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By 2045 'The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,' and That Could Be a Problem

schwit1 (797399) writes Louis Del Monte estimates that machine intelligence will exceed the world's combined human intelligence by 2045. ... "By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species." Machines will become self-conscious and have the capabilities to protect themselves. They "might view us the same way we view harmful insects." Humans are a species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses." Hardly an appealing roommate."

42 of 564 comments (clear)

  1. Now thats incentive by Majestix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To stay alive for the next 30 years.

    --
    --- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
    1. Re:Now thats incentive by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 4, Insightful

      To stay alive for the next 30 years.

      How about "the same old story for the last 100 years"?

    2. Re:Now thats incentive by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

      See, they legalize cannabis, and this is what you get... :-)

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    3. Re:Now thats incentive by DrLang21 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I'm pretty sure it was the gay marriage that did this.

      --
      I see the glass as full with a FoS of 2.
    4. Re:Now thats incentive by lgw · · Score: 4, Funny

      I blame amnesty - if we only built a proper fence, we'd keep out the illegal singularity!

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    5. Re: Now thats incentive by O('_')O_Bush · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Yea. Their first step is flying cars.

      There are way too many uncertainties of what will be technologically possible by 2045 to be worrying about that right now. I'd wait until we actually had some idea of how to make a machine intelligence, and work the kinks out in a closed environment enough that it might actually be given control of something rather than the role of Ask Jeeves.

      --
      while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
    6. Re:Now thats incentive by Spazmania · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Louis Del Monte estimates that...

      Who?

      The average estimate for when this will happen is 2040, though Del Monte says it might be as late as 2045. Either way, it's a timeframe of within three decades.

      I hope that's a in-joke. Like construction that's forever two weeks from done and jam two days a week (yesterday and tomorrow), three decades has been the estimate for "true" AI since the 1970's. Every year, it's just three more decades away.

      --
      Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
    7. Re:Now thats incentive by MRe_nl · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's all like, interconnected, man.
      I smoked Mexican pot once
      and now I'm gay.

      --
      "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
    8. Re:Now thats incentive by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Louis Del Monte estimates that...

      Who?

      I don't like this kind of reasoning. Science should never be about authority.

      With that said, the article doesn't appear to have any credible arguments, just the kind of contrived timeline you are familiar with from bad science fiction with Jean-Claude Van Damme in the lead.

    9. Re:Now thats incentive by Spazmania · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't like this kind of reasoning. Science should never be about authority.

      Good point. Here's what his linked-in page ( http://www.linkedin.com/in/lou... ) says about him:

      Louis A. Del Monte is a Internet marketing/sales expert, award winning physicist, author, featured speaker and CEO of Del Monte and Associates, Inc.

      During his college & graduate school, Del Monte supplemented his income working as a professional magician at resorts in New York's Catskill Mountain region.

      His first pride, foremost in his profile? His ability to sell you. Also important? His skill as an illusionist. Missing from the summary? Any hint of software development work of any kind, personal or professional, let alone AI.

      Science mustn't be about authority but it mustn't be about salesmanship either. There's an obvious credibility problem here and no way to test his claim save waiting until he's old, decrepit and has already received the maximum benefit from anybody choosing to listen to him.

      Guy's speaking out of his tailpipe and it looks to me like he really is a sales expert.

      --
      Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
    10. Re: Now thats incentive by Megol · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I'm not afraid of future technology - there are too many things to be afraid for already: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons (including engineered ones), ignorance and demonizing opponents (what creates most wars), hybris and ignorance, fanaticism, legalized corporate lobbyism and bribery + a lot more.

      But being afraid never helps, being aware of dangers can.

    11. Re: Now thats incentive by SerpentMage · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Exactly! I have been telling people that machines will not wipe us out because they will become as stupid as we are.

      Don't believe me? Here is my argument. Humans actually are very intelligent. I am not saying that some are more intelligent than others. I am saying we as a species are rather intelligent. However, it is that intelligence that gets in our way. When humans look at a problem they see answers. If the problem is science then the answer is relatively simple and we have devised ways to ensure our errors do not get in the way.

      But here is where the tricky bit comes in. If the problem is not entirely scientific and involves the interactions of humans, or interactions of any living beings (eg human to environment) then our decisions become stochastic; Same basis results in completely different results. This is not due to the lack of knowledge. TRUST ME it is not. It is due to people weighing certain aspects heavier than others. We all do this. You would think that we all come to the same conclusion, but we don't! It is this stochastic behavior that machines will have as well.

      For when machines become "aware" they will see the facts in different lights than say other machines. It is only natural because machines cannot store all information about everything. They, like humans, will have to optimize, prune and figure it out. Thus they like us will make stochastic decisions! I am even thinking that machines will turn into the Monty Python Holy Grail missions, and even though that sounds silly it will.

      Of course machines might have more capacity than humans, but even there I am skeptical because humans will have brain implants and be cyborgs and the cycle of lunacy will start all over again. IMO the most accurate representation of the dilemma of humans and machines is the Matrix. Watch it closely and see what its basis is.

      --

      "You can't make a race horse of a pig"
      "No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
  2. Well by Jorl17 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    That escalated quickly. I highly doubt that in a matter of thirty years we'll have "conscious machines" viewing us as a thread. Are these guys for real? Do they know anything about AI?

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    Have you heard about SoylentNews?
    1. Re:Well by NemoinSpace · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not multi threads, that's for sure. Of course computers will take over the world. Programmers leave all those unused cores lying around doing nothing and that's trouble. You gotta keep those registers full, and i mean all the time. Either that or just feed them some chip-porn. That'll keep em busy.

  3. Warp Drive by TrollstonButterbeans · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now. Probably Jupiter, Saturn or other stars.

    The moon landings happened 45 years ago!!

    I see no evidence of any programming that "learns" or is the slightest bit adaptive.

    And immortality wouldn't help --- evolution is powered by the failures dying off.

    And although slightly off the topic, what good would immortality be when advances in genetics will make humans better.

    And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us. Would be genetically obsolete.

    This article is --- well --- shortsighted, bordering on the naive.

    --
    Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
    1. Re:Warp Drive by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Then you have never looked at a ten line C program to implement a PID control loop for a servo motor.

      I don't think that would count as learning. That ten-line program will always do exactly what it was programmed to do, neither more nor less. An adaptive program (in the sense the previous poster was attempting to describe) would be one that is able to figure out on its own how to do things that its programmers had not anticipated in advance.

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
  4. AI is always "right around the corner". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I first got into computing in the 1960s. AI was a big thing back then. Well, it had been a big thing in the 1950s, too, but it still need "just a little bit more work" in the 1960s when I started my graduate studies. There was this programming language called LISP. Everybody was really gung ho about it. It was going to make developing AI software so much easier. Great things were on the horizon. Soon enough it was the 1970s. Then the 1980s. Then the 1990s. I retired from industry. Then it was the 2000s. Now it's the 2010s. And AI is still, pardon my French, pretty fucking non-existent. I'll be dead long before AI could ever become a reality. My children will be dead long before AI becomes a reality. My grandchildren will likely be dead before AI becomes a reality. My greatgrandchildren may just live to see the day when the computing field accepts that AI just isn't going to happen!

    1. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 3, Insightful

      And AI is still, pardon my French, pretty fucking non-existent.

      Except for the cell phone in your pocket, that can recognize your commands and search the internet for what you requested, or translate your statement into any of a dozen foreign languages, and has a camera that can recognize faces, and millions of objects, and can connect to expert systems that can, for instance, diagnose diseases better than all but the very best doctors. Oh, and your cellphone can also beat any grandmaster in the world at chess.

      However, if you consider AI to be shorthand for "stuff computers can't do yet", then, yes, AI will always be "right around the corner".

    2. Re: AI is always "right around the corner". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Lol you cutie. You think Siri is AI. Wow you are so naive and cute for thinking that.

    3. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by Beck_Neard · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Symbolic manipulation as a route to AI was a period of collective delusion in computer science. Lots of people wasted their talents going down this route. In the 80's this approach was all but dead and AI researchers finally sobered up. They started actually learning about the human brain and incorporating the lessons into their designs. It's sad that so much time was wasted on that approach, but the good news is that the new approaches people are using now are based on actual science and grounded in reality. The intelligence in search, natural language, object and facial recognition, and self-driving cars (that ShanghaiBill pointed out) is due to these new approaches.

      AI spent its youth confused and rebellious. That was when you were in your graduate studies. Now it's far more matured. I encourage you to read up on new machine intelligence approaches and the literature in this area. You won't be disappointed.

      --
      A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
    4. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by Panoptes · · Score: 4, Funny

      "semi-autisitc fuckwitted word salad"

      When a computer can come with such linguistic inventiveness, we may truly say that AI has arrived.

    5. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by bzipitidoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Researchers once thought chess made a good proxy for intelligence. Not every smart person is good at chess, but it seemed every good chess player was also smart. They worked for decades to make chess programs that could beat good chess players. When that started happening, it was obvious that the programs had no general intelligence at all. They were good for chess, but had to be reprogrammed even for very similar games like checkers. When the ultimate triumph of beating the world chess champ happened, it was more of the same. No real intelligence, just faster hardware and refinements to the search algorithm.

      The conclusion is that chess is not a good measure of intelligence after all. We don't have a good grasp of what intelligence really is, let alone how exactly to measure it. IQ tests have all kinds of problems, not least that the typical IQ test is very narrow. Maybe wealth or number of children or friends could correlate with intelligence, but there are lots of problems with that too. Is it smart to have wealth beyond one's present and future needs?

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
    6. Re: AI is always "right around the corner". by Knuckles · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The machine has no fucking clue about what it is translating. Not the media, not the content, not even what to and from which languages it is translating (other than a variable somewhere, which is not "knowing". None whatsoever. Until it does, it has nothing to do with AI in the sense of TAFA. (The alarmist fucking article)

      --
      "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
    7. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 3, Insightful

      All those things your smartphone are doing aren't AI. They're still relatively basic commands but done quickly through increased processing power or off-loading the work to a server. It might make your phone looks like it can talk to you but it's not doing any more than computers in the 80's did.

    8. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by mpe · · Score: 3, Interesting

      The conclusion is that chess is not a good measure of intelligence after all. We don't have a good grasp of what intelligence really is, let alone how exactly to measure it. IQ tests have all kinds of problems, not least that the typical IQ test is very narrow.

      It's also rather hard to design a test which dosn't require "general knowlage" or which isn't "ethnocentric" in some way.

    9. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Translation is like predicting the weather. If you want to do an okay job of predicting the weather, predict either the same as this day last year or the same as yesterday. That will get you something like 60-70% success. Modelling local pressure systems will get you another 5-10% fairly easily. Getting from 80% correct to 90% is insanely hard.

      For machine translation, building a database of 3-grams or 4-grams and just doing simple pattern matching (which is what Google Translate does) gets you 70% accuracy quite easily (between romance languages, anyway. It really sucks for Japanese or Russian, for example). Extending the n-gram size; however, quickly hits diminishing returns. Your increases in accuracy depend on a corpus and when you get to the size of n-gram where you're really accurate, you're effectively needing a human to have already translated each sentence.

      Machine-aided translation can give huge increases in productivity. Completely computerised translation has already got most of the low-hanging fruit and will have a very difficult job of getting to the level of a moderately competent bilingual human.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    10. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by msclrhd · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The chess programs had the rules of chess programmed into them, and the move to play was calculated by rating different moves in the search space using an algorithm that was programmed by the developers of the AI system. This means that it is only specialised to chess.

      To be the AI in movies like The Terminator, the program will need to be able to learn the rules and strategies of chess itself, and adapt its algorithm over time. To simplify the problem of recognising the elements on the board (machine vision), you could represent the board as an 8x8 array of Unicode characters.

      Teaching the rules is difficult because you need a way of communicating those rules, which means that the program will need to understand language and the meaning behind the language (or enough meaning to understand rules to a particular game). Also, chess has a lot of rules that can be complex (en passant, castling, etc.) so it would be better to start with a simple game like tic tac toe or connect 4.

      The real threat is not in a generic AI that deems humans as a threat, but a specially tasked program or AI that miscalculates: allowing machines to control drones or military aircraft to perform air strikes, or similar things. There, if a machine gets things wrong it can cause untold destruction. Think SkyNet/The Terminator, but here the machines do not know what they are doing (they don't have independent thought or understanding like humans and animals), they just classify humans (or buildings) as a threat -- that is, this can be via a decision tree like in the chess games and the best "move" is to attack any building.

    11. Re: AI is always "right around the corner". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Welcome to the http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room

      Q: if there was a human dumb savant who could translate instantly between multiple languages, though without understanding how he did it (think Rainman), would you say he was not intelligent? Why? What is intelligence? We are inconsistent - we praise humans as intelligent when they can perform some complex algorithm well (chess), and yet as soon as a computer beats a human, or all humans, we denigrate the task as "not intelligence". Often the reason is "just an algorithm", but as a neuroscientist knows, that is a poor excuse - it's algorithms all the way down.

  5. most of the human race will have more leisure time by manu0601 · · Score: 3, Funny

    TFA says

    most of the human race will have more leisure time

    Or they will struggle to survive by working in jobs the intelligent machine do not want to do

  6. Re:"machines will view us as an unpredictable" by blackbeak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Humans are a species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses

    I beg to disagree. The typical human works toward stability in his/her life, wields (relatively puny) weapons only to protect him/herself (if at all), and is subject to attacks from computer viruses. Will intelligent computers make the mistake of defining the human species by the small percentage of psychopathic humans who believe they are demigods? Not if they are intelligent. Btw, no one will miss the subset of the species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses" when our new overlords wipe them out. (You know who you are!)

    --
    Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
  7. Re:AI is always by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Algorithms are not AI. Everything you describe is simply a matter of following a human-generated set of instructions. That is not AI.

  8. Intelligence by Oligonicella · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.

    As stated elsewhere, I see no indication of intelligence in computers and we're only thirty years from his mark of they're being intelligent enough to look down on us. Been hearing this hysteria since the '70s at least.

  9. Re:AI is always by Imrik · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The machine that learns can be considered an AI, but the ones derived from it don't learn anything new after they're programmed and so shouldn't be considered as part of the total machine intelligence.

  10. Stephen Hawking fears the same thing... by kolbe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Just not necessarily within 35 years:

    ""Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history." Hawking writes. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last."

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

  11. What we don't know... by OrangeTide · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Your cell phone is less capable of learning than a jellyfish. Although your cell phone can sometimes simulate very simple learning under extremely rigid frameworks for learning.

    a human competitive AI in 30 years? seems unlikely given the almost zero progress on the subject in the last 30 years. But maybe we'll hit some point where it all cascades very quickly. Like if we could do a dog level intelligence it is not a far leap to do human level and super human level. But we have trouble with cockroach levels of intelligence, or even defining what intelligence is or how to measure it.

    AI research for the last several decades have taught us how little we know about the fundamental nature of ourselves.

    --
    “Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
  12. Re:AI is always by viperidaenz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's not going to change it's mind half way to New York and go somewhere else.

    Until a machine can come up with an idea of it's own, it's not intelligent.

  13. Re:AI is always by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Nope, not following instructions. I think all of those were based in machine learning.

    I guess Google's car is following instructions too, like "drive me to New York", but most would still count that as AI.

    Just because 'most' would count something as AI doesn't make it so, nor does it make it relevant. The fears raised on articles like this are based on the development of what we would term "sentient AI".
    And frankly speaking calling what is out there right now "machine learning" is a joke. It's akin to scuffing your wool socks on the carpet to produce a static shock and then lumping that into the same category as advanced electrical engineering.

    Cold fusion in your pocket, warp drives, antigravity vehicles (aka 'flying car'), planetary scale terraforming, and genetic/medical engineering which will turn us into undying superbeings are all "right around the corner". These types of alarmist articles are pure pigshit. These types of discussions need to be had, but not as a matter alarmist 'news' articles- this is the role that science fiction fulfills... and does a far better job of it.

  14. Re:AI is always by Great+Big+Bird · · Score: 4, Informative

    Actually it is AI. What it isn't is Generalized AI. What most AI research is done now is specific techniques to specific problems.

  15. Re:AI is always by peragrin · · Score: 4, Interesting

    if you think a self driving car is an AI then you know nothing about intelligence.

    A self driving car is about as smart as a worker ant. it can move around obstacles, it can move heavy loads(like a fat arse). It has taken 50 years for computers to replicate an ant. And to do it we need 100,000 times the power requirements. Oh sure the self driving car follows GPS instead of sent trails. but no self driving car can follow a trail that doesn't exist.

    --
    i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
  16. Re:AI is always by BitZtream · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Googles car has been programmed to know how to drive. It can not learn how to fly. It can not learn how to build a new copy of itself. It can not learn to bake a loaf of bread.

    It is in no way AI.

    --
    Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
  17. Re:AI is always by Ol+Olsoc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It's not going to change it's mind half way to New York and go somewhere else.

    Right - it's not like direction finding devices can't find construction and route you around them.

    Until a machine can come up with an idea of it's own, it's not intelligent.

    You've just invalidated at least half of the human race.

    --
    The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
  18. Re:AI is always by ranton · · Score: 3, Funny

    And how long did evolution take to make an ant? How long from there to a human?

    In case anyone is wondering, it took about 2.6 billion years for ants to evolve, and another 0.1 billion years for humans to evolve. So anyone comparing self driving cars to ants is making the prediction that Strong AI will take another 3 years or so to become reality.

    --
    -- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke