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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.
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/...
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.
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.
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!!!
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly
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.
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?
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.
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
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.