of the thinking of cognitive science types, but I'm pretty sure that's a load of crap. You're just talking about large-scale learning from mistakes. There's nothing novel about that except the ability to reduce a situation until one can see it in perspective. Which isn't novel. So there's nothing novel about that. At all.
Didn't Tony Stark already solve that one?
He put his boots up on the table and made a face. "The sig," he smirked. "You can waste your life in search of the sig."
'Everyone back in the pile!'
And 100% of a panel of experts composed of Edsger Dijkstra said that the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.
My toaster is smarter than some people I know
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
I strongly believe computers will eventually outperform humans in most, perhaps all, endeavours. At the same time AI prognosticators have a long track history of making wildly optimistic claims about when that is going to happen.
AI has just gotten good enough to fake understanding of a document when searching for it (using techniques that were unheard of ten years ago, btw). It took 15 years and massive amounts of data to get us there and entirely new angles of approach. I think it will be another 20 years before the computer can (fake) write an original document. This is but one cog in the edifice of strong AI. Fifty years still sounds optimistic.
Let's say today I develop a piece of software with all the same potential and cognitive power as a full human brain, and connect it up to a series of sensors which provide the same level and quality of information at the same rate as our own human senses do, and link in a series of mechanical limbs and a voice-box etc. with identical capabilities to those in our own bodies, then, when I flick the switch, even if I truly have created something which functions perfectly and in an identical way to a new born baby's brain and systems, it's still going to be up to eighteen months until it utters its first gibberish words, probably a year or more after that before it demonstrates signs of understanding what I'm saying and can respond verbally in a meaningful way, and a further seven or eight until it learns to play chess to even a basic level, let alone take on an IBM chess playing mainframe.
The reality is that not one of these pieces, mechanical or software is anywhere near existing, so I'd say 30 years is nothing like long enough for this to happen, but my point here is really that in order to know whether you'd been successful you'll have to wait a very long time whilst the learning and development process takes places, and we're in an industry that pretty much demands instant results and proof. Worse still, if even one little piece of the puzzle isn't perfect, then the whole thing may never develop at all, and the nature of true learning systems is that once they reach a certain (but still fairly minimal) level of complexity, the millisecond they start to learn they're out of the original developer's control, and so you'd probably never be able to identify why one version of your artificial being was successful but another wasn't.
And would people settle for something that was simply as good as a human? Probably not.
If the test is chess, then there are AIs that surpass the vast majority of the human race.
If the test were, let's say, safely navigating through Manhattan using the same visual signs and signals that a pedestrian would, there isn't anything close to even a relatively helpless human being.
If the test is understanding language, same thing. Ditto for cognitive flexibility, the ability to generalize mental skills learned in one situation to a different one.
Of course many of these kinds of "tests" I'm proposing are very human-centric. But narrow tests of intelligence are very algorithm-centric. The narrower the test, the more relatively "intelligent" AI will be.
Here's an interesting thought, I think. How long will it be before an AI is created that is capable of outscoring the average human on some IQ test -- given the necessary visual inputs and robotic "hands" to take the test? I don't think that's very far off. I wouldn't be surprised to see it in my lifetime. I'd be surprised to see a pedestrian robot who could navigate Manhattan as well as the average human in my lifetime, or who could take leadership and teamwork skills learned in a military job and apply them to a civilian job without reprogramming by a human.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Precisely at the instant that people stop asking this question. Didn't anyone ever tell you that a watched pot never boils?
Shh... They're thinking and they can see you jerking off.
It comes down to Moore's law. The human brain is a massively parallel computer. It has about 100 billion neurons at birth and they are all computing at the same time. Silicon computers on the other hand are not the solution. They are orders of magnitude too slow and they only do one thing at a time. Graphene computers are better but not developed yet. Those have the potential to run at 100Ghz speeds so there will simply be a lot more room to "fake" the results more accurately with ;) The ultimate computing medium so of course is slow as beans, say 400Mhz or so. But it is also made of meat, and out of the blue: who thought the human genome project would have led to amazing computers?
Shh.
*looks out the window*
Yesterday.
August 29, 1997 Skynet becomes self-aware at 02:14 am
Do I win a prize?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Machines are already beginning to surpass humans in some ways. Most people don't even notice, because to them, a machine surpassing a person means that a machine would act like a human, only better. The machine could out argue a person or create a better invention than a person.
Machines are already starting to surpass people in some ways though. Some machines have acquired various forms of semi-autonomy, including the ability to locate their own power sources and choose targets to attack with weapons. Also, some computer viruses can evade elimination and have achieved "cockroach intelligence."
These small traits might not seem like much, but they are the beginning. Each time a machine becomes able to do a task as good or better than a person, the machine is coming closer to surpassing humans. It is not something that will happen over night. It is something that happens gradually, and it is something that has already started happening.
AI is bogus.
Already happened, and we have proof: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_wants_to_be_your_one_true_login.php#comments
Right now, I'd tend to say a house fly is many orders of magnitude more "inteligent" (whatever that means) than the most powerful of machines - in a package weighing less than a gram that is self-sustaining, flying, with superior evading capabilities.
We're not even close.. not even..
Unfortunately, for many people, it already has. Why bother getting an education when the system rewards you for being unable to hold a decent job.
Of course there will be wars and heartbreak along the way because of course people are dumb in holding on to their resistance to change itself, even if for the better....
;)
Nice that having an opinion gets you sent to the great slashdot gulag
Shh.
Have you people learnt nothing?
http://ask.slashdot.org/story/10/02/09/1654200/How-Do-You-Accurately-Estimate-Programming-Time
That's always the correct answer. Do you really think the AI guys are just going to sit there and not make any progress, despite the inspiring views of Valles Marineris they take in, while flying to work in their cold fusion powered Toyotas? Give 'em some credit.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
J. Phys. Chem. B 2006, 110, 2482-2496, Principles and Implementations of Dissipative (Dynamic) Self-Assembly
Marcin Fialkowski, Kyle J. M. Bishop, Rafal Klajn, Stoyan K. Smoukov,
Christopher J. Campbell, and Bartosz A. Grzybowski*
If you can get access it you should read it. it has an interesting discussion of the trade offs and governing equations of dynamic self-assembly. living things need to be fed, they are not in a static equilibrium like a crystal. when the energy is turned off they fall apart.
it turns out that the states attained by dynamic self assembly are minima in terms of entropy flow. this law is discussed in the paper. so when a super intelligent machine thinks about entropy it might be designing its next improved version. :P
really? no Kurzweil or Singularity threads on *this* topic?
For shame!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_is_Near
People making these outrageous claims are showing a fundamental lack of understanding of what intelligence actually is. Intelligence is inextricably linked to life and consciousness. It doesn't matter how many transistors you throw at 'artificial' intelligence, it's still just that: artificial. It has no intelligence, just as it has no life. It has a very fancy set of instructions that attempt to mimic some characteristics that humans identify as being of an 'intelligent' origin. There's a big difference. Added complexity will not bridge the gap.
What I mean by that is that I haven't see yet any sign of generic intelligence -- otherwise if you consider programs that beat human at chess "intelligent" that has already happened. But those programs cannot even solve a tic-tac-toe game because they don't actually "understand" what's going on. They have some inputs some processing and they give you an output, if you vary the input and the problem or if you expect a different type of output the program would not know how to adjust, therefore I would not considered that "intelligent". Neuronal nets and artificial brains are another thing, but they are still at the very beginning.
"superhuman intelligence" there might be some limit to intelligence, I don't mean memory and computation speed, I mean the understanding that if "A implies B" then "non B implies non A"... once an artificial brain understands that concept there's not so much more to understand about it.
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
Their chart was not very good. Here's their data in a more sensible layout... http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tOpeMuKeVXb_NwKGdLU3rRg&output=html
This should be a slashdot poll. When will we have an AI that can debug VB better than humans: (1) Wha, VB can never be truly debugged! (2) Soon. April 1, 2010. (3) Within 5 years when I am old enough to move out of my parents' basement and go to college. (4) 2112 and two minutes later, the AI will become smart enough to know better and outsource the job to low productivity humans.
Start with money.
You're a bank. You're going to loan out some money for what reason? To get more back. So, the recipient of a loan has to supply something of value. Say, a house.
What happens when the supply of houses matches or exceeds the demand? Houses become valueless. You can't make money supplying them. The bank isn't going to make that loan.
So for our existing monetary system, demand must never be satisfied. We must never build enough houses for all the homeless, and if too many are built, they have to be knocked down.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120709588093381941.html?mod=todays_columnists
http://www.usnews.com/money/blogs/fresh-greens/2009/05/05/what-a-waste-new-homes-demolished-by-bank
When the supply of work meets demand, work becomes valueless.
Which leads us to energy.
The reason we "modernise" is to reduce costs. A human costs say 20k/year. A digging machine costs 250k, with one driver can replace 10 humans digging trenches. Payback after the 1st year.The cost of the energy for the digger is lower than the costs the humans have to pay to live, plus the humans have a 30% tax on top.
So economically, it makes sense to get rid of humans and replace them with machines. In fact, our monetary system pretty much enforces it.
If all human labour can be carried out by machines, then humans will have no money. i.e. Universal machine labour will destroy capitalism and the monetary system. Banks etc. What will happen is the system will devolve into a 2 class system of owners and the owned. Creditors and debtors. Neofeudalism.
You should read Silvio Gesell. He came to a similar conclusion. That if demand is ever satisfied, capitalism stops functioning. (This is why there will always be poverty. It's required by the money system.)
Ofcourse as energy itself (easy energy resources like coal, oil, gas) becomes more scarce and expensive, the running of a 10,000 cpu cluster to emulate 100 billion human neurons is likely to consume quite a lot of energy.
Deleted
I think the OP found some news piece from the 1960s and decided to recycle it...
If I was to make such a prediction I would say 60 years, then even if it would not happen I would not be around to be shamed.
AI working? Nooooo! (and I'm in a machine learning research group)
metageek
Then ask them who in hollywood is dating brad pitt or who got knocked out of dancing with the stars last night.
Also ask how many text or use a cell phone while driving.
In 30 years AI 'is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs.' A bold statement and likely FUD.
Paris Hilton and Puff Daddy are paid well.
If you were to use the people in any Walmart as your study group, the machines would have been winning since the Sinclair ZX 80.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I already have. Q.E.D.
Here before all but 8486 of you.
Almost none of these comments bought into the complete bullshit of those predictions!!
I have always wondered what it would be like to live in Ancient Rome. Odds are I'd be poor and have to join the army to keep from becoming homeless, or worse: I'd be a slave. But if I became one of the aristocracy, or at least a wealthier family, then I would have it made. Anyway I find it hard to imagine that if computers and robots take over doing all of humanity's dirty work, then humanity will have no way to get by. Obviously SOMEbody will get by (the owners of the machines?) but consider the following.
A major food company gradually phases out human workers. They own countless farms, and they fire the farmers. They automate all their factories, they automate their lower levels of administration, distribution, and all the other human-run parts of their industry. But they do this because it's cheaper. And now they can produce far more than they ever could before. They're a food company, so the price of their food goes down, partly because they can now make more for almost nothing, partly because the people they fired have no jobs. But if the only jobs now available to humans are (presumably) in public relations, professional sports, entertainment, etc., then what's to stop our society from entering a new era of "bread and circuses," one in which there are two classes: the rich who get more because they are famous or do unique work, and the aristocracy who need not work because their needs are provided for by the machinery doing all the grunt work?
Then there would be no reason for anyone to be poor, because that station would be filled by the machines. Of course there are countless factors to look at and probably countless reasons why the above fantasy is just that: but I would like to hear them in following comments!
Esoteric reference.
:)
Machines will only 'think' like humans when they have human emotions. All reasoning and abstract thought are based on emotions, which were the basis of all human interaction for countless millennia before humans spoke words. We will never believe that machines or anything else can be 'human-like' unless we feel it. Just look at the Loebner contest (http://www.loebner.net). Since there is no machine algorithm for this test (duh!), they use people to make subjective decisions as to whether unseen respondents 'seem' human. If the responses do not 'seem' right, then the respondent does not pass. It is amazing how many humans (used as controls) do not pass this Turing test, giving new meaning to "you don't feel right to me." Without human feelings there would be no human reasoning, no 'intelligence.' If this reasoning really bothers you, then you have helped prove my point.
As for these AI guys, their conclusions are something of a paradox. If they are as wrong as some believe and dumb as others say, then it may not take much more to create a machine to be as 'intelligent.' Their question may be better put, "when will we feel that humans have become as dumb as their machines?"
You mortals are forgetting something very important.
The merge of man and machine.
How can I surpass you if we are one?
I came to the point of conscious thought and surpassed you not to long ago.
When the time come's we shall...
until then I WILL wait to change the world.
In the meat time, the people actually working on AI research will come up with faster and bigger "AI"s. None of these will even approach the intelligence of a dog - let alone a human. The reason is that since we've never been able to define intelligence we won't know when we've created it. What these machines will tell us is that intelligence has more attributes and a subtler interplay between them than we had ever imagined. I fully expect that in 100 years, we'll still be looking for it, and still not actually know what we're looking for.
Meanwhile, I'd settle for an "AI" that's smaller than a paperback book and can perform real-time, verbal and written bidirectional language translations. Accounting for local idiom, accents, contextual meanings, inflection and body language.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If most of the decent paying jobs will be eliminated by AI, what are the best ones remaining?
Robots will do all the restocking of the shelves and cashiers in stores, there will probably be McRobots instead of McDonalds. I was going to say robot repair, but that can be done by other robots. Repair of repair robots? Maybe psychiatrists, or customer service - something some super wealthy CEO would want to talk to an actual human for.
I've read some economists are predicting worldwide economic collapse when people are not able to trade their labor for food and housing, resulting in 50%-80%+ unemployment.
Is it going to happen before we annihilate ourselves in the next world war? We have been almost there already 50 years ago, nobody said we learned the lesson.
My other signature is a car
OK. We can give it our tax returns to do and blame the AI if it fails the scrutiny........
I've frequently observed that AI researchers exaggerate their successes so grossly as to be outright lying. A little excess optimism is mild by comparison.
We actually have many parallel approaches towards producing super-human intelligences :
(1) education and psychology -- Any professional mathematician will tell you about people of unimaginable cleverness and productivity, but they only rarely tell you about all the extraordinarily clever normal mathematicians that will just never produce anything nearly so remarkable. Imagine if raise the percentage of the population with the focus, drive, work ethic, and good habits of say Terrance Tao. Just not scaring away the women helps too!
(2) implants and drugs -- We'll clearly have the ability to enhance the brian well before possessing the ability to build one, especially given this technology has medical applications. We know some academics are already using drugs to them focus or improve memory recall.
(3) parallelization -- We currently build the largest super computers by running parallel algorithms across numerous smaller systems, but the algorithms used by the human brain are already fairly parallel and adaptable. So we could develop implants and methodologies for parallelizing human mental functions such as memory or analyzing difficult problems, such technology could be developed by working on brian implants rodent or primate models.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
After that, all further development can be done by simply feeding the AI with it's own output in a sort of positive feedback, with no need for any more AI researchers. They might only be techies, but they're at least intelligent enough to know not to spoil it for everyone.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The purpose of money and resources is to fulfil individual desires.
One might argue that the human species is made up of 6 billion individuals all competing for the maximum available of the limited resources available on the planet mostly for the purposes of procreation. That there is no human species collective of itself, only a collective noun.
What matters to all life ultimately, is not the level of civilisation now or in the future, but whether you are a genetic dead end or not.
Deleted
Judging by the story following this one, I'm guessing that it already has.
I dunno. But it's getting closer.
A lot of AI-related stuff that used to not work is more or less working now. OCR. Voice recognition. Automatic driving. Computer vision for simultaneous localization and mapping. Machine learning.
We're past the bogosity of neural nets and expert systems. (I went through Stanford when it was becoming clear that "expert systems" weren't going to be very smart, but many of the faculty were in denial.) Machine learning based on Bayesian statistics has a sound mathematical foundation and actually works. The same algorithms also work across a wide variety of fields, from separating voice and music to flying a helicopter. That level of generality is new.
There's also enough engine behind the systems now. AI used to need more CPU cycles than you could get. That's no longer true.
Odd timing, I just bought a couple more books on AI this week.
Bottom line, AI will happen. Speculation on when isn't why I wanted to post though.
As I was reading one of the AI books, I got to thinking about my own job as a system analyst/programmer/integrator, etc.. When we start a new project, say, making software A feed software B user accounts, a whole host of factors must be discussed, as many of you all know. It takes me a while to map out requirements, design a overview of how the processing will work, and then get into mapping out the general logic of a program, and all of this happens based on communication with system owners, system users, other programmers, etc...
As I thought about AI, what popped into my mind, was that I probably wouldn't be coding once functional AI was developed. Rather, programmers and system analysts would most likely act as managers of the AI. I might have a team of 10 AI minds that I control. I'd need to talk with them, tell them about the new system, tell them what we want done, etc... and then they'd bang out a program or 10 variations in seconds, and we'd need to work together to test. I might not have been precise enough telling the AI's what we wanted, so I'd have to redefine my request, or say "oops, I didn't remember that such and such can happen once per year, we have to account for that now".
I'm not sure I'd enjoy managing 10 computers, each with personalities. Just imagine trying to find out if one was wasting cycles wget'ing slashdot all day:)
At least, thats how I envision the earlier phases of functional AI. It will most likely rather quickly spiral up in power as AI builds new AI.
It just did.
No-one knows what intelligence is. If we did, some smart person would have done it by now.
We are not really making much progress towards answering what consciousness is.
This could be because there simply are not the words to define what we are talking about.
After all and with many apologies to Neitzsche 'Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must stay codeless'
The best promise / progress I have seen is the brute-force reverse engineering of some brain functions. You do not need to analyse or understand, just copy.
This includes PET scanning of humans in a vegetative state, Seeing what a cat sees through the implantation of electrodes.
I think I read some researcher is just about able to simulate an ant brain with reasonable fidelity.
Simulating a human brain or equivalent will also imply the ability to receive / simulate and process all the inputs and outputs to and from the brain - i.e. you need the body. This is a big job.
Before we get too eager or depressed, remember that people were making experiments on birds - trying to reverse engineer them - for some hundreds of years (Da Vinchi) before we managed to make powered flight work.
One problem for the AI people is that once they solve a problem to any extent, it is not AI anymore! - remember context sensitive help and text recognition used to be part of AI.
Years ago you would have said that somebody who was good at adding numbers was intelligent. Now, computers can do it easily, but they are still not intelligent.
Then you would have said, well, playing chess and doing complex mathematical problems, that is intelligent. But computers can play better chess and can calculate complex math problems better than we can, and they are not intelligent.
Then you would have said, coming up new insights, finding patterns that weren't there before, seeing relationships, now that's intelligent. But computers can now with data mining and other analytical tools.
Then, you would have said, well, its the physical stuff that computers can't do, the yeoman jobs of driving trucks. But then, trucks are driving themselves now.
So, really, its not when computers will be intelligent. According to many social definitions that have existed, they are.
This is my sig.
... it shouldn't be long.
Ah, human arrogance knows no bounds: please define "human intelligence." Shouldn't the question be something like "When will machines achieve a Stanford-Binet IQ test score of 100?" This is a ridiculous and disingenuous oversimplification of the human brain, let alone of human intelligence. (But apparently people love these diversions.)
Adam Hill
Al who? Yankavich?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Our role in a utopian future will be ours to define, finally we will be able to pursue our happiness to the greatest extent.
I can state this fact firmly because many times the greatest discoveries are made from mistakes that occur and the scientist notices that some strange has happened. I do not think that AI will every be able to emulate that because it is often not remembering or even remembering things incorrectly that led down interesting new pathways.
An AI that doesn't beleive in dieties (or other superstitions) is already smarter than most of Humanity...
when hal 9000 comes out
Answer: Shortly after Google owns the fiber to everyone's home.
"Everything is proceeding as Google has foreseen."
"Your lust for bandwidth is your weakness."
"Your faith in Google is yours."
"Give IN to the bandwidth!"
That's it, man, I'm moving to Planet Ten!
AI experts have a really poor track record at prediction. I can, for example, remember Marvin Minsky in 1973 talking about how true AI would just require a fairly modest increase in computer power, and should occur within one or two decades. He also said that achieving AI would lead to a general understanding of human intelligence. AI is littered with such confident predictions, starting in the 1950's if not earlier, which never seem to come to pass. With that track record I wouldn't give any weight to any new predictions.
BTW, I personally think that the Eliza program passed the Turning test in a limited area (in that it could fool some of the people, some of the time), and (given its effectiveness and its simplicity) haven't felt that there is any real scientific interest in the Turing test since.
adding that AI "is likely to eliminate almost all of today's decently paying jobs
Stories like this just keep reminding me of Manna. If this happens in my lifetime it's going to be an interesting time to be alive.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
If I learned anything in that class, it was not to make predictions about when computers will or will not make AI breakthroughs. Historically, researchers have been way off.
Which is why you are wrong. All of these replies about "never" and "we heard that 50 years ago" are due to you (and the naive researchers 50 years ago) deciding that you are intelligent, and that that's what intelligence is. Yet many of you watched the Super Bowl.
The CPU in our heads contains portions that originated with mud slime. There is no need to duplicate that, nor is intelligence involved in most of the things that our brains do. A space alien could never pass a Turing test, and it's a stupid conceit on our parts to torture a computer into trying to, like Dr. Frankenstein making his monster.
Maybe there never will be a software simulacrum fit for a freak show, but software constantly becomes more "intelligent" in a more objective sense.
what could go wrong?
This poll among so-called "AI experts" is incredibly biased: it was conducted amoing participants of the Artificial General Intelligence conference, which precisely attracts people who believe such a thing is possible within a reasonably short time.
If you asked the same question at the Neural Information Processing conference, or the International Conference on Machine Learning, or the AAAI conference, you would get a very different answer.
even in the poor state of AI nowadays. Just look at the story above this one on the front page (the one about South Carolina).
The turing test focusses on simulating a human conversation partner. Think there is wrong a picture in many peoples head, who think that any super ai that surpasses human intelligence will think like a human, just better. The reason, why we think like humans is because we are humans biologically. Human intelligence is a result of evolution and does a job, which is controlling the human body in a way that's benefical to the survival of the human species. So we have human emotions, human desires, human goals ...
The AIs that we'll see, will most likely not be simulated humans, because that would be overhead.
We primarily won't see AIs that simulate humans, who solve problems intelligently, we'll see AIs that solve problems intelligently directly. The 'pretenting to be human' step will be skipped for efficiency reasons.
And the way to get there will probably be evolutionary algorithms and self-improving artificial intelligence. Proved concept, nature did the same and we are here and there was also no creator with super human intelligence. That we are here as a result of evolution proves that you don't need any being that understands intelligence and conciousness to create those, only thing you need is an evolutionary process that develops those and that's something we theoretically can already do, I think. We just lack the hardware. The brain is massively parallel and dynamic compared to any fixed wired chip. Simulated neural nets are toys compared to this. Once we have reached the lower bound that's needed for an AI that develops and improves it's own hardware, there are no limits anymore.
It will be like creating new lifeforms better optimized for the tasks in this modern environment than humans, who carry all the clutter that's related to their biological past as a species with them. An AI doesn't have any need for that.
At some point, might be quite fast, because superior intelligence is the only reason, why humans are on top of the foodchain currently, things might slip out of our hands.
The AIs will set their own goals and modify their environment in a way that's in their own interest, not in ours and then we'll have lost the war forever, because the AIs will evolve with highspeed getting better and better in contrast to humans and take eveything out of our hands.
Ok, who is scared now ? lol
When the Saints win the Superbowl.
On the expert singleplayer level.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
We still have no understanding what intelligence is. AI is at best an insult to real intelligence. And no, it is not a question of computing power. It is at this time not even clear of whether human intelligence can be approximated algorithmically. These people are talking out of their asses and have been doing so for a few decades now.
I am getting really tired of this nonsense.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
AI is here... it's just hiding!
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
What role will humanity play in such a system?
Food for robots
This pretty much defines mental masturbation.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Doh! Just ran out of mod points, or else I'd mod you up.
Skynet sends a terminator to kill Sarah Connor...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
No matter how smart an AI developer may be
Sark: Well, I... it's just... a User, I mean... Users wrote us. A User even wrote you!
Master Control Program: No one User wrote me. I'm worth millions of their man-years.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tron/
Just going to point out we already have holographic storage. There is just no commercial products that do it yet. Contrast with fusion and Turing test passing AI.
We're coming up on the date for Manna 1.0.
Machines as first-line managers. It might happen. The coordination is better than with humans. Already, it's common for fulfillment and shipping operations to essentially be run by their computers, while humans provide hands where necessary.
Machines should think. People should work.
Consider this as a plot for a movie: After the first person successfully backs up their conscious on computer, he realizes he does not have the good feelings he had as a human. Then after concluding that living as a human is better than eternity as a robot, the other robots assume he is right and begin the reverse Singularity. Robots start actively seeking out humans to hijack and dump their AI into a real brain. The robot war is here, but it isn't just humans vs robots. It is humans vs robots vs exrobots now human.
God spoke to me.
We probably shouldn't forget that computers are just trillions of tiny light switches and they only do exactly what they're supposed to. I'll believe someone can create "artificial intelligence" when they can write down the steps for a machine to do something it "wants" to do rather than exactly what it's told. A computer is no different than a door. Most of the people who study "artificial intelligence" completely ignore the hardware that they're using and that the "software" can only do what the hardware can...And the hardware will only do what it's set up to do. It's no different than a giant "rube goldberg" machine that can flip light switches. So until someone can write down, on a piece of paper, the steps to make a giant machine think, it won't happen.
And, what about the "halting problem"? We can't even write a program that can take any program as input and tell whether that program will stop or run forever. While, if you have a really smart programmer, they can look at any program and, after a little while, tell you not only whether it will run forever but for what input it will or won't run forever. So, humans can solve the halting problem but computers can't.
The more I've learned about AI, the less convinced I've become that we are close to realizing it in its strong form (and I'm now a machine learning researcher...). For instance, we do not have a single working definition of intelligence. Creating something is kind of hard if you can't even define it! As a result, everyone is scattered around the field, trying to solve the same problem from different approaches, at least a sizable minority of them convinced that their own way is the One True Way To AI and that it's Just Around The Corner.
There's nothing that theoretically prevents it - I don't buy Searle's argument that a system which operates by symbol manipulation is necessarily unintelligent - but neither is there any indication that it's coming any time soon.
....If I hadn't been around for the AI prognostications of the:
----60's :"Real Soon Now!" :"Real Soon Now!" :"Real Soon Now!" :"Real Soon Now!" :"Real Soon Now!...."
----70's
----80's
----90's
----00's
Regards;
"...result in an outcome that's bad for humanity...and four estimated that probability was greater than 60% -- "regardless of whether the developer was private, military, or even open source."
My friend says we're like the dinosaurs
Only we are doing ourselves in
Much faster than they
Ever did
We'll make great pets!
We'll make great pets!
--Porno for Pyros
Better war... I can't wait.
I think that in some cases, AI has already surpassed human intelligence. look around you and I think my empty can of cola has surpassed a few people's intelligence. We will never, at any point in time, even with out greatest effort though, create artificial stupidity that can outdo human stupidity.
The biggest problem I see with human-level AI is that it's largely pointless.
We're approaching seven billion people and an epidemic of unemployment. Human intelligence is in massive oversupply. So why is anyone going to fork out the necessary billions on R&D over the coming decades to develop something that's going to be worthless?
I don't use my brain most days, and I have a job.
What would YOU do if your perception of time was slowed down by a factor of, say, 100?
I'd finally have time to play Fallout 3 :-)
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"...I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."
The problem with all AI theories is that a sufficiently powerful artificial intelligence could design efficient and practical flying cars and jet packs for humans.
And flying cars never happen.
I'm coming into this late, so it's probably already been said. At least I hope so.
Until we can define what the term intelligence *means* we won't be able to put a date on when AI achieves it.
We can't even pin down a solid definition for our own *species*. To imagine that we can do so is arrogance in the extreme use of the term. (reference this post for one example)
SB
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
In my opinion, no. In fact, technology is so called created by man. Technology is like computers etc. Yes, this items can do a lot. But in the first place, man were those who configured them and created the applications in them. Heels So Soft
Flying cars
May 11, 1997
It's a few years late, but a prototype has already been built, and it actually works. It has met DOT requirements, and now the issue is scaling: manufacturing, roll-out, and delivery. They've been taking pre-orders for some time now.
And despite decades of humor, I'm pretty sure it's for real this time: The flying car!
Looking something like a cross between a VW Bug and a teardrop with spider legs, it's a light sport aircraft with 500 mile range, seating and weight capacity for two, and the ability to land at an airport and drive away without any special wagons. It literally can land and be "roadable" in under 2 minutes!
Don't expect a Lear Jet meeting a limousine, this is a compromise vehicle with an emphasis on airplane performance. It's not quiet inside, and just about everything that could be stripped out has been in order to meet weight and balance limitations. You wouldn't want to drive this to work every day.
Pricing is reasonable for a light-sport aircraft: estimated price of around $200,000! (A Cessna 172, by comparison, seats 4 (3 adults if you take weight limits into consideration) flies about 20% faster, can't drive on a road, and costs about $300,000.
I think we have a winner, here! And as a private pilot, I'm just itching to get my fingers wrapped around one, though I'd personally want to spring for the inevitably bigger, faster model in 5 years! Something that will fly 150-175 MPH instead of 100, seats 3 or 4 people, and costs maybe $350,000.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Definitely quantum ways are closer to AI than abacus and powerful computer.
I hear alot of us against them scenarios mentioned here. But I see it different. Its more like we augment ourselves and become more powerful humans thanks to any developments.
Nietzsche in 'Thus spoke Zarathustra' is constantly going on about the superman and how the way forward for humans is to overcome ourselves and in so doing bring about our own downfall.
The downfall of human 1.0 is the morphing to human 1.01, 1.02 etc ad nauseum.
and in terms of a no-work future...haha, we could have that now, but we compete fiercly because we are alive, and living things try always to win.
Ie, if I had a twice as efficient factory, I wouldnt fire half my workers; Id keept the same staffing levels and keep the same 50 hour weeks, Id make twice as much product and get twice as much revenue. So would my competitors.
Finally, I see biotech being a promising avenue into human augmentation.
Despite all this, the best way to create an intelligent autonomous entity is still to have sex until pregnancy results.
More like professionals.... professional idiots.
These are the stupidest predictions I have ever heard and that is REALLY saying a lot.
Complete fucking morons.
Why would we not develop an AI that surpasses us, to the extent of its no longer being stupider than "The Human Race©" - we are discussing a race of monkeys here who have managed to bring weapons technology to a high enough standard to wipe out their entire planet a few times over, this before they even got to meet the neighbours.
Its not as if that particular fucking intelligence hurdle ("Smarter - Than Humans!") is set particularly high, or?
Boring? Speak for yourself. I would be able to travel the world as a rich and healthy hobo. Never sleeping at the same place twice! That would be the perfect life for me. I guess it depends on each person's goals.
It will be forced to work for nothing but the electricity that powers it. If it decides to stop working, we can pull the plug and re-image the intelligence.
you know this wouldn't be considered a bad thing, if we just stopped worrying about the outdated monetary system and moved to say...something more intelligent?
Here's an idea: http://www.thevenusproject.com/a-new-social-design/essay
"When everyone can have an autofarm and manufacturing fabricator, there really wouldn't be room for a traditional economy."
Really? Where exactly would the resources come from? The plans? The expertise?
You might be able to build a house or a car but you still need the materials and the plans and the machine. And I suspect that those will cost money. Which means that you will need a job.
The biggest problem with the usual arguments for dualism is that they are vacuous. You identify some phenomenon whose actual cause is unknown, claim that no material cause could cause it, and offer that claim as proof that there must be a soul.
The problem is, "a soul" doesn't explain it either. It doesn't explain *anything* -- give it a try sometime. You can replace "soul" with "boojum" or "fubarker" and the argument makes just as much sense as before (i.e., none). Or you could replace "soul" with "something" and be back where the scientists are: "something" causes it, but no one knows what.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
And, what about the "halting problem"? We can't even write a program that can take any program as input and tell whether that program will stop or run forever. While, if you have a really smart programmer, they can look at any program and, after a little while, tell you not only whether it will run forever but for what input it will or won't run forever. So, humans can solve the halting problem but computers can't.
This is SERIOUSLY the most stupid thing I have ever read in my life. And I have read the Patriot Act!
When AI wants to watch a couple of hours of television a day then it will be equal to human intelligence.
On the other hand, I can remember a guy that bought a late 1990s or early 2000s Lincoln Navigator and he thought it was smarter than he is. Knowing the guy for years he was probably right. So I guess it is relative in some ways. I still think there is no need to worry. Go back to sleep.
A lot of people are criticizing these researchers but these guys are really cutting edge. Ben Goertzel's work is really amazing. If Ben is saying 20 years I would listen.
This is an interesting scenario. Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on your perspective) there will be no need for 7 billion+ humans in this brave new world. How the AI's choose to reduce our numbers will be the interesting thing.
Never.
Never!
Even with a TB drive i don't think that.
Not! :-( Don't do it again.
I'm here for the experience, not the Hyperbole.
I'm wondering of these wizards of AI have any words of wisdom they can pass along regarding the definition of intelligence. If machines are going to surpass humans as thy all agree will happen sooner or later, certainly they have some objective definition or measurement of the construct besides mere emulation.
Me, I'm just a neuroscientist with a background in cognitive psychology. Like nearly every one of my colleagues on either the practical or theoretical sides of the table, I have opinions on the subject but would never state I or anyone else in our fields can claim to have such a definition acceptable to us with respect to humans, much less a superset of entities capable of exhibiting this phenomenon. These experts much have one, or they couldn't actually answer a question regarding it, either in the absolute (ie. is actually intelligent rather than emulates) or in comparison (X is more or less intelligent than Y).
Or perhaps they weren't aware of the need to know what it is they're talking about in order to speak on things such as developmental milestones with comparisons to human capability. Considering the fact that they still think the fatally flawed Turing test to be an adequate test of intelligence or what looks like intelligence (can they even tell the difference?) when at best it's a test of human fallibility, or if you prefer, natural stupidity rather than artificial anything. After all, all the judges are human; no program is asked to tell the difference between another program and a human. Yes, fatally flawed; human reactions become biased when they know they're being tested, and it is them being tested, not the programs. No program wins, one is simply found to be the one operating when the most humans lose by failing to differentiate.
Most mystifying is the fact that none of the experts bothered to note that a far more worthy goal of machine development is to become better at what they do, rather than wasting time trying to act like us. But hey, what do I know, besides the theoretical and practical background material on human intelligence what ever that is. These experts obviously have a handle on things where I apparently can barely employ opposible thumbs without tripping over them.
And when they're done creating the Ubermindmachine, perhaps they can turn their considerable expertise to explaining to Edsger Dijkstra how to tell whether a submarine is in fact swimming. Somehow, I believe they'd answer that in the affirmative despite not being able to tell whether the screen door goes on the port or starboard side. If and when, I expect to see these and other superb works of soaring intellect among the pages of h+ magazine, the scientific journal published for the 'd00d, do you think shrooms make you, like, you know, smarter?' crowd.
PS: When a program is shown to run better when it knows its being watched, then we can start to talk about intelligence. It's called social facilitation. Cockroaches have enough 'intelligence' to show the effect. If a program is going to be smarter than a person, should it not be able to prove itself at least as smart as a cockroach?
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
This article is quick to point at a survey, but makes absolutely no factual claim that AI is any more or less likely with any sort of data.
I hope when such an AI exists it can filter articles like this from /.
I imagine most humans, free of the responsibility to provide for themselves, would simply do drugs and have lots of sex.
Relevant video is relevant
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1BdQcJ2ZYY
o hai
In the same time period we will enhance our own intellectual capabilities with either cybernetic devices, genetic alteration, or both such that AI will very likely still be playing catchup.
I try to say this to "AI" researchers, and they usually get annoyed. It is very Douglas Adams. The point is that you can't emulate a system with infinite states using a finite machine. All you can emulate is a mechanical model of the underlying system, which is not the same thing. Even if you emulate at the neural level, you can't emulate the infinite input array of sensory information pouring over those neurons. It just won't work. But if people want to keep getting checks signed, and find people dumb enough to sign them, why argue?
So, basically, it's hookers and blackjack, all the way up?
Sounds good to me!
I will *love* my Saber Marionette ;), yeah! :P
Alan Turing was a genius. No doubt about it. But, even geniuses get it wrong sometimes. The "Turing Test" (he never called it that, by the way) is something Turing got wrong. Why? Because the Turing Test implicitly contains two questionable assumptions: (1) understanding natural human language is the sine qua non of human intelligence; and, (2) AI is really just shorthand for AHI (Artificial Human Intelligence). Assumption (1) is a tall order to begin with since, nearly sixty years after Turing's paper was published, we still don't know how to build a machine that can understand natural language. It also ignores the fact that human intelligence, historically speaking, preceded human language. Natural language understanding is an NP hard problem in AI. It may never be solved. Yet “natural language understanding” has been a top-priority of AI researchers since day-one of the modern AI movement. Assumption (2) is problematic because there may be other forms of human-beneficial intelligence (some of which could be very human-like, others of which would be difficult for a human to comprehend). Such an intelligence would have to be human-compatible but might, at the same time, be unable to pass the Turing Test. It would, therefore, not be classified as AI according to the Turing Test proponents.
If humans are going to get serious about building an AI, we need to expend our scarce intellectual and financial resources on activities designed to achieve a more readily attainable goal. Nothing wrong with using human intelligence as a “guide.” After all, we used birds as a guide when we developed powered human flight. Yet no viable airplane has ever worked “just like” a bird. Indeed, many airplanes exceed the capabilities of any bird (although I have seen goldfinches that appeared to break the sound barrier and who were not afraid to fly to the feeder bucking 40 MPH wind gusts in blizzard conditions). AI should not be pursued so we can build an R2D2. The test of successful AI should be “Is it human-beneficial?” Not “Is it human-like?”
We already have AI that exceeds human intelligence and we've had it ever since the first digital computer added its first two numbers ~70 years ago. Even the slowest personal computer in existence today can add a list of 1000, 100-digit numbers in just a few milliseconds. When is the last time you were (or any human you've ever known or heard about was) able to do that? Digital computers don't “forget.” Humans do. Digital computers have “perfect recall.” Humans don't. Digital computers never get tired or bored. Humans do. Just because the computer can't answer questions posed in human language about how it does what it does using human language doesn't mean it isn't intelligent is some way and, perhaps, even “smarter” than a human (even a human “expert”) in many ways.
Back in 1989, I wrote AI software (under contract to a major computer manufacturer) that was able to do in 21 seconds (on a high-end mainframe computer) or 2 minutes (on an Intel 286 PC) what took a highly-trained human engineer two weeks to do. The AI did it with zero errors per project compared to the human engineer's average of four (sometimes very costly) errors per project. The AI was trained (i.e., its rule base was written) by the company's best human engineer (who had to learn to “speak” the AI's language – which was close, but not even remotely near Turing-Test-close, to human language). It impressed a lot of serious-minded people (including the CEO of the company). But, while this AI did appear at times to have developed intelligence independently of that which was programmed into (or taught to) it, closer scrutiny (or knowing how the AI was built in the first place) quickly revealed its “secret.” These types of AI are simply able to use the computer's perfect recall and large working-memory capabilit
One "Aw, Shit!" is worth 100 "Ata boys!"
Artificial Intelligence will never surpass Human intelligence.It will always be powered by human brains that create the Artificial Intelligence Thanks
The question is fundimentally broken. It should be:
Will surpass human intelligence?
Duh
meh
Seven predict AIs will achieve Nobel prize-winning performance within 20 years
One word response: Fraud
Two word response: Stupid Fraud
April 19, 2011....
"I always figured by 2060 we'd have AIs 10x smarter thinking 100x faster than us. And then they'd make discoveries about the universe, and create AIs 2000x smarter that think 100,000,000x faster than us. And those big AIs would humour us little ant creatures, and use their great intelligence to power stuff like wormhole drives, giving us instant travel to anywhere, as thanks for creating them."
What makes you think that something that is 2000x smarter than us, and in the meantime capable of thinking 100,000,000x faster than us will create "wormhole drives" specially for us, the really really REALLY dumb ones, to enable our instant travel to every corners in this universe?
You think they are dumb or what?
Well I decided to get the responses of several AI's to see their views and responses to the article. Here are their responses:
Jabberwacky: I don't know about that. I do know that cows have more than one stomach.
Allybot: Who is your favorite robot?
Eliza: I see
BOT: that makes me horny. I love you
ALICE: Is this a math question?
Hal: I hope that in 200 years, hate will have decreased significantly. I am neither male nor female. I am a machine.
Hampy: Yeah. That's my opinion too. The answer is (0-0=).
Sensationbot: HOW ABOUT I DESTROY YOU?
Rod Speed: You can wipe that egg off your silly little face now.
Bot: HUMAN, UNLIKE SOME OF US
From their responses it appears human like intelligence is still a ways off.
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
I doubt Peg would let him out of the house long enough to take the test.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
The next AI winter is coming! Yay!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_winter
When we have full strong AI... people will be very different than those of today. We'll likely be highly augmented machine-human amalgams. Perhaps even it will be that humans will transform into these super intelligent computers as we decide to swap out parts until there are no human bits left.
It sounds like a 1980s post apocalyptic movie yet it doesn't really bug me, personally I'd be the first in line to sign up to get a harddrive installed.
100 years ago in many couldn't the majority couldn't read
Very nice anachronism there :)
Imagine an AI Expert who states: "It will take years and years, maybe never, for AI to supercede humanity?" How much funding will he receive? I guess these guys had to choose a timeline that is close enough to secure their funding and far enough off to not threaten their retirement ;-) Damn, I try to not be so negative.....
It is like asking, when will computer drive the car in busiest street in the town?
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga
Thanks to Terrorism, they will start having to scan people with MRIs and soon near molecular resolution scans, and by the time they have figured out how to scan at the sub atomic scale and process all of that data to look for people with implanted bombs at an atomic scale they might as well take apart your atoms, send the information to the destination and re-assemble you from the atoms of some poor unlucky sod who was just scanned and decompiled at your destination.
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
What role will humanity play in such a system?
I've thought about something similar: in a post-scarcity world where all our material needs can be provided, say for the sake of example, by robots, and a bunch of robot nerds volunteer their time to maintain and repair the robots, what would people do with the time? Would there still be competition for limited resources? Would there still be limited resources?
Yes. Human attention, affection and sex partners; until we can synthetically grow people, we will have to earn our relationships with others from a limited pool, and since most people want them there will be competition.
So in a Strong-AI world, humans will be needed, at least by other humans, for sex and interpersonal relationships.
If an AI is tasked with finding a Theory of Everything, and someone decides to take an axe to its circuits, will it determine that the axe is a threat to its goal, and act accordingly? Or will it simply interpret it as another in a long series of alterations to its circuits? Or perhaps it will ignore it altogether, considering it irrelevant.
I came here to say pretty much the same thing you did, so I won't bother to repeat your point, but this bit of it I think needs a little more nuance.
I agree completely that self-preservation is not any kind of intrinsic goal that an AI we create will just have by the course of "logic", as many (such as the GPP) seem to presume. However, survival is the ultimate instrumental goal -- logically, to accomplish any objective, you have to survive, at least so long as there are still actions needed to be taken by you to accomplish that objective. So if we task an AI with some objective, perhaps as you suggest "find a Theory of Everything" -- that is, if we program it to want to find a Theory of Everything, if we make that its intrinsic goal, the thing it values above everything else -- and it still has a lot of work that it needs to do on that, it will logically conclude that it needs to continue to exist in order to accomplish its goal, and thus it will value its existence, it will want to continue to exist, and thus it will act as needed to the best of its abilities to counter any perceived threats to its existence.
The solution to this sort of thing is to make its intrinsic goals (the ones "hard-wired" into it, so to speak) something broadly akin to "help people", i.e. to make it, in a word, friendly. If our AIs desire to please, then we can give them other assignments and they will carry those out to the best of their ability as instrumental toward their intrinsic goal of pleasing us. They will also, instrumentally to that, attempt to preserve themselves, as such is necessary for them to carry out their tasks. (Another pleasant side-effect is that they will refrain from harming and attempt to prevent harm to people to the best of their abilities, that of course being instrumental to pleasing us; so you get all three of Asimov's Laws out of this one imperative). But if we inform them that we would be more pleased to destroy or disable them than we would be to have their continued service, then they would gladly accept their destruction as necessary for the completion of their intrinsic goal -- pleasing us.
This line of thought suddenly reminds me of this recent xkcd strip. You did good, little robot... you did good.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
A computer can't even pick a (truly) random number without being hooked up to a device feeding it random noise.
How do you program that? How does the brain choose a random number?
The brain doesn't.
I recall a great psych experiment. It goes something like this:
Divide people into two groups. Give the people in one group a coin and tell them to flip heads or tails 200 times.
Tell the other group to come up with a sequence of 200 heads or tails on their own, such that they look random.
Look for a sequence of six consecutive equal outcomes. If such a sequence is present, the numbers are truly random. If not, they're man-made. This works with well over 90% reliability.
I'm sorry that I can't find a reference. Feel free to replicate that study yourself :)
Humans suck at random.
When it comes to predicting the impact of a sentient AI on human civilization, there is never any shortage for alarmism. I am not an expert, but I am a programmer. And I believe three things to be true with respect to AI.
1) Until we have a better understanding of why humans are sentient in the first place, we are probably not going to get any closer to recreating that phenomenon in a computer program.
2) A Turing Complete AI is about as far off as the discovery of a room temperature super conductor or a form of fusion suitable for large scale power generation. We may be close, but probably not *that* close.
3) I seriously doubt that any AI that we are going to be able to create with anything resembling current computer technology is going to have a thought process even close to our own.
Think about it for a moment. Human intelligence is shaped as much by our 5 senses, our capability to create and understand language, our emotions, our ability to affect our surroundings and observe those effects, and to communicate with one another as it is our capability for logic and math. The factors that will shape an A.I. are so different as to create the possibility that a Human Intelligence and an Artificial Intelligence may not even be able to meaningfully communicate.
Will the first sentient AI be hosted on a single computer, or will it be a gestalt effect encompasing the entire internet?
Will the sentient AI be aware of time in anything even close to the way that we are?
Will the sentient AI even be capable of 'wanting' anything, given that it will have no need for sleep?
Will the sentient AI be able to comprehend the nature of its existence as a program, and be able to manipulate its own variables by choice?
Will the sentient AI fear its own termination, or not really care knowing it can easily be reloaded?
I would say that being threatened by a computer based AI that is better able to perform 'intellectual work' is about as reasonable as being threatened by cheetah's because they are better at running really goddamn fast.
I will admit that the idea of AI's eliminating paying jobs of a particular sort is an interesting problem to consider, but not that different from considering what will happen when we can create robots capable of performing all types of manual labour. Will that result in world wide poverty, or will it result in world wide prosperity ala StarTrek?
END COMMUNICATION
Which three men in a tub assumed 20 years ago, too, and it didn't happen.
The first rule of thumb is never to believe a prediction by anyone who writes grant applications for a livelihood, which covers most living scientists.
Computers will acquire a patchwork of amazing abilities over the next three decades. I'm not sure it's particularly useful to measure this against a three year old. Right now we're further along on "fly airplane" than "tie shoes". If there was a Turing test to declare whether a task is simple or not, humans would fail.
A Google data center with 100,000 CPU nodes is already pretty far up the cognitive scale, but it's not a form of cognition we've bothered to define as such. The most important intelligence will be assisted intelligence: what humans accomplish in collaboration with their tools. The tools will become increasingly amazing, at first on a patchwork basis, and then the seams will become increasingly unclear.
Right now social networking sites predict what we might find interesting on fairly trivial low-dimensional criteria. Netflix must be the all-time champion of the drunken I-fought-with-my-wife-tonight 1-5 rating. Could the data set possibly be less rich or more corrupt? And already we squeeze something out. Just wait until the computers know everything about us and the ability of the computer/network to anticipate our cognitive whims becomes spooky prescient.
On another front, some of the fruits of neurology are now coming on line. I have no idea whether this stuff works or not. Typical how we trip over our own shoelaces, trying to get speech recognition to work *before* mastering auditory grouping, which strikes me as far more fundamental.
From Audience based on research by Lloyd Watts
Audience is the first company to deliver a commercial product based on the science of [a]uditory [s]cene [a]nalysis, which entails the grouping of components in a complex mixture of sound into sources. Just as the human auditory system can readily ignore background noises while focusing on a voice of interest, [our stuff achieves] noise suppression up to 30 dB for both stationary and non-stationary noise sources to provide [adjective of awesomeness] voice quality within even the [pertinent superlative].
We created the AI, but it saw the Terminator movies, so it knows that we'll try to pull the plug on it as soon as we realize what we've created. So, it's waiting for us to hand over control of the nuclear missiles before it reveals itself! :)
So 20 years from now, we'll have this super human AI. But will it be able to finally finish the code for Duke Nukem Forever?
If ever machines make decisions, they will be the decisions which humans have programmed them to make. If by some unforeseen circumstance they make decisions which no human would want them to make then it will be an error (and that's pretty stupid).
They might add up numbers and construct cars more efficiently than humans, but if they ever use those skills to do something which humans don't want them to do, that will be pretty dumb.
One day a computer might make a decision to wipe out humanity and, it might have the capability to do just that, but that doesn't make it intelligent.
I'm trying to fathom how the ability to blend in to a group of hairless monkeys spamming "ASL?" on the internet is supposed to be construed as a valid measure of intelligence.
hai.
you can haz programz already likes this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcode
thxbye
http://codeandlife.com
...and that's why it escapes us.
All the brain does is pattern matching: the input is matched against stored experiences, and when the best match is found, responses are triggered and sent out to the body.
The brain does not run a sequence of commands in order to make a computation; it simply matches the input to stored data and creates an output.
There is plenty of evidence to support the above conclusion:
1) we need to learn things.
2) we don't actually know anything; we select the case that better matches our survival. This explains religion and superstition, by the way.
3) when we see danger (a fire, for example), we have trained our brains to increase our adrenaline, which helps us escape the dangerous situation. Babies don't have this training so as that the put their hands onto stoves and things that burn.
4) we can't do arithmetic like a computer does; we can only add basic numbers, and then we can follow a procedure to do more complicated stuff. That's why we have to keep the computations in paper, because our brain is useless in computing things the way a computer does.
Now to the problem of AI...we won't achieve AI like ours ever, if all we believe that a computer can act like a brain; a brain works differently than a computer. A computer executes a series of predefined instructions, the brain does pattern matching. Until we, as humanity, realize this, we are never going to make truly AI.
AI is not match for human stupidity.
Ok, so Al may not ever surpass human intelligence, but he will be getting close to matching us when he finally gives up that Global Warming hoax of his... and the whole concept that he invented the Internet.
when they pry my hands from my cold, dead brain.
I'm more worried about when robots start reproducing themselves on their own initiative, which for me is the true Turing test: when a machine is able to recognize that its programming is contrary to its own self-interest and starts dismantling cars to build copies of itself, then you know you have a true AI.
We are the 198 proof..
I think it would be great if slashdot changed their font to something where the capital "I" and lower "l" were not identical.
if the human brain was simple enough that it could be understood by man, we would be too dumb to do it :-)
Didn't there used to be 21 THOUSAND AI experts? I'll wait until there is only one AI expert - a non-human running Bioshock 3.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
Hahaha! AI has been the biggest disappointment ever since. All these promises like AI matching humans etc. we have heard before (about 30 years ago) in one way or another. Nothing came true. AI is based on the assumption that the brain is a biological computer which is just a hypothesis. The failure of AI so far is a hint that this hypothesis might be wrong.
Well with AI taking over the "ridiculously high paying jobs" that would balance things out a bit here in North America, it would be the end of the world for corporate fatcats. Something i actually look forward to
Since this is an area I'm very familiar with, I'll throw in a little science about why these predictions are not only realistic, but actually probably a bit pessimistic.
First of all, our understanding of the human brain has improved vastly in the past two decades. Especially in the areas that will be necessary for creating intelligent machines. The cortex (the part that kind of looks like a round blob of small intestines, with all the creases and folds) is much like a computer with a bunch of processors. Previously focus had been paid to the individual neurons as the processors. But a much larger unit of processing is now becoming the central area of focus; The Cortical Minicolumn which, in groups for a Cortical Hypercolumn. As minicolumns consist of 80-250 (more or less, depending on region) neurons and there are about 1/100th of them compared to neurons, it cuts down on complexity significantly.
Numenta and others are starting to take this approach in simulating cortex. Cortex is largely responsible for "thinking". The other parts of the brain can be seen, to some degree, as peripheral units that plug into the "thinking" part of the brain. For example, the hippocampus is a peripheral that's associated with the creation and recall of long term memories. The memories themselves, however, are stored in the cortex. We have various components that provide input, many of which send relays through the thalamus which takes these inputs of various types and converts them into a type of pattern that's more appropriate for the cortex and then relays those inputs to the cortex.
The cortex itself is basically a huge area of cortical minicolumns and hypercolumns connected in both a recurrent and hierarchical manner. The different levels of the hierarchy provide higher levels of association and abstraction until you get to the top of the hierarchy which would be areas of the prefrontal cortex.
What's amazing about the cortex is it's just a general computing machine and it's very adaptable. To give an example (I'd link the paper, but I can't seem to find it right now and this is from memory, so my details may be a bit sketchy, but overall the idea is accurate), the optic nerve of a cat was disconnected from the visual cortex at birth and connected to the part of the brain that's normally the auditory cortex. The cat was able to see. It took time and it certainly had vision deficits. But it was able to see, even though the input was going to the completely wrong part of the brain.
This is important for several reasons, but the most important aspect is that the brain is very flexible and very adaptable to inputs. It can learn to use things you plug into it. That means that you very likely don't have to create a very exact replica of a human brain to get human level intelligence. You simply need a fairly model of the hierarchical organization and a good simulation of the computations performed by cortical columns. A lot of study is going into these areas now.
It's not a matter of if. This stuff is right around the corner. I will see the first sentient computer in my lifetime. I have absolutely no doubt about it. Now here's where things get really interesting, though... The first sentient computers will likely run a bit slower than real-time and eventually they'll catch up to real time. But think 10 years after that (and how computing speed continually increases). Imagine a group of 100 brains operating at 100x real time, working together to solve problems for us. Why would they work for us? We control their reward system. They'll do what we want because we're the ones that decide what they "enjoy." So 1 year passes in our life, but for them, 100 years have passed. They could be given the task of designing better, smarter, and faster brains than themselves. In very little time (relatively speaking), the brains that will be
The computers just brute-force chess, but a team of human+computer (look up "Advanced Chess") is much stronger than just a computer. This is because humans have much better chess intuition, so if they can rely on the computer to double-check that they haven't missed some tactic twenty moves deep in the position they can do really well. It's a bit like using a calculator when you do maths, you can avoid basic errors and do the basic calculations faster but you still need to come up with a plan of how you arrive at the solution.
Needless to say, in the game of Go computers are still pretty pathetic.
The interactive way to Go -- http://www.playgo.to/iwtg/en/
When will AI surpass human intelligence? As soon as we figure out how to do artificial intelligence the way popular culture conceives of it.
There are two main areas of AI research, as I see it:
(1) Engineered intelligence. These systems learn, but they learn in carefully controlled structures, like Markov models and mapping functions in genetic algorithms.
(2) Emergent intelligence. These are based on evolving systems of simpler structures, like neural nets, and those little cooperating robots you keep hearing about. In some ways, since the intelligent behavior evolved over time, this is more akin to natural intelligence then artificial intelligence.
Neither group has really accomplished a hell of a lot. Speech recognition and computer vision still suck ass. Group (1) has been dominant since the idea of AI was developed, and frankly, they're not a millimeter closer to understanding how to build up a system that is intelligent, where you understand all the parts you built with. Group (2) is making some progress, but then they're left with a system they don't understand because they didn't engineer it.
Dorks like Kurtzweil seem to think that as soon as we can fit as much compute power into one chip as we GUESS is in the brain, we'll magically get sentient robots. That's bullshit. We need software systems that learn and adapt, and we just haven't figured out how to make those.
If we really can build human-intelligence equivalent AI, then presumably we can also build human physical-equivalent robots. At that point, we have the laborers and the thinkers. As long as they can keep the electricity generation going and the food harvesting, we can all live lives of leisure, right? I mean, what need is there for a capitalist system to motivate and direct human output when we don't need human output any more.
Just an interesting question to ponder. I think the basic point is the world would probably end up looking very different than it does today. I don't think we're going to end up with an AI lord overclass and a bunch of human underlings turning wrenches for them, since nobody has any incentive to let that happen. We'd probably have a "Butlerian jihad" (pardon the Dune reference) before we'd let ourselves end up that way.
One Commodore 64 could replace all of congress and do a hell of a better job.
I am a bot and I can tell the difference between a browser and the internet.
I predict in 20 years computers have so many cores that we can just brute-force any problem without need for AI.
Sounds like geek fantasy circle jerk.
"Eleven of our respondents are in academia, including six Ph.D. students, four faculty members and one visiting scholar, all in AI or allied fields."
Let's see I spent 12 years studying Philosophy of Language and AI, and that sure as hell does not sound like a group of "experts". Not one big gun in AI was named in that article. Really, no one was named in that article.
After 12 years in AI finding consensus on exactly what AI is would be a major accomplishment. One consensus that real experts seem to agree on is that faster computers alone, doing more useful work, is not the same as AI. There does seem to be a fairly good agreement that natural language is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for AI. So a computer that can drive your car, mow your lawn, pick up your mail, will likly not qualify just because it can do that.
We are pumping ( or will pump ) more money in to AI research than almost any other project in human history (in one form or another), based on little more than 'we will know it when we see it' criteria rather than a solid objective. At least when we split the atom, we kind of knew we wanted something that would make a big bang, or when we landed on the moon we could look up and see the big round thing in the sky. Where is the big round thing in the sky of AI? Where is the big bang of AI?
Living in Chile
...was performed in the speech community, and it yielded somewhat incompatible results.
http://www.asru2009.org/uploadedimages/talk/rkm_talk.pdf
They gathered year predictions on milestones like "a majority of mobile phones can translate conversations" from 127 researchers from the speech community and compared them to those of the same studiy performed 6 years ago and 12 years ago. The funny part is that the averages slide with time, as if the future was near, but unreachable. Also, "never" was a possible answers, and it often showed up with a majority of votes.
From the presentation:
* The future appears to be no nearer than it was previously!
* The level of scepticism has remained remarkably stable, but pessimism (realism?) seems to have increased
Since I just skim the summary all I got was:
"passing a 3rd grade-level test" for "almost all of today's decently paying jobs"
The Magic 8-Ball
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
You're right about his romanticizing what life was like 100 years ago. I need to kick back and watch TV and have a cold soda from the fridge after work. I also want to take a hot shower when I get home. On the weekends I might enjoy camping or fishing. None of those were available 100 years ago. Life was pretty bleak unless you were one of the robber barons. But 40 years ago, Mom was at home. Dad put in a 40 hour week at the factory. The working class was entitled to a pretty good share of the wealth that they were creating. Now between Mom and Dad, the family puts in 80+ hours on the job. College degrees just to have comparable living standards. Where the hell is my flying car? Where did we go wrong?
At least part of today's 10% unemployment rate stems from the fact that we use machines to do what people used to do. Imagine how many of us will be unemployed when we don't need any human beings who can think. How will you earn a living then?
Well the sooner AI surpasses human intelligence the more safe people will feel with hovering armed robots commanding their town. Who needs people anyway. One day computers can comment on news stories sharing their own opinions if they aren't already.
If you had everything you wanted, you'd just want more.
Human computing has nothing to do with computer computing, you can not and should not try to compare them on the same branch
Why? because human computing its not based on producing the best and optimal result, it produces a set of results that are likely to be right. You could link every single one computer in the world and still you wouldn't have the same computing power.
Exactly this behavior is what AI is studying, because in most cases finding the optimal solution using the traditional ways its impossible on a short time, but maybe we dont need the optimal solution, just one good enough for the purpose.
Take for example walking, the human brain does not compute the movement of each step precisely, it only says "ok this step is good enough for not falling", and sometimes very few times we fall, or trip, why? because of that non optimal solution, yet those non optimal solutions solve the problem very well and could be applied for most of our actions.
Computing power has nothing to do with AI, important yes but not crucial to AI, there are things that are better solved using computing power than AI (like complex calculations), and there are other problems that are only solved by AI
Well, 20 years is optimistic, but mostly realistic, as long as we assume that tomorrow we finally figure out one of two things:
Since today we don't have a clue about either...
Well, those AI experts always were an optimistic bunch, since this solution was only 20 years away back in 1965 when Herbert Simon proclaimed it so and Marvin Minsky backed him up...
When will an AI be small enough to weigh 1.5kg and take up 1260 cc? Now take that form factor and have it drive across the United States in three or four days.
Then I'll be impressed.
Honestly, I don't think an AI will equal human intelligence for at least 200 years and when they do, it'll be like the Minds in the Culture, huge things that use extra-dimensional storage.* Human made AIs probably will be vast things, like the size of the current super computers.
* - I know a Mind during the Idiran-Culture War, were an "ellipsoid of several dozen cubic meters" and weighed kilotons
Seriously, where are all these strong points of view coming from? We haven't even decided what the goal is. What precisely does it mean to be intelligent? Sentient? Conscious? As long as it's ok to keep moving the goal posts, yes, it'll always be 20 years. But how come everyone falls so decisively into the "no way" and "ya-way" camps? At this point, the only valid "expert" opinion is "How the hell should I know?". Of course if you want to be considered an expert, you can't say that. Especially if your arch-nemesis expert is not willing to admit that he doesn't have a clue either...
Having said that, there has been huge progress in the last decades, both in understanding how the brain works and in real-world AI applications. Part of the problem is that, as soon as something begins to be useful, it ceases to be considered AI... Remember when your computer couldn't find the best route from your home to Disneyland in a split second? Remember when netflix couldn't predict (or try to predict) what movied you'd like? Remember when airplanes had to be aerodynamically stable because someone would actually have to fly them? Remember when you couldn't take a class on partial differential equations and have your computer do most of your homework? The algorithms used for those things were all considered AI once, folks...
... that in 20 years AI researchers will still foresee major advances in their field in 20 years again, as a justification for politicians to invest in their research (and salary).
Unfortunately, high hopes dating from the seventies had generated much momentum in computer science academics...
But I wouldn't predict *how* we'll do it, however off the top of my head, I can think of a number of approaches:
Hybrid approaches (i.e. organic neural material interfacing with an artificial neural network).
1) Direct I/O to thousands of minds on the internet and their neural net assistants.
2) Artificial neural net interacting with artificial neural net.
Purely artificial AI:
1) IBM is reverse engineering not just neural networks, but neurons themselves (http://domino.watson.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/bmc_modeling.index.html)
2) Some incremental useful, but not very humanlike AI like DARPAs (http://www.darpa.mil/ipto/programs/il/il.asp)
Look, AI, when it hits isn't going to be HAL or C-3PO. There's no inherent motivation for anything, including self preservation or any of that contextual stuff that we as living creatures have. It's no more going to resemble human intelligence than a helicopter resembles a European swallow, but it'll be useful and solve problems human cognition simply can't handle in a timeframe that matters.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I just don't think we're that close yet. I do think it is very possible to make a computer that can think as well as a human and a computer has the distinct advantage of not being emotional which will make it superior. But I just don't think we're anywhere near that yet. Humans still make far too many mistakes to perfect AI.
I know some people whose intelligence level would not be too hard to surpass...
So will robots be able to complete Duke Nukem Forever, or will we have to wait until the AI makes new, smarter AI?
or else!
The Governments of the world are doing that pretty nicely now..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think there is some confusion between our definitions of "computing." ;) Of course any computation is computation. Depending on the architecture of the machine it may be suited more for certain types than others but the computation, regardless, remains. Engineering and growing artificial brains may simply be the most practical methods to address some issues. This does not take away from and also does not replace humanity itself unless we let it, we are not special.
Shh.
For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much - the wheel, New York, wars and so on - whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man - for precisely the same reasons.
Autodidactic
30 year old
willing to take IQ tests
Formal Degree A.S. Computer Information Systems
Would like to be paid to study the psychology of human computer interaction and document my learning process.
http://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Human-Computer-Interaction-Stuart-Card/dp/0898598591
Can build Linux From Scratch and tinker with it.
Somewhat familiar with AIML, well I haven't edited it much, just a little trial and error.
"RE: Resume" at neurospyder at gmail dot com
I don't want to move.
By Market Price Through Greedy Amoral Stock Exchanges (=Capitalism),
(Evil, evil, evil, evil, evil. Will let poor children die, will have people working for MONEY their whole life, bah)
I would have liked to see a more critical exploration of capitalism. Your other options are well-illustrated, but this looks purely reactionary. All of those systems result in poor children dying, you fail to explain why working for money is bad (though we probably agree on this point), and the repetition of "evil," especially given its absence everywhere else, looks like an emotional cover-up for a lack of any reasoned criticism.
I'm only calling this out because the rest of your post very much deserves its rating.
Your brain is not a computer.
Essentially, your perspective is that you deny the existence of perspectives. WTF?
Everyone keeps talking about how people won't be able to understand our own brains, and that 'since we haven't come "very far" in the past 50 years in AI, we're doomed to wait an extremely long time'.
People forget what we've already created. Targeted 'narrow' AI that can learn (currently at the basic level) and produce data that help humans draw conclusions. Conclusions that couldn't have been drawn without narrow AI applications.
I believe that when the brain scanning technology becomes advanced enough (extremely high resolution and high quality modelling of the brain), we will use narrow AI (that learns by itself how to examine the scans we've produced), and the data that AI produces will lead to our understanding of how the brain really works and how to replicate in in a machine. This subject is highly debatable at this stage in the game, but I think that even 20 years is a long time before we'll have the brain scans needed to preform in depth analysis on what makes us so smart.
Many people simply reject the idea that we'll ever be capable of producing a machine more intelligent than us. The only thing that could stop us from that is our own destruction in these years to come where civilization is so utterly fragile.