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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.
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.
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.
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. :/
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
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.
It matters to the fish who have to share the water with this new beast.
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.
How does the brain choose a random number?
It tells the body to roll a die. If you try to pick random numbers by just thinking about it, you'll do a spectacularly bad job.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
you keep your dirty bits away from my access port!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
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.
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
Your opinion is dumb.