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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.
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.