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Why Robots Will Not Be Smarter Than Humans By 2029
Hallie Siegel writes "Robotics expert Alan Winfield offers a sobering counterpoint to Ray Kurzweil's recent claim that 2029 will be the year that robots will surpass humans. From the article: 'It’s not just that building robots as smart as humans is a very hard problem. We have only recently started to understand how hard it is well enough to know that whole new theories ... will be needed, as well as new engineering paradigms. Even if we had solved these problems and a present day Noonian Soong had already built a robot with the potential for human equivalent intelligence – it still might not have enough time to develop adult-equivalent intelligence by 2029'"
By the same argument you could say that any good library from 1950 was also smarter then a human. You'd be just as wrong.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Robotics expert Alan Winfield offers a sobering counterpoint to Ray Kurzweil ...
I like how the naysayers are depicted as sober, rational minded individuals while those who see things progressing more rapidly are shown as crazy lunatics. They are both making predictions about the future. Why is one claim more valid than the other? We're talking fifteen years into the future here. Do you think that the persons/people predicting that "heavier than air flying machines are impossible" only eight years before the fact were also the sober ones?
Lord Kelvin was a sober, rational minded individual. He was also wrong.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Computers on the other hand can already be argued to be smarter than a human - if you consider the entire internet as a single computer.
Depends on how you define "smarter."
The internet holds more knowledge than a single human ever could, but machines cannot do anything without direct, explicit directions - told to it by a human. That's the definition of stupid to me: unable to do a thing without having to all spelled out to you.
There's a reason D&D considers Wisdom and Intelligence to be separate attributes.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
There's two schools of thought on this:
There are those who think Kurzweil is a crazy dreamer and declare his ideas bunk.
There are those who think Kurzweil is a smart guy who's been right about a fair number of things, but take his predictions with a grain of salt.
There doesn't seem to be a lot in the middle.
[You can score me in the second camp, FWTW.]
Actually, your second point IS the middle. The logical third point would be, there are those who think Kurzweil is a genius and is spot on about the future.
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
o we don't know what "thinking" is -- at all -- not even vaguely. Or consciousness.
o so we don't know how "hard" these things are
o and we don't know if we'll need new theories
o and we don't know if we'll need new engineering paradigms
o so Alan Winfield is simply hand-waving
o all we actually know is that we've not yet figured it out, or, if someone has, they're not talking about it
o at this point, the truth is that all bets are off and any road may potentially, eventually, lead to AI.
Just as a cautionary tale, recall (or look up) the paper written by Minsky on perceptrons (simple models of neurons and in groups, neural networks.) Regarded as authoritative at the time, his paper put forth the idea that perceptrons had very specific limits, and were pretty much a dead end. He was completely, totally, wrong in his conclusion. This was, essentially, because he failed to consider what they could do when layered. Which is a lot more than he laid out. His work set NN research back quite a bit because it was taken as authoritative, when it was actually short-sighted and misleading.
What we actually know about something is only clear once the dust settles and we --- wait for it --- actually know about it. Right now, we hardly know a thing. So when someone starts pontificating about dates and limits and what "doesn't work" or "does work", just laugh and tell 'em to come back when they've got actual results. This is highly distinct from statements like "I've got an idea I think may have potential", which are interesting and wholly appropriate at this juncture.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I propose, en the other (third) hand, that reliably educating humans to be smart should be the first step. We will only do the artificial intelligence bit when we actually get the human intelligence angle.... and that will not, for sure, happen any time soon.
NO SIG