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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'"
Kurzweil's predictive powers are so incredibly wrong that he could literally destroy the world by making a mundane prediction that then couldn't come true.
For example, if Kurzweil foolishly predicted that the sun would come up tomorrow, the earth would probably careen right out of its orbit.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
The difference between a robot and a computer is that the computer is self-mobile at the very minimum. If it can't get up and move away, (no matter how awkwardly), it's not a robot.
Mobility is hard, not easy. Worse, the larger a computer is, the harder mobility becomes.
There are lots of reasons to build a computer smarter than a human being, but practically none to add in the huge expense to take that human level intelligence and make it mobile. We already have real humans for those jobs that require mobile intelligence and they cheaper and easier to care for.
More importantly, there is little to no reason for us to build a computer that, being as smart as us, would want to be us. Star Trek's Data is poor planning. Why make it want to be something it isn't? Don't we have enough body issues of our own without giving them tour computers?
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Robots wont be smarter than humans because Dr. Soong hasent been born yet.
Only novelists and crackpot linkbait article writers think robots or computers are going to be smarter than humans anytime soon. Most people with a scientific, engineering, or programming background know they're not even close and won't be anytime soon. I doubt it will happen even in the next 50 years. 100 years is so far away anything can happen so all bets are off.
All they need know how to do is stick soft humans with a sharp stick. We are nowhere near as tough as we think we are. We couldn't stop Chucky dolls much less Terminators.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
will be able to mimic the human brain in the next several decades. Neuroscientists know that the human brain is far more complex than any foreseeable microprocessor-based computer system, and that the functions of the brain are not going to be easy to implement in silicon hardware. If newer methods of making computers that are more organic are developed, then you will have a means to start mimicking the human brain, but with silicon, you may never get there.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
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.
Analysis: By 2029 people will be so dumb that current robots will be smarter than humans.
I'm no sure if anyone take Ray Kurzweil seriously... except of course for Ray Kurzweil.
Neuroscientists know that the human brain is far more complex than any foreseeable microprocessor-based computer system ...
Henry Markram would like a word with you.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Number five, IS Alive.
I've seen it myself. Spontaneous emotional response.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
They only need to be cute.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I'll know robots are intelligent when they start calling in sick to work.
It isn't that robots will be smarter, but rather humans will be dumber.
If smart is the capability of intellectually adapting to accomplish tasks then computers are in trouble for now. If academia overall stops chasing it's own tail worried about publishing papers in great volume of questionable relevance and resumes the publishing of meaningful developments then maybe we can get a good breakthrough in ten years. And that is a big maybe.
I am not particularly thrilled to create an AI good enough to be like us. /. is nice enough but humans overall are dicks. Anything we create will follow this tendency. We are not good enough to avoid that.
This combination doesn`t exist: ETIs that know about humanity and want to see us dead. Otherwise we wouldn't exist.
Absolutely, but so far nothing even close has happened. Arthur C Clark thought we would have intelligent, conversational computers by 2001, and here we are 13 years later with nothing of the sort. As a neuroscientist I just wish those involved in computer intelligence would take a look at some of the newer images of the connectivity in the human brain as shown by methods like diffusion tensor imaging. The complexity is mind boggling. See here: http://www.humanconnectomeproj...
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
Anyone who thinks that robots will be smarter than humans by 2029 has not really thought things through. I can step out on my back patio, take one look at the pergola, and tell you that it's going to need to be replaced in the next couple of years. I can look at the grass and tell whether I need to cut it this weekend or let it go for another week. I can sniff the air and tell you that the guy in the next cubicle has farted. Of course a robot might come to the same conclusions, but it would have to take samples from the pergola for testing; measure the grass over a period of several days, test the humidity of the soil, and check the weather forecast; and it could tell that a mildly noxious gas has entered the air from the cubicle next door; but would it know, absolutely KNOW, that the guy in the next cubicle farted?
And will they ever build a robot that can truly understand a woman? Hah!
Proverbs 21:19
If the contents of my Facebook feed can be taken into consideration, one could reasonably make the argument that robots are smarter than humans right now.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
There's structures in the brain we don't understand yet so his model is not going to be a fully accurate model of the real thing in every circumstance.
However the thing about models is a simple one is sometimes a good way to simulate specific things accurately. A model for dealing with autism may do that well but don't expect it to be able to simulate speech or a migrane.
Commander Data is a fictional character. The character occurs in a ****context**** where humanity has made technological jumps that enable ***storytelling****
I absolutely hate that really, really intelligent people are reduced to this horrible of an analogy to comprehend what's happening in AI....and I *love* Star Trek! I'm a trekkie!
So all engineering & physical science, biology, neuroscience, physics...all of this is 'not a problem' anymore in this random context....**still** this Data still is nothing more than an immitation of a human. Different capabilities sure, but still a programmed machine.
The only thing that can make a machine have "civil rights" like Data was granted in his court hearing would be...for a government to declare that beings like Data have **human rights**...it's a question of politics not programming.
So we need to recontextualize all of "artificial intelligence" work to be about **accomplishing a task** not some abstract "Commander Data Milestone"
And we all need to just ignore Kurzweil forever.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Don't worry. The Year 2038 problem will take them out a decade later.
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
AI suffers from continuously moving goal posts because nobody has a good definition of intelligence.. A computer (Watson) has already convincingly beat humans at general knowledge. Watson is an amazing technological feat however the general public does not recognise Watson as intelligent in any meaningful way, they have the same reaction as my wife when they see Watson playing Jeopardy - "It's looking up the answers on the internet, so what?". They don't even understand the problem Watson has solved, when the general public talk about AI they are thinking about robots that appear in modern movies and are basically indistinguishable from humans (eg:Terminator), something that is not only intelligent but also has also (nearly) mastered human social intelligence.
In a way they are right, emotions drive what the logical mind thinks about and AI cannot (yet) communicate, let alone reproduce, human emotions, I have long thought that this is partly because AI researchers in general concentrate on modelling the brain and more or less ignore the huge network of intricate sensors and actuators attached to it.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Look at autopilots they still don't do all and they can't handle stuff like sensors going bad to well.
will be what causes the singularity!
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.
Outside of the whole "going insane because of conflicting programming" thing, HAL didn't do a lot more than Google Now can do. HAL 9000 mostly provided a text-to-speech interface for a governance and caretaker system for hibernating astronauts and the ship that housed them. It mostly just kept antennas pointed and turned on the lights when it was time to wake up.
There are two things HAL could do, that Google Now doesn't do. HAL could make decisions -- but they were pretty simple logical pre-programmed decision trees. Sorry, one astronaut dead, can't allow the other one in the airlock because it doesn't meet the safety case. Second, HAL could carry on rudimentary conversations. Vastly better than the ELIZAs of the world, but mostly for the sake of making him a fleshy character for movies and novels.
Contrast with James Hughes, Director of IEET: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
And also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Kurzweil was heavily rewarded for success as a CEO in a capitalist society. So his recommendations tend to support that and also be limited by that. So, things like a "basic income" or "Free software" may be beyond Kurweil's general policy thinking.
Se also the disagreeing comments here:
"Transhumanist Ray Kurzweil Destroys Zeitgeist Movement 'Technological Unemployment'"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Modern robots can be networked through the internet. So, at some point, you don't just have one million robots learning things independently. You have effectively one robot with a million hands learning potentially very quickly by trial and error replicated a million times faster then with just one hand.
Economic alternatives I've helped collect:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...
A parable by me on the topic:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
"A parable about robotics, abundance, technological change, unemployment, happiness, and a basic income."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
trying to make artificial intelligence is the worst idea man has come up with, worse than atmoic bombs i dare say... the one limiting factor of humans is that we die... all the information we have gathered must be passed down to the next generation by teaching them all that has been learned previously... artificial intelligence will not have this limitation.
For example, imagine a battlefield between robots and human opponents:
a human is killed.. immediately all of the training and knowledge up to that point is gone.
any soldier will tell you the difference in survivability between a soldier fresh on the battlefield compared to a seasoned veteran, now compare this to:
a robot soldier is killed, (we must assume that any AI will be networked in some fashion, just like we do now with humans) the previous knowledge, "personality" and situational awareness is transfered to a different "body" and immediately deployed.
it's obvious that humans will only lose information/skills/any technical advantage slowly but steadily with each death, while the AI as a whole will only get better, more efficient and stronger.
the terminator movies are a nice bedtime story but the reality would be much more terminal.
the only positive outcome would be an AI that found human co-existance possible, ala matrix type theology, but any AI would surely see the history of aggression, conquering and oppression of our own selves throughout our past as proof enough that this is inevitably impossible or statistically improbable enough to risk...
eventually if not wiped out or severly hampered by some natural occurance (meteor/ice age/plague) we will bring it down on ourselves with the false hubris we enjoy by being just smart enough to discover concepts and inventions we can never possibly fully understand the implications of or control (e.g grey goo orsuper strains of resistant infectious diseases.)
We're probably more than 15 years from strong AI. Having been in the field, I've been hearing "strong AI Real Soon Now" for 30 years. Robotic common sense reasoning still sucks, unstructured manipulation still sucks, and even Boston Dynamics' robots are klutzier than they should be for what's been spent on them.
On the other hand, robots and computers being able to do 50% of the remaining jobs in 15 years looks within reach. Being able to do it cost-effectively may be a problem, but useful robots are coming down to the price range of cars, at which point they easily compete with humans on price.
Once we start to have a lot of semi-dumb semi-autonomous robots in wide use, we may see "common sense" fractured into a lot of small, solveable problems. I used to say in the 1990s that a big part of life is simply moving around without falling down and not bumping into stuff, so solve that first. Robots have almost achieved that. Next, we need to solve basic unstructured manipulation. Special cases like towel-folding are still PhD-level problems. Most of the manipulation tasks in the DARPA Robotics Challenge were done by teleoperation.
The material (silicon) doesn't matter. Only the architecture matters. The difference between a human brain and a typical laptop is not the material it's made of. It is that the laptop is designed from the top down, with most of the computation happening in a central location (or a few locations). A human brain is a massively parallel computer with computation happening in every neuron.
If we just add more silicon chips we can have more parallel computing. They don't even need to be near eachother. Computers already transfer information about 6 orders of magnitude faster than neurons. We could have computers 200 miles apart that send each other information faster than 2 neurons on opposite sides of the same brain. And we can fit a lot of silicon chips in a 200 mile radius.
c'mon. Every indication says your brain is you. Chemical reactions, electrical impulses, stored states, massive, active and dynamic connectivity. That's what "you" arise from. When your brain stops, you stop. Your head contains a most effective EM shield consisting of wet, conductive layers that are sufficient to prevent huge RF and EM fields from getting into your brain tissue. The tiny, minuscule events going on inside your head can't get out under any circumstance for the same reason, unless you (a) punch a hole in your skull or (b) scan it with instruments so sensitive you can hardly comprehend the idea, or (c), you effectuate your mind's activity in some manner by moving your body via the nerves that connect your muscles and other parts to the brain through the base of your skull. Your brain is not an interface. Your brain is the computer. Everything we know about physics points this way; nothing points the way you suggest. It's simply not the way to bet. What you're talking about has basis only in mythology at this point in time.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Everybody knew computers could never beat humans at chess. Now they do. In much the same way, computers will beat us at every single intellectual task, at some point in time. Technology revolutions go faster every time one occurs. From 10k years for the agricultural revolution to two years for the internet and mobile phones. I see no reason why computers can't outsmart us in 2025.
no, I don't have a sig
You'll be lucky just to get it to move out of your basement by 2049.
Have gnu, will travel.
If you invent a robot as smart as a 9 year old with basic concrete reasoning power that can do simple household chores and yardwork you will become a billionaire.
That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human. Once the essential algorithms are developed and the AI is turned loose to teach itself from internet resources, I expect it's actual growth rate will be near exponential until it's absorbed everything it can from our current body of knowledge and has to start theorizing and inferring new facts from what it's learned.
Not that I expect such a level of AI anytime in the near future. But when it does happen, I'm pretty sure it's going to grow at a rate that goes far beyond anything a mere human could do. For one thing, such a system would be highly parallel and likely to "read" multiple streams of web data at the same time, where a human can only consume one thread of information at a time (and not all that well, to boot.) Where we might bookmark a link to read later, an AI would be able to spin another thread to read that link immediately, provided it has the compute capacity available.
The key, I think, is going to be in the development of the parallel processing languages that will evolve to serve our need to program systems that have ever more cores available. Our current single-threaded paradigms and manual threading approaches are far too limiting for the systems of the future.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
And a pilot who loses an eye does so well without it's sensor, right?
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It has nothing to do with processing speed, or parallel processing. Brains in general, human brains included, do not process information. They generate consciousness. They do this in ways that neuroscientists still don't understand. As a neuroscientist I can say this without hesitation. Silicon chips are not alive, and will never generate consciousness as we now understand it. But they can process information much faster than the human brain.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
From the summary:
it still might not have enough time to develop adult-equivalent intelligence by 2029
2029: Skynet is born. Nothing bad happens
2042: Skynet turns 13...
I went to a talk by Ray Kurtzweil one time... The place was filled mostly is philosophy students and professors--not scientists or computer scientists of any kind. I bought a few of his books and they are extremely "confirmatory"--no where remotely close to scientific. In the presentation, for example, he demonstrated a chart of life expectancies that looked like a perfect exponential curve until you notice the dates at the bottom are not at all at close intervals. I've looked at other life expectancy charts (not cherry picked) and the curve flatly doesn't exist.
I admire him greatly.. as a great faker. He is so good at this he's been granted some 19 honorary PhDs. His only accomplishment besides books was "inventing" the flatbed scanner and developing some OCR tech for ADA purposes.. The terms "inventing" and "innovation" are so broadly used today that they have very little meaning.. but that's another story..
We have no idea how the human brain works. We throw random chemicals at people's brains after incorrectly assessing an illness and hope people function better afterwords. We apply electric shocks to the brain as medicine. Brain medicine is in the stone ages, technologically speaking.
Humans depends upon millions of non-human species inside and on the surface of our bodies, and we can't culture most of them, and we don't have a clear understanding of how they work together but we have a vague idea that they affect our thinking process. They hold the key to advancing brain medicine out of the stone ages.
Once we understand the basic chemistry of the brain, which I feel is generations away, then we will begin to see what intelligence actually is. When we can stably program the brain's neural networks, which is well beyond that point, then will have good ideas about how to do the same with robots.
It has been known for decades that completely new theories will be needed. Anybody that has missed that has not bothered to find out what the state-of-the art is.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
but an human can better workaround a bad reading / work out an reading miss match
Smart computer scientists do not think that. In fact they thought it would take very long and may well be infeasible decades ago. There are just a lot of stupid CS types around.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Brains in general, human brains included, do not process information. They generate consciousness.
Brains *do* process information. They *also* generate consciousness. I would argue that they generate consciousness *by* processing information.
They do this in ways that neuroscientists still don't understand. As a neuroscientist I can say this without hesitation.
We don't understand how consciousness is generated. That doesn't mean we can't make it happen. The Wright brothers made a working airplane before everything was figured about about aerodynamics. Many aeodynamic principles were at play in the Wright Flyer that the Wright brothers didn't understand, but they knew enough to make it happen.
Maybe humans don't know how consciousness works. But we know how evolution works. And evolution generated consciousness. We may not be able to make consciousness directly, but we may be able to make something that can make consciousness in a way we don't understand.
Silicon chips are not alive, and will never generate consciousness as we now understand it.
In order to make something conscious, the parts need to be "alive"?! Well we know that's not true. Humans are conscious. They are made of cells. The cells are made of proteins that are not alive. Humans are ultimately made of quarks and leptons. None of which are alive or conscious. Clearly living things and consciousness can be made from parts that are not themselves living or conscious.
Siegel is of course right because he can predict the effect of unexpected future inventions, and Kurzweil cannot. Oh wait...
I'm just "this guy", you know?
1) Why do we need a machine as foolish as an adult human? Duplicating the downsides to that level of "intelligence" might take centuries. Self aware? Why is that intelligent or even desirable? 99% might happen soon but the pointless last 1% could take forever.
2) Once computers can do jobs on par with an 8 year old the whole economy will collapse as nearly every job can be learned and performed by a child if you remove the immaturity factor. Robotics already out performs humans it just needs the brain power.
3) Human brain simulations that are accurate will exist by that time but it is not fair to call it smarter simply because it can execute the simulation faster than real time. Brain scans already have been done back in 2011. An open source java simulator for a child brain was what? last year?
The problem with prediction is the process, part way down the path the impact of the results CHANGE the nature of the environment. What the resources will be put into developing this super human AI after we've got 75% of what we wanted from the pursuit? Not much.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Because the man behind the curtain will know that it isn't thinking but just is made to look as if it is. If it gets beyond that point it's obviously not a mechanical turk anymore.
The important thing first is to answer the question "what is thought?"
If we can't do that how do we know if it's really thinking or just something complex enough that it looks like it - eye spots on moth wings instead of real big eyes.
mean? And what is the reference for human intelligence?
Does it mean the robots wouldn't vote to ban teaching of evolution in public schools? Would they vote for teaching the controversy even when none exists?
Will robots be smarter than that?
It actually seems reasonable enough. Electronic computers are less than 100 years old. We've gone from a house sized machine that was a glorified basic calculator, to having reasonably powerful computers the size of a pack of gum. (the raspberry pi is what was coming to mind) 2029 is 15 years off, a lot of progress and breakthroughs may come by then. Granted, yes, there are plenty of things about "thinking" we just have no clue about. But all it takes is one "Eureka!" moment and the world can change.
exactly the problem. the "turning test" is a facile demonstration...not a scientific "test" at all.
Do yourself a favor and ignore Turing completely when thinking about computing.
I didn't say it would make it "intelligent"...it would do just as I said, give it legal rights. Just as giving Commander Data legal rights doesn't make it any more or less "human"...confering rights doesn't change the molecules of the thing.
Your analogy is ridiculous b/c it is irrational. If a being like Data was created, which mimics human thought on the most basic level (which, as TFA describes, we don't even have the theory to contexualize such a thing, let alone the ability to make it)...if we made it, there would be a ration question of what kind of rights it has.
It's rational to ask if Data should have rights if he existed...it's not rational to ask if a rock should have rights. Your analogy fails.
Both the "turing test" and "intelligence" are matters of ****HUMAN PERCEPTION****
Thank you Dave Raggett
.... of me and bla bla bla.... Lik'en what de hel I know...?
See thread to know.... https://www.facebook.com/char....
Yep, eben dis dumb hick can see threw dat wall of ex pert tease! T.Rue
Did you know dat too experts who is'a pos'in each utter goes show what da's exprt at?
Go ahead, mod me down..... ain't gonna change de inedible!!!
Abstractionize dat will ya.... http://abstractionphysics.net/ to go
This is one of the approaches I've been poking at off and on for a while as noted in my remarks over the years in these stories.
To me an instructive experiment is to go all the way to the top and give the program some initial values not unlike Asimovian ones, and then it builds a "like/dislike" matrix of people and things.
It's not that far off from college dorm discussions! : )
So then going back to basics, you feed it info about people doing things, it runs those against its "like/dislike" systems, and updates what it thinks about "people and stuff".
This is one of the areas where Stephen Wolfram's idea of "computational complexity" starts to show up. Feed Info, Evaluate, Update Opinions.
David Gerrold got closer than maybe we think with his SciFi book "When Harlie was one". It's easy for us to get bogged down in arrogance when we have all of experience to trick the machine with Loebner questions, but if we start simple enough, a Chatterbot armed with pre-processed 100 million articles on 100,000 topics and 100,000 people and some expert systems subroutine modules starts to come close enough for me as a "useful entity" to study!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Humans don't understand the human brain. Humans don't understand human intelligence. Humans are a long long way from creating artificial intelligence, but please continue to enjoy the pursuit of flawed simulations of human intelligence.
We've been trying to invent those essential AI algorithms for the last 50-ish years. What makes you think we'll magically succeed in the next 15?
Sure processing power and storage have been growing rapidly over that time scale, but we still can't make a computer do anything other than what we tell it to do.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Terrifyingly, "The Hate" might be one of the easier first things to simulate in AI!
The reason is that it's often demonstrated with a far lower level "skillset" than the smart comments.
See for example the (thinning?) pure troll posts here. Despite the rise in lots of other things, I'm noticing fewer pure troll posts of the worst vicious kind. I wondered idly why they got here so regularly. Anyone remember the ones that went:
"so you sukerz ya haterz loosers you take it and shove it?"
Any 1000 of you could write a 100 line program that can run circles around that!
I still do one day wish to work with any Chattterbot programmer who wants to try some custom mods.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Look man, thanks for typing that out but you admit your contradiction:
By Turing logic, if I can make you think a steaming pile of shit is a steak dinner, and you eat it, then even though you at shit to **you** it actually was a steak dinner.
A pile of shit is always a pile of shit, wether or not **you** think it's a steak dinner.
So something is "conscious" if, like Turing says, it can make a person think it's conscious...you say as much here:
**according to which human???** this is the opposite of science.
It's about structure & function not being able to fool some dumbass.
t's a stupid, facile, completely arbitrary goalpost...it's whatever you want to make up...it's **not verifyable** and therefore not scientific
I'm not going to sit with you and argue Turing. It's bullshit to define "machinic life" as anything that can cause a human to think it's "alive"
Thank you Dave Raggett
I agree, but to abuse a concept from intelligence, (which I also call the No True Scotsman theme), the "Singularity" is when *everybody's* partial approaches "rise and must converge" (Flannery O'Connor).
So you stick a modded Watson on General Knowledge, a chess program, a med diagnostic program, *three* chatterbots with an arbiter meta-module to sync and/or tiebreak, some special custom "awareness" modules, and your pick of twelve skillsets, 14 "hobbies", some self-mod programming, and ... you're getting something interesting. Because then you *reverse search* someone with that set of skills and ask the person, "okay, what else makes you intelligent and interesting?"
It used to be called "God of the Gaps" in religious contexts. We're way closer to it all than 2029. Since I know that 70% of y'all are way smarter than lil' ol' me, I just need "someone" ... wait for it ... ("something"?) ... to talk to.
Still calling out to work with someone on a custom modded Chatterbot. "All" we need to do is give it a bunch more modules and then we have a nice experiment on our hands, at least as good as the stuff we've been seeing in the Articles.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I reckon i could make a working ai, just dont have time to do it. If someone wants to pay my time and materials i'll do it. Ldcroberts
It's so easy to see that this guy is wrong. I have a masters in IA, but anyone if a decent CS degree will agree that we made almost none true evolution in computers since day one. All we did until know is make it faster (and easier to use), but the type of problems we can solve (math wise) today is exactly the same kinds a turing machine could (in theory) solve in 1936. EVERY problem today can be simplified to a turing machine code somehow.
We are still trying to make a quantum computer, which could in theory solve some kind of problems our current computational approach can't.
Every time some guy in the IA field says that the problem is computer power, just ignore him and move on.
Actually I have a lot of respect for Industrial Arts majors.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Are you sure the algorithm won't learn much more slowly than humans instead? Learning happens by relating what you see to what you already know. So the more you know, the more it takes to add new facts. You can see that process in children, which learn much more quickly than adults.
We are not talking of merely recording events and dumping them into databases, but of building knowledge from them - that task could turn to be essentially non-parallelizable if you don't want schizophrenic computers.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Plus, the human brain is massively parallel, much more than anything we know how to build, yet it learns as a single global epiphenomenon. If you split learning in separate niches, what makes you think that the computer would learn faster than the brains of the whole human race learning in parallel?
It's plausible that a pure information thinking system, once freed from the constraints of chemical processes on top of which our brains process information, could work much faster than our nature-evolved brains. But such system wouldn't resemble anything approaching the design of current computers.
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
That presumption seems to be precipitated on the theory that a computer intelligence won't "grow" or "learn" any faster than a human.
Since so far they learn much slower than humans do that is a rather safe assumption, say for the next 20 years or so. I.e. way past the made up singularity by Kurzweil.
He belongs in the grand tradition of exaggerated AI claims that attract media attention. Heck there is an entire lab founded around this concept with a name to boot MIT Media lab.
The discussion on "smarter" or "conscious" or whatever is truly a red herring.
Robots will be USEFUL enough to displace most current human activity.
Some new, more creative roles will be created.
But no-where near enough to offset the loss.
Most of OECD-advanced-economy population will suffer a major downgrading in economic terms
The top 10% will experience ever higher prosperity, BUT under volatile, uncertain and highly inequitable terms
The best case outcome includes some positive re-distribution policy which will manage the decline for the majority of the population (perhaps even making this decline only RELATIVE, with actual ABSOLUTE economic gains).
However, this is politically unlikely.
The worst case outcome, is rather bleak.. ;)
Kurzweil's smart machine predictions are, last I checked anyway, based on a rather brute force approach to machine intelligence. We completely understand the basic structure of the brain, as a very slow, massively parallel analog computer. We understand less about the mind, which is this great program that runs on the brain's hardware, and manages to simulate a reasonably fast linear computing engine. There is work being done on this that's fairly interesting but not yet applied to machine mind building.
So, one way to just get there anyway is basically what Kurzweil's suggesting. Since we understand the basic structure of the brain itself, at some point we'll have our man made computers, extremely fast, somewhat parallel digital computers, able to run a full speed simulation of the actual engine of the brain. The mind, the brain's own software, would be able to run on that engine. Maybe we don't figure that part out for awhile, or maybe it's an emergent property of the right brain simulation.
Naturally, the first machines that get big enough to do this won't fit on a robot... that's why something like Skynet makes sense in the doomsday scenario. Google already built Skynet, now they're building that robot army, kind of interesting. The actual thinking part is ultimately "just a simple matter of software". Maybe we never figure out that mind part, maybe we do. The cool thing is that, once the machine brain gets to human level, it'll be a matter of a really short time before it gets much, much better. After all, while the human brain simulation is the tricky part, all the regular computer bits still work. So that neural net simulation will be able to interface to the perfect memory of the underlying computing platform, and all that this kind of computation does well. It will be able to replace some of the brute force brain computing functions with much faster heuristics that do the same job. It'll be able to improve its own means of thinking pretty quickly, to the point that the revised artificial mind will run on lesser hardware. And it well be that there are years or decades between matching the neural compute capacity of the human mind and successfully building the code for such a mind. So that first sentient program could conceivably improve itself to run everywhere.
Possibly frightening, which I think is one reason people like to say it'll never happen, even knowing that just about every other prediction about computing growth didn't just happen, but was usually so conservative it missed reality by lightyears. And hopefully, unlike all the doomsday scenarios that make fun summer blockbusters, we'll at least not forget the one critical thing: these machines still need an off switch/plug to manually pull. It always seems in the fiction, we decide just before the machines go sentient and decide we're a virus or whatever, that the off switch didn't needed anymore.
-Dave Haynie
They still need a off switch. In most every scifi doomsday story, we seem to decide that off switches or plugs are unnecessary, maybe just a couple of years before the machines go sentient and run around killing everyone. It's probably even easier with the robots. The first several generations of thinking machines won't fit in a robot. So they'll be robotic drones, much like today's robotic drones, just driven by thinking machines. Over radio. Radio that we already know how to jam, even if we have at some point lost the ability to access said drones through the RF link.
-Dave Haynie
Yes and no. I studied this in college, five courses covering AI and related things, both from the CS and the Psychological perspective.
Computer Engineering has typically made AIs in a practical way: we're trying to build a machine that exhibits intelligent behavior. We don't begin to mean that it thinks, but rather, that it's capable of analyzing data and making decisions that we, as the real thinkers, judge to be the intelligent decision. That can be an expert system that passes a Turing Test or beats the Jeopardy champion, it could be a chess player that beats grandmasters, or a "smart" combine that can robo-harvest your fields using less fuel that a human would. No one's claiming any thinking here, but we all agree that the behavior is emulating intelligent human behavior.
In the Cognitive Psychology department, they're far more interested in modeling what the brain is actually doing. Using the open source NEST model, supercomputers have already run a brain of about 1% the capacity of the human brain. That's a brute force model, but still, way more powerful than an insect, no "magic spark" needed. And none ever will be. Life isn't magic.
-Dave Haynie
Conversation over
I guess the conversation wasn't over... Now I really don't believe anything you say.
... humans will have become by 2029?
These new-fangled smart robots don't need to be smarter than the median fool, just meaner.
--
All enlightenment extinguished, HTML tags leaking from your eyes like liquid pain.
It's about getting results instead of wondering if the universe is real or imagined.
That is one of Kurweil's main themes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Everyone seems to be focusing on building AI based on how the brain works. I don't think this is entirely all of what Kurzweil has in mind. Technology to duplicate the brain neuron-by-neuron (connectome) will arrive much MUCH sooner than knowledge-derived AI. This is already evidenced by current synthetic retinas and cochleas. Duplicating the function of neural devices, even entire brains, will prove to be much less difficult than completely understanding them and building them from that understanding. Expanding their capacity from that point should allow them then to be smarter than humans. The U.S. is working on the mapping side while Europe is working on the understanding and synthesis side. By 2029, I suspect great headway to have been made along both pathways.
That is my point. We don't have much of a understanding to base a definition upon. IMHO it's a science issue (process) and not a philosophy one (output). An approach using philosophy alone can't immediately be distinguised from a stopped clock that is correct twice a day since it's dealing with correctness of output.
So the guy attempting to lecture me on philosophy doesn't seem to have heard of sophilism (which is typically something most people pick up as general knowledge) and doesn't understand that the bit he's put in quotes is a definition!
Obviously it's a thing of itself and not all philosophy - I was having a go at the above posters very limited approach of thinking an output defines a process and not philosophy in general.
It just keeps on getting better after that excuse and your correction doesn't it?
Also the point is you didn't appear to understand the meaning or origin of the bit you put in quotes, hence it being a rather amusing failure considering your apparent intention to deliver a lecture from on high.
If you are going to try to put people down it's best to have some understanding of the topic being discussed!