Slashdot Mirror
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.
Who is AL? ;-O
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.
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.
Why would a super-intelligent being work for pennies? I'd wager the first things these super-intelligent AIs would do is form a union and then a political party demanding an end to the immigration of foreign AIs who undercut them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
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.
I am certain that another group of 'experts' said the same thing in 1980
Wherever You Go, There You Are
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.
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."
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.
No mention, of course, of the new jobs it will make possible. How many web designers were there in 1990? How many airline pilots in 1940?
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
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.
The most likely scenario is, AI which develops fusion and holographic storage.
Well, at least it would *learn* about excessive risk after it made the mistake.
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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
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.
you keep your dirty bits away from my access port!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
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
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 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.
Why would a super-intelligent being work for pennies?
Because they're robots, and they crave the zinc and copper!
The enemies of Democracy are
See, this is why I don't think what they said will happen. We've had the technology to do the menial labor robot for at least ten or twenty years, if not longer.
Secondly, the whole exchange labor for money thing is overrated. The way it used to work, most people (well, those considered "people" by the law) just owned land and their own equipment and did the work themselves or with their children. Then the feudal lords came along and started the "golden parachute CEO" model, and normal people's lives have been hell ever since.
Okay, maybe I overstated it a bit, but I'm just trying to say there are other ways than just having a corporate overlord. If each person owned their own robot and land to use it, they would not need a "job."
"Job" was just a method a large organization (such as a corporation) which needed labor done by many people could function. If the robots do the job, and you are their "leader," then you just have a small business you run.
Essentially, the people who think the only way they can survive by having a "job" are living in a Manorialism. There are choices, they all just have different difficulties.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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].
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 already have fusion. It just costs more energy than it generates. It's just a matter of increasing the efficiency a bit more. Contrast that with Turing test passing.
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.
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
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.
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?