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Alva Noe: Don't Worry About the Singularity, We Can't Even Copy an Amoeba
An anonymous reader writes "Writer and professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley Alva Noe isn't worried that we will soon be under the rule of shiny metal overlords. He says that currently we can't produce "machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba." He writes at NPR: "One reason I'm not worried about the possibility that we will soon make machines that are smarter than us, is that we haven't managed to make machines until now that are smart at all. Artificial intelligence isn't synthetic intelligence: It's pseudo-intelligence. This really ought to be obvious. Clocks may keep time, but they don't know what time it is. And strictly speaking, it is we who use them to tell time. But the same is true of Watson, the IBM supercomputer that supposedly played Jeopardy! and dominated the human competition. Watson answered no questions. It participated in no competition. It didn't do anything. All the doing was on our side. We played Jeopordy! with Watson. We used 'it' the way we use clocks.""
I find this laughable because it's almost the opposite of the "If we can put a man on the moon, we can solve cancer." fallacy. If we can't copy an amoeba, we won't. LOL. No? I beg to differ. We can't right now, and for a million fundamental reasons that are all being solved in time.
Here's some perspective. I work in cell biology. 3 years ago, genetic expression required measuring the RNAs of at least a small cluster of cells. Two years ago, single cell RNA analysis became available. A year ago we started seeing the ability to split one cell into 4 equal vessicles, each able to be analyzed separately if need be. We also now have the software and processing power to infer huge bioinformatic hypotheses from this intricate data. In three years the ability went from an average, to a single, to a greater sampling number from the single (for statistical accuracy). THIS IS NOT EVEN THE UPCURVE OF SINGULARITY, but it sure feels like it.
Nanomaterials are allowing for crazy new properties on the macro-scale. Biotechnology is becoming cellular an surpassing simple chemistry. Artificial intelligence is now being implemented on neural-like computer architectures which are much more powerful at brain-like activity.
Full Disclosure, I've been a Kurzweilian Singularity Believer for years now and my life is betting on it. But I've had a lot more than confirmation bias going on to keep my confidence very high.
Putting nuclear bombs on the tips of rockets and programming them to hit other parts of the Earth is also mere tool use. Tools are not inherently safe, and never have been. Autonomous tools are even less inherently safe. The most likely outcome of a failed singularity isn't being ruled by robot overlords, it's being dead.
Watson is actually way "smarter" than any human in certain ways.
That has *always* been true of computers. That is, in fact, exactly why we built computers in the first place: to do things faster than humans can. Saying that something is "smarter than any human in certain ways" is meaningless. Hell, in a way, rocks are smarter than humans. After all, if I throw a rock, it "knows" exactly what path it should take (minimizing energy, interacting with the air, etc.) Sure, it'll be nearly a parabola, but it will be perturbed from a parabola by tiny air currents, minute fluctuations in the gravitational field, et alia. And it will follow the resulting path perfectly. Humans cannot calculate, and will never be able to calculate, this trajectory with perfect precision. No one would ever say the rock is smarter than a human, however, because obviously, it isn't. It has absolutely no intelligence whatsoever.
Watson is, fundamentally, no different from that rock. Sure, it follows a very complex "path" indeed (though laid down by humans), but the only difference between the rock and Watson is the *kind* of path. In fact, Watson's path is less complex than the path of the rock (which isn't entirely a fair comparison, since the rock's path is practically infinitely complex). There is intelligence in Watson, sure, but it's our intelligence, in the same way a thrown rock can make a deadly weapon if well-aimed. This is not to say that it's impossible for humans to design an intelligence that can supersede our own, but the kind of intelligence required for the "singularity" is entirely and almost completely different from anything we've come up with so far. We might do it one day, but it'll require an invention of an entirely new kind of artificial intelligence, and we don't even know what that kind of intelligence would look like, beyond possibly running a simulation of a human mind (which is, quite possibly, one way of doing it).
I certainly wouldn't listen to the "it's coming in 2040" predictions for the singularity: I mean, people seriously thought we'd have fusion power, flying cars, and regular moon trips by now 50 years ago, and none of that happened. On the other hand, we did get the Internet and ubiquitous wireless communication, which few people predicted. The future of technology that far away is unpredictable, because it relies on new discoveries, and by definition we don't know what we haven't discovered yet.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
As I note in my doom and gloom YouTube, it's a 50-year-old analogy in the quest for AI that artificial flight did not require duplicating a bird. Artificial intelligence may look very different, and in fact in my video, I avoid defining intelligence and merely point out that "a computer that can program itself" is all that is required for the singularity.
Not true. The Scientific Method is itself a philosophy, as is mathematics. (Mathematics is not a science, it is a humanity and specifically a philosophy.) Mathematics is the core of all science.
Your understanding of philosophy clearly needs some refreshing. I suggest you start with Bertrand Russel's formalization of logic and progress to John Patrick Day's excellent textbook on mathematical philosophy. It's clear you do not know what serious (as opposed to populist) philosophers are concerned with. This is no better than judging physics by Fleich and Pons' Cold Fusion work, or judging biology by examining 1960s American perversions of brain surgery.
You've got to look at the real work. And the odds are that there's more in your computer that was developed by a philosopher than ever came close to a "non-philosophical" scientist (whatever those might be).
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If you compare the power usage and performance of a Commodore 64 to today's laptops, I think we've done a pretty good job of exponentially increasing power efficiency. Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds, we just haven't figured out how to steer all this power towards actual intelligence. If mother nature can create human minds that function on a few sandwiches a day, I'm sure we'll be able to surpass that. Of course it can't continue to grow exponentially forever, but it can certainly scale well beyond the combined power of the seven billion human brains on this planet today.
"Already, computers are waaay more powerful than human minds"
no they aren't. Seriously, watch some of the DARPA robotics challenges. These machines attempt to mimic human tasks. They take something like an hour to do the calculations to move itself up a ladder. And usually fail at that. It takes me roughly 10 seconds to do that same bit of calculation. And I usually don't fail. This isn't related to intelligence either. This is simply figuring out how to move our respective limbs to go up a ladder.
When it comes to actual sentient intelligence, robotics have literally not started. There's all this talk about singularity bullshit. That doesn't come in to play until we've actually demonstrated it at any level. Every construct we have with SVMs, neural networks, etc. None of those demonstrate real AI at any level. How can we have hit a singularity if we've yet to show the most basic form of actual intelligence.
We currently have machines that can tell us if something is blue or something is red based off a statistical analysis. God help you if you ask it why is something blue.