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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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.