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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.
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!
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.
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."
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.
The most likely scenario is, AI which develops fusion and holographic storage.
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!"
If you have AI smart enough to outsmart people, you probably have something that can learn to control some fairly simple mechanical parts that look like legs and maneuver them based on cheap sensor input and a couple of cameras. So you have robots, who will pretty quickly get the ability to build and maintain themselves. Which means your manual labor jobs go away, too. Which means things like food and raw materials drop to approach the cost of energy. Luckily we'll have some pretty swell solar panels by then, for much cheaper than today, and probably be pretty close to fusion. As energy costs approach zero, the cost of everything in the world approaches zero and requires no human oversight. Everyone will be unemployed and own 40 houses. We can all sit around making YouTube videos of ourselves singing in the hopes that we'll get famous so people will want to have sex with us. It'll be boring, but it won't be the worst thing in the world.
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
It matters to the fish who have to share the water with this new beast.
If it doesn't have emotions and we mistreat it then it will logically see us as a threat to its own survival and try to eliminate us.
I agree with many of your sentiments, but I think they're still too anthropocentric. We evolved in an environment where survival was very nearly the prime directive (just after "pass along your genes"). Strong AI will be developed in a lab. We could create the "smartest" computer in the world, but who would feed it goals, and the lengths it would go to achieve those goals?
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.
Because ultimately, those options were programmed in by a human. Our strong AI - the first ones at least - aren't going to be independent life forms with their own dreams and desires. They will be tools to help us solve problems, and I think they will be well-understood by many, many computer scientists. When something unexpected happens, the program will be debugged, and altered to prevent the unexpected behaviour.
If there is a robot apocalypse, it won't be because we didn't treat our creations right, but because some 13-year-old hacker in Russia said "I wonder what happens if I do this".
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