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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.""
Of course Watson didn't answer questions in Jeopardy. That's not how Jeopardy is played. The contestant ASKS questions, not answers them.
Ha! Appropriate /. tagline while reading: Pound for pound, the amoeba is the most vicious animal on earth.
If the universe is someone's simulation -- does that mean the stars are just stuck pixels?
I did philosophy myself as an undergraduate, so I don't want to bash our armchair friend here for doing his best. He is making the classic mistake of making claims about fields he isn't part of. In this case biology, computer science, and cognitive science in general (beyond philosophy).
Regarding the statement "We used 'it' the way we use clocks":
He is mistaking agency for being something that is an end unto itself. This isn't true. Agents commonly use other agents as tools. The mere property of "being used" doesn't dictate whether something is sentient, intelligent, an agent, or whatever. Yeah, we used Watson to play Jeapordy!, but that doesn't mean it isn't smart. Watson is actually way "smarter" than any human in certain ways.
This boils down to what you define as intelligence. In humans, intelligence is a very rough term applied to an enormous pile of features. Processing speed, memory, learning algorithms, response time, and many more features all contribute to what we think of as intelligence. A singularity doesn't need to precisely mirror the way in which a human thinks in order to be a singularity. It just needs to be able to adapt and evolve. I'll be the first to admit we are a long way off from modeling a human consciousness in virtual space. However, existing machine learning and rule based techniques are powerful enough to do some really impressive things (like Watson and Siri). They aren't singularity level, no, but that doesn't make this man's arguments relevant.
Regarding "we can't produce "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of an amoeba":
The idea that an ameoba displays intelligence in excess of our current ability to simulate is frankly a little ridiculous. Artificial agents are capable of very complex behavior. They can react to abstract constructs which are inferred about their environment. They can anticipate opponents based on statistical probability and thereby win, on average, more often than even *a human being*. An amoeba is closer in behavioral complexity to a simple chemical reaction than it is a contemporary artificial intelligence.
Wrong. We've produced "...machines that exhibit the agency and awareness of..." a worm: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/...
Im not worried about AI being smarter than us... Im worried about machines that use the same logic (or ethics) we do...
Such as the Baghdad Airstrike... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
A machine is only as good as the code behind it, and look at the issues with electronic voting machines, ATM's, and chip on credit card's
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.
I think the singularity is just some technology-wrapped new age bullshit.
The fact that you had to resort to fiction (and cheesy fiction at that) for your reference, instead of an applicable real life analogy, just shows that up.
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.
http://www.theguardian.com/sci...
I couldn't find a more recent article, but at the end it mentions that this AI came up with a formula for cellular metabolism. It is my understanding that this formula has been tested to be valid, but no human scientists understands what the formula means yet.
Ideology: A tool used primarily to avoid the bother of thinking.
What is the point of this article? You would think that people have learned better by now than to attempt to make predictions as to where technology will go.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
You can make a machine that is many orders of magnitude more intelligent than a human, but unless it has the mechanisms to want something, it won't want anything. Think about what it would take to program a conscious being, just think about how we humans are aware of time and the movement of time--as a software engineer it boggles my mind trying to think about how the brain accomplishes that. Then to program a machine (biological or not) to want something in a fairly consistent way over a period of time under changing circumstances...it takes more than just brute force processing time to accomplish that. We biological machines are aware of ourselves, and we have no idea how we accomplish that. We are going to have to figure that out before we make the singularity machine.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Consciousness neither implies nor is implied by either emotions or desires.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
More than half the time, the "answer" doesn't even make sense as a response to the "question".
Q: Who is "Joe DeSixpack"
A: Born in 19th Century Verona, he died of plague playing beach volleyball in Aruba.
NO!!!
The development of Watson stems from employers' inability to use human intelligence 100% instrumentally -- i.e., people can't be used as clocks. Once Watsons are prevalent, humans will be economically superfluous in nearly every area that requires thought. Our overlords won't even bother to bring out the old line about freeing up humans' time to do "better things."
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
You would hope a Professor of philosophy could get his head around the difference.
Agree, way too many people who should know better still conflate consciousness with intelligence. An ant's nest exhibits intelligent behaviour but it can't contemplate it's own existence, Watson displays the same kind of "mindless" intelligence and consistently outperforms the best human trivia buffs.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly
Meanwhile a week ago nematodes reached the singularity, when folks mapped the roundworms' 300+ synaptic connections into a Lego robot, which proceeded to react to moving toward a wall in similar fashion to biological nematodes.
Bright lights, like this loon, are all part of the "man is not ready......." pseudo religious bullshit".
In fact, we will progress to artificial life and artificial intelligence in erratic steps - some large, some small - some hard, some easy.
Easy is logic, easy is memory and lookups, easy is speed - hence Watson as we start to climb the connectedness/co-relatedness/content addressable memory ladder. (Content addressable memory {CAI } is like a roll call in the Army - "Private Smith?" - "here"). A lot of the aspects of intelligence are ramifications of CAI, and other aspects of interconnectedness. Add in the speed and memory depth and more and more aspects of an AI emerge. As time goes, step by step, intelligence will emerge. It might be like an infant that needs to learn as we do, but at a far higher speed - zero to 25 years old in 5 minutes???. Experiential memories - can they be done at high speed, or must that clock take longer?.
The precise timing of these stages elude me, but I believe they will emerge with time.
As to whether or not this AI will be a malevolent killer, or one of altruistic aspect??? It seems to me that this will depend on how is is brought up.
(until an AI can reproduce sexually - no he/she). Can a growing AI be abused - mentally, as in children are abused?? I suspect that with no sexuality that there will be no casus abusus. That is not to say that ways to abuse a growing AI are impossible to find - they will emerge in time.
As these AIs emerge, how smart will they be? and IQ of 25 or one of 25,000,000?? This might bear some relationship with how these AIs treat mankind, as a student at man;s knee, or as something that looks down at man with an IQ of 100 and also sees bees and ants with with a group IQ of 25? and muses - what's the difference and thinks of other things...
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.
Computers have been able to "program themselves" since the first Fortran compiler. We just taught computers how to interpret specifications written at higher and higher levels. Let me know what it'd take for a computer to come up with a program's requirements all by itself, and then we'll know what a singularity needs.
and the CEO of the contractors who build the system get's 50M bonus for doing a good job.
Yes! That's precisely the technology-wrapped new age bullshit we're talking about.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Exactly this. Everyone needs to read up. Ant nests are no less self-conscious than you or I. There is no way to prove or disprove an internal experience of any intelligent entity. So the best thing to do is to focus on the displayed behavior and not try to second-guess the internal "thoughts" of an AI or an ant's nest, because that way lies madness.
As a logical positivist, I'm ready to reject all questions about consciousness, including claims that humans do or don't have it. Nobody has any clue what the metric is. "I assert I am conscious, therefore I am." "I assert the ant is or isn't conscious, therefore it is or isn't because it didn't disagree."
I can simply program Eliza to tell you she is self aware. How would you test it? By her ability to fool humans into thinking she is human? Is that the metric??
Prove I am not just a complicated electro-chemical pattern that maintains its cohesion entirely due to physical processes.
Evil robots should not be feared because they might become "aware." They should be feared because they might be programmed and/or controlled by evil humans. Same as with all other tools...
Doubly true, we recently stuck a worm's brain in a robot body.
Wowowowow and a worm is way more complicated than an amoeba! Dr. Noe should probably stick to questioning his own existence.
Expert systems are not intelligent. They're nothing more than a fancy version of Animals. If/then/else isn't even weak AI and a binary search of an index is just a search. It doesn't mimic an expert, because experts only start with simple diagnostic tools like that. That's the beginning, not the end. Experts know when answers are off and know how to recover from it - when it's unimportant and when it's absolutely critical. Experts also know how to handle cases never encountered before, because they don't just know a bunch of checklist questions, they know how information relates and they know the patterns that are generic across all cases, known and unknown. You can't program an Expert System Shell with Category Theory maps, Prolog isn't going to know what to do with meta-abstraction.
Neural Networks are debatable. Fundamentally, a Neural Network is a very large set of multi-input gates. Nothing more. If it's trained, then all you've done is simplified the derivation of the gates. You've not added any intelligence. Self-organizing networks are another beast entirely. These can be argued to be "intelligent", since the human brain is ultimately nothing more than a gigantic conglomerate of gates itself. The only reason you have the illusion of intelligence is that there's self-organizing involved. However, no self-organizing neural net on any computer yet built is so powerful that it can simulate the functioning of a nematode's brain. Strong AI, which is what most non-CS people think of as AI, cannot yet even be described. We have no comprehension of what it is, therefore cannot build it.
What the professor is really talking about though, as indicated by the reference to cellular biology, is not AI but ALife. Nothing currently in existence can be called true artificial life, although the Bugs program from Scientific American is a good start. Artificial Life is many orders of magnitude harder than Strong AI. It's not enough to emulate the properties of intelligence, you have to emulate the reason for there needing to be intelligence in the first place. Even those working on Strong AI aren't tackling such self-consistency issues, far too complex for them.
(It's clear that most AI work is incompatible with a self-consistent Strong AI, so I'm inclined to believe Singularity isn't going to be here for a while. Progress is, as others have noted, somewhere between non-linear and exponential, but even if we assume exponential, it'll be between 75-150 years before Strong Artificial Life is within reach, where Strong ALife is Strong AI and Artificial Life and self-consistency.)
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)
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)
Yeah "it" will be self limiting for the obvious reason - processing takes resources. There is not going to be an exponential explosion in computing without exponential explosion in power efficiency or resource availability. Nothing in my laptop will ever become sentient, the power supply is not sufficient for such a crappy flops/watts design.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
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.
You're applying your own arbitrary definition of intelligence, using that to frame the argument and declare yourself right. AI as a subject got past that kind of crap by the 90s with a realisation that it's a little more complex than all that.
You dismiss various AI solutions as just being a bunch of algorithms, well guess what? we still have absolutely no evidence that human beings themselves aren't run by a bunch of algorithms, the only difference is that we just don't understand them well enough to document or reproduce them synthetically yet.
It's stupid to declare something like a neural network or expert system not intelligent just because you understand the details of it because most people who see the actions of a neural network would say "That's pretty intelligent how it can do that".
If you have two closed boxes for classifying say, wine. In one is a person and in the other is a computer with equipment and a neural network trained for wine classification and a wine sample goes in and a classification is displayed on a screen by entering an output and the computer can of course do it better than any person people are pretty much always going to class the computers response as the intelligent one when it gets far more tests right. The Turing test was designed to show the sorts of intelligence we see in strong AI, but modified versions of that display intelligence from weak AI in select circumstances.
So yes, you can absolutely say things like neural nets, and expert systems are not strong AI, but you absolutely cannot say they are not intelligent without framing it on the rather stupid definition that something is not intelligent if we understand how it works. In some circumstances these systems would be deemed to be more intelligent than humans by most people and as we don't have a fixed definition of intelligence that seems a far better way of judging intelligence - getting people's judgement on intelligence in a statistically sound study than coming up with definitions like "Something is intelligent if we don't understand how it works".
If computer algorithms could show no intelligence whatsoever then we'd only be using them to do dumb repetition, like building cars on an assembly line, but we don't, we use them to augment our search capabilities, to correct our grammar and spelling, to figure out an optimal path for data to travel down on a complex network and so on and so forth far better than a human could - we're using them to augment our intelligence every day and many ways, and that's because they can display some intelligence. Not conciousness, not strong AI, but a degree of intelligence all the same.
You're conflating conciousness, intelligence, and strong AI all into one big pot, but it's all far more nuanced than that. You're assuming life works in a binary way, where something is either not intelligent, or something has human level intelligence and artificial would be a strong AI. But god only knows, we have enough evidence of various living things in this world to see that there are varying gradients of conciousness and intelligence for that to be true. Assuming it'd somehow be different with computers makes no sense and guess what? in the last 20 years we've seen progress with AI research with ever increasing levels of intelligence. When that'll escalate to the level of what we deem strong AI, or human intelligence is anyone's guess but we're not suddenly going to go from having no strong AI to having strong AI, we're going to have ever increasingly intelligent stuff that approaches strong AI and eventually becomes good enough to declare as strong AI.
Terminator isn't a peer-reviewed scientific paper. In fact, it's often thought that much of its sources were fabricated with special effects and clever camera work.
In fact, it's author James Cameron is not even an established scientist, it has been recently discovered that his oceanographic work on Titanic was published BEFORE he underwent any deep sea exploration, and it's speculated that he only went down there afterwards to further fabricate his already published results. It's also speculated that he never produced unobtainium in his lab before claiming its discovery.
In fact, I'm not even sure if Judgement Day even happened, and whether or not any Cyberdyne Systems products were responsible for it happening.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
How can you have emotion or desire without consciousness?
Who ordered that?
Indeed. Other BS things called as "singularity".
1) What is at the center of a black hole? Answer: Singularity. Real Answer: No freaking clue
The singularity of a black hole simply means we can't see that far. It is the point from which information cannot escape. It's not some psuedomystic hand-waving nonsense promising unicorns and fulfilled dreams. It's just the name for a region for which there is no way to discover what is inside of it.
The singularity in the context of technological progress uses the black hole as a metaphor. It describes a point at which technology becomes self-propelling in a manner that makes it impossible for us to project what life would be like then, in a similar way to how miniaturisation and Moore's law have given us a present that couldn't have been projected in the 1940s. People then like to project what it could look like as an interesting exercise, and some of them choose to promise unicorns, but that doesn't make the concept of self-propelling technological advance itself inherently wrong.
But all of it doesn't even matter.
The professor of philosophy is actually wrong. We don't understand what time is any better then clocks do. We are complicated, ad infinitum refined "clocks" for mindless, insentient set of genes who aren't even aware of us. Even the notions "aware" and "sentient" are themselves misleading.
No, this is wrong. The professor is right; we do understand time and computers do not. In fact, we are capable of an understanding of time in a way which is impossible to communicate to computers or even any other forms consciousnesses. We understand time because we have an inherent sense of causality built into us, and time is the name we have given to the way we relate causal events. In fact, we are so good with time that we can construct dynamic experiments in our mind, using our own mind as a model and track the state of the modelled mind in time.
Consider the following experiment. A little child watches his mother put a bar of chocolate in the fridge. Little later daddy sneaks in and eats the chocolate. The little boy giggles; why? Because he knows that as far as mommy is concerned the chocolate is still there in the fridge and she will be surprised when she looks for it. How does he know? Because he constructed a simulation in his head of his mommy's mind, fed it a sequence of stimuli and observed its evolution over time. This is a level of manipulation of time (causality) which is completely out of reach of the most powerful computer.
"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.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm living in a computer simulation being run on a computer. And I'm starting to get the feeling that it's a poorly optimized console port from Ubisoft.
You are welcome on my lawn.
But they can't eat the chocolate.
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