The only way for the US to avoid killing anyone with their super dooper high tech weaponry would be if there were no friendly forces anywhere nearby. I always thought the weapons were expensive because they made such a big bang..
Granted computer hardware will continue to be fairly predictable (not necessarily a safe assumption, it will be easy enough to build in quantum uncertainty into a system if you want to) nonetheless it is actually chaos theory that will make super intelligent systems unpredictable. Not that the hardware will be unpredictable, but that beyond a cetain level of complexity the software will become unpredictable. We already have software systems with undocumented functionality that the designers and coders included without realising it. You only need a few simple rules carefully chosen and systems can soon escalate beyond computational analysis. The whole massive processing thing is relating to the 'Strong' school of AI, 'Weak' AI, i.e. intelligence as an emergent an unexpected phenomenon does not require this processing power. Think about it this way. A beetle has very little processing power compared to the box you're reading this on, but write a program for your machine to navigate it's way across a room to a food source by calculation and you don't need a lot of obstacles for the beetle to make your gigahertz machine look stupid. On the other hand give a ZX81 a couple of rules;
Move towards the food; If you hit something go left 1 foot then move towards the food
and nine times out of ten with random obstacels it will give the beetle a run for it's money (assuming all contestants have an equal mode of transport etc). My point is not that ZX81s are better, simply that I suspect we won't even know the systems that reach self awareness first, they will be one of those big complicated monsters that has been added to, modified, and probably runs on a COBOL core. Government, University, Corporate, it's irrelevant. These systems have evolved from silicon to somewhere beyond single cells in 50 years, it took us 3 billion years for that bit, the last bit was rather quicker.
Dr Vinge may be right, he may be wrong, but I think that while humans may inherit the stars, they may be life, but not as we know it.
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The only way for the US to avoid killing anyone with their super dooper high tech weaponry would be if there were no friendly forces anywhere nearby. I always thought the weapons were expensive because they made such a big bang..
Granted computer hardware will continue to be fairly predictable (not necessarily a safe assumption, it will be easy enough to build in quantum uncertainty into a system if you want to) nonetheless it is actually chaos theory that will make super intelligent systems unpredictable. Not that the hardware will be unpredictable, but that beyond a cetain level of complexity the software will become unpredictable. We already have software systems with undocumented functionality that the designers and coders included without realising it. You only need a few simple rules carefully chosen and systems can soon escalate beyond computational analysis. The whole massive processing thing is relating to the 'Strong' school of AI, 'Weak' AI, i.e. intelligence as an emergent an unexpected phenomenon does not require this processing power. Think about it this way. A beetle has very little processing power compared to the box you're reading this on, but write a program for your machine to navigate it's way across a room to a food source by calculation and you don't need a lot of obstacles for the beetle to make your gigahertz machine look stupid. On the other hand give a ZX81 a couple of rules;
Move towards the food; If you hit something go left 1 foot then move towards the food
and nine times out of ten with random obstacels it will give the beetle a run for it's money (assuming all contestants have an equal mode of transport etc). My point is not that ZX81s are better, simply that I suspect we won't even know the systems that reach self awareness first, they will be one of those big complicated monsters that has been added to, modified, and probably runs on a COBOL core. Government, University, Corporate, it's irrelevant. These systems have evolved from silicon to somewhere beyond single cells in 50 years, it took us 3 billion years for that bit, the last bit was rather quicker.
Dr Vinge may be right, he may be wrong, but I think that while humans may inherit the stars, they may be life, but not as we know it.