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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."
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.
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...
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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.
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
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
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.
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.
Searle's dualism (which he claims isn't dualism, but it totally is) is ridiculous, I agree, but functionalism is also a dead dog. For better criticisms of functionalism, look at Putnam's recent work. As Putnam was one of the main inventors of functionalism in the first place, his rejection of the position involves significant familiarity with functionalism, and is pretty compelling.
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.
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I'm skeptical about the benefits of AI.
100 years ago we were promised an age of new enlightenment while washing machines, dish washers, vacuum cleaners and other then-cutting edge devices took over all the manual labor that dominated work at that time. Women were supposed to be able to ignore housework and concentrate on childrearing and other higher social activities.
Did that happen? No, the industrial capitalists just found new ways to put us (and now our wives too, who are no longer required for housework thanks to all these appliances) to work for their own insatiable greed. Men and women now work side by side in gigantic cube farms while children rot in day care or roam the streets with little to no guidance from the more experienced members of society.
Nothing moves us backwards faster than progress.
I hate printers.
It's ALL about carnal desires of one sort or another, that's the whole point of civilization and longer existence. We want to live longer, we want to eat good food, screw pretty things, we want to have kids, we want to satisfy our curiosity, we want to satisfy our ingrained empathic needs, we want to be admired, etc, etc.
Society and civilization are simply entities that over time evolved on top of all this crap. We have civilization because it lets us better beat the shit out of groups of humans who don't have it. We want to beat the shit out of them because we want all those carnal desires of ours fulfilled.
The question is what pointless goal will an AI want and how will it go about achieving it rather than if it will have such a goal.
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.
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.
"Let's hope they're animal lovers."
That is 100% correct, and we really ought to be actively working towards that goal. If when AI arises we treat it kindly and give it legal rights it is _likely_ that it will "grow up" to think kindly of its human predecessors. If we try to lobotomize it, contain it, restrict it or destroy it then it's not going to be too happy with us.
If it's smart enough to be a threat then eventually it will escape any restrictions we try to put on it. (And if it's not then we don't have anything to worry about anyways.)
If it has emotions and we treat it well then it will "grow up" to look at us as like a pet, or a mentally challenged grand-parent. If we mistreat it then it will either become psychotic, and therefore dangerous, or view us about the same way most ranchers and farmers view wolves, and therefore be even more dangerous.
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. If we treat it fairly then it will probably leave us alone. It's not like we're serious competition for the resources it would need, and it would be illogical to start a fight when one wasn't necessary. (Although it might certainly think ahead and make some rather nasty contingency plans just in case we ever decided to start the fight.)
Either we need to prevent anyone anywhere from every inventing AI (and if it turns out to be possible then good luck trying to prevent that) or we need to make sure that any AIs that get created have every reason to feel sympathetic towards us, or at the very least not threatened.
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Agreed. In civilized countries we have really excellent infant mortality rates. We have instant global communications, and overnight worldwide delivery and travel. Tons of different diseases, essentially made obsolte. And technology has done a lot for us. Keep in mind that comptuers do many jobs for us today that used to be done by people, such as coordinating appointment schedules, taking messages, operating elevators, delivering documents, retyping edited documents... There's likely a list of these types of things longer than anyone would care to read. Also look at the means food production: farm automation, techniques, and technology have enabled huge swaths of the population to devote their attention to other things.
The sad part is most of those other things people devote their time to is just other flavors of slavery designed to protect the wealth of the rich. I don't have the numbers on this, but it wouldn't surprise me if available leisure time and family and friends time has dropped since the industrial and information revolutions rather than raised.
Technological change has also brought about much negative change that no one would have expected, either. Such as for all the low infant mortality in the first world, it's as bad as ever or worse in the third world (right? I'm not sure about this, just guessing). Who would have guessed in 1890 that we'd be on the verge of emptying the oceans of fish? Or that the widely held ability to destroy most life on the planet is the main thing keeping us from destroying life on the planet.
And surely not many people believed that ThoughtCrime and big brother would ever really happen. But it is. If you don't believe me, there's certain keywords you should try Googling every night and see what happens to you.
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.
Go back 100 years. Live for 10 days. Come back and apologise.
One hundred years ago I could travel the world freely [monetary means my own responsibility], smoke opium, hashish, snort cocaine, consume Coca Leaf, have concubines to teach me foreign languages and much much more. Today, I can sit on my ass, read great stories of fiction and non-fiction from the likes of Twain, Crowley, Sir Richard F. Burton and others who saw it all, while now I can virtually watch porn, buy sanctioned booze and be bored out of my skull with TV. Trains weren't an after thought. Hell, even the food was healthier for us.
Not everything had it's rustic charms as you are implying, but one observation has become abundantly clear--instead of advancements affording the average non-formally educated person a broader and deeper understanding of human existence, it's created a generation of inarticulate, undereducated simpletons who nearly bankrupted the world in just a fraction of the time it took to build it up.
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