Personally I believe the singularity will never happen.
For one reason: The entire premise of the singularity is that humans will be able to invent a machine that is smarter than them. Or at the very least invent a machine that can invent another machine smarter than itself.
I think that premise is simply wrong. I think it's impossible.
Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI.
No one has any idea how to program an AI - no matter the computing speed.
Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today - why would you think we can do one tomorrow?
One argument is basically evolutionary design - let the machine invent itself. The big problem with that is no one even knows how to create an algorithm to measure smartness! If you can't create a fitness function, you can never create an evolutionary design.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
Second, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Today, we're taught what great men had to struggle for 50 years ago - so each new great man will get a little further.
A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago.
We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended.
Disagree. Pretty soon, you're going to have to spend 40 years in specialized schooling just to even try to understand where the giants before us went, let alone ended. Human knowledge only seems sequential, but I don't think it is. The fact that archeologists are continually surprised by how advanced the "ancients" were shows how much knowledge humanity has lost and reinvented (or in some cases, not).
Not if you have silicon neurons that can process information a hundred times faster (since they use electromagnetic signals, not chemical agents, to pass information)! ;-)
But I beg the question...
EDIT: I sort of disagree with you. I'm in graduate school right now, and 90% of a modern mathematician's life is spent on keeping up with the progress of others, particularly in the last 50 years. That is true. However, over time, we also filter out the unimportant stuff. While automorphic forms may be an important field today so that we can bring in fresh minds to try to tackle the Langlands Program, once that is solved there won't be as much of an emphasis. I knew "more" calculus than Isaac Newton when I was 12 in the sense that I had learned things like Stoke's theorem that he had not even known about, but Newton's knowledge was much more of a mess, as well. The stuff you learn from textbooks is not how researchers originally discovered things. Think of the analogy of starting a fresh startup codebase that looks horrible, but becomes very polished and clean after several refactorings; it may take weeks to introduce a person to the former codebase, but for the latter it may only take a good one-hour tutorial.
You nailed it with the code analogy, human knowledge is continually refactored and slowly but surely increased with each successive generation. To say we aren't getting smarter is absurd, we are getting both smarter and more knowledgeable at an ever increasing rate.
You are assuming that the required knowledge can be presented in a modular way, to reduce its complexity.
Knowledge can only be simplified so much... what if the knowledge required for AI, after being made as simple as possible, is still more complex than the most gifted human being can understand?
I like to think that the ultimate nature of reality is simple and beautiful. But all I can be sure of is that the things that I can see are simple enough for me to grasp.
We've already designed, or grown might be a more accurate description, working (most of the time) systems which defy understanding [in full] by the most gifted humans. See the world financial system, our national electricity grid, Windows, Wikipedia, etc. etc. We may not be able to design AI, but we are going to develop it.
Well the thing is, the code analogy works really well for things like algorithms, math, and factual knowledge. Really, the things you are talking about that cannot be modularized are things that require large amounts of training. However, the training algorithm may be able to be modularized and encoded thus enabling the AI to learn these things. This is the goal of machine learning.
>A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago.
What!?! That is not true. How about the book From the earth to the Moon, written in 1865? And the ideas there were correct! They couldn't do, but they could imagine it.
Even 2000 years ago you could imagine throwing a rock really really high and getting to the moon. Again, you couldn't do it, but you could imagine it.
No one has any ideas for how to implement AI - none. It's not a matter of not being able to execute the ideas - there aren't any.
There are many ways to invent. Intentional design is just one of them, and so far the least effective one.
Many great discoveries in fields like medicine and biology were by accident and enlightened stabs in the dark, not by careful prediction, modeling and subsequent measurement.
Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI.
If you had given doctors around then 1920s an infinite budget and armies of test subject, they would still not have been able to even propose an idea for a working wide-spectrum anti-bacterial pill to vanquish most of that age's deadliest diseases. Yet, by accident, they stumbled on penicillin, and did beat out all those diseases.
Accident is a powerful force.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
The singularity doesn't have to come through pure-silicon computing. If we enhance human intelligence enough, we get a similar result.
You missed the point with your example of anti-bacterial pill.
It's not the execution that is missing with AI, it's the ideas. In 1920 you most certainly can come up with the idea of killing bacteria by eating something - people did it every day! Sure they had no idea if it works, or why it works, or what to eat. But the basic idea: eat something and make the illness go away was there.
There are no ideas in AI. AI reaserchers these days are working on sub-problems, vision recognition, speech, pretending to reply to someone, but none of them have any ideas on how to make AI work.
They just hope that by putting all these things together something will come out - and they will probably be able to make a robot that is a smart as a dog for example.
But they have no ideas for how to program creativity - no one does.
I'm afraid you're the one who's missing the point. People in the 1920's weren't so used to eating something and making diseases go away. Diseases were accepted as a fact of life (or rather death), and if you had told someone around that time that within a few decades they'd be able to swallow a little pill and cure most of the deadliest diseases of that time, they'd have laughed at your face and considered you a hopeless optimist.
Imagine someone came up to you today and suggested that in 20 years' time you can get a jab that will protect you from cancer, aids, degenerative diseases, heart disease, cholesterol problems, baldness, and erectile dysfunction all at once - you'd laugh at them and call them a spammer. Yet the biotech and nanotech revolutions are just around the corner and who knows, they might bring just that, though anyone who believes that they will is indeed very optimistic.
AI researchers might be working on sub-problems, but who's to say that they won't stumble on a bigger solution while working on those sub problems? And, again, you're missing the point even more by failing to see that AI is not the only path to a singularity. Enhancing human intelligence can be just as effective. If we create "trans-humans" who are vastly more intelligent than we are, we still get a singularity. We can do that biologically, cybernetically... etc.
Are you not reading what I wrote? You yourself just suggested a method of curing all those things you wrote. So obviously it's possible to imagine them. You don't know how exactly, but you have a starting point: inject some sort of protective something that will do it.
Why do you think I would laugh at them? It seems quite plausible to me.
You are totally wrong about people in 1920. People 2000 years ago even were eating various plants for their medicinal effect. Some of the books from that time (or a little later) still exist! And some of them even work (willow bark for pain for example).
That does not exist with AI. Give me any idea at all of a programming method (besides random permutation) that will, eventually, even with a lot of work, result in AI.
You don't realize just how much harder creating creativity is from anything else humanity has ever done. Create a mechanism that will create something new that has never existed before? (And is not simply a reshuffling of other things.) Computers can not do that, and I don't think will ever be able to do that. (Again, except by trying everything randomly.) Even humans rarely do that - and the ones that do have no idea how they do it, so what makes you think we can program such a thing?
Read some quotes from Mark Kac about magician genius and you'll start to understand the problem. No one has any idea how they make their leaps. A regular genius simply can not do what they do. So why do you think we can program a computer to do such a thing, when we can not even understand how it's done in the first place?
AI is not coming. And on top of all that computing speed has hit a wall. The entire premise depends on computers getting faster and faster. They aren't right now. Intel can not make CPU's run any faster than they are right now. Instead they are adding cores.
Now I expect that to be solved at some point, but it means the exponential growth curve broke. And that means no more singularity.
That's something I don't see much talk of. But it's over, there is no more exponential growth in computing speed.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
One of Kurzweil's really strong points was to treat "AI" as a very loose term. That is, it could for example mean replacing every human neuron with a manmade (e.g., silicon) counterpart. This has already been done on a small scale in rats (I can't find the reference, but it's in his book).
"Upgrading humanity" IS artificial intelligence if you take artificial to be functionally equivalent to manmade: man has "upgraded" himself, and hence created something artificially intelligent.
I agree, in that I think we can't make a machine that is fundamentally smarter than us.
But I think it's possible to create a machine that is as smart as a human. Now, since some human beings seem to be smarter than others, I think it's possible to build a machine that is closer to the "smart" end. And, of course, with the help of such machines, we will be able to do this better and better (as with knowledge and technology in general). Therefore, we could build many Einstein-level intelligences (or a bit better, since he wasn't perfect).
Behind this, my key point is that "more intelligence" is an illusion. Einstein was a function of his times (there was the unexplained lack of motion through the ether, for one thing) and, like Newton, saw further than most because he SOTSOG. He wasn't fundamentally smarter than you - though he might have been able to keep track of more ideas than you, and track their relations to other ideas, and he might have been more free of convention (the humility to admit he didn't know, and the arrogance that you don't either), and more dedicated than you. Ie. he was probably smarter, but not fundamentally.
Being able to accept that you don't know, and therefore to be open to see, is the important thing. Not intelligence.
So if we can have something that is just like the person who invents an equal-to-humanity intelligence, but operating a hundred times faster, with perfect recall, and able to shut down senses or arbitrarily reorder goals, you don't think we could tell this being "Do what your meatspace predecessor did, approximately" and have something even faster, in less time than the original took? And that this process couldn't be repeated?
I don't agree we can't build a machine that out-thinks us, because the early iterations at least would be specialist self-improvement tools - NOT general intelligence. Glorified whole-program optimizers.
AI needs to be built from a theory of mind and a theory of intelligence - but there is reason for hope, as a combination of neuroscience and mathematics (cf: AIXI) is attacking this question. AI also needs to be built from a theory of "friendliness" (goals compatible with humanity) and there are people (cf: SIAI) working on this.
Your message strikes me as having the "mankind will never achieve heavier-than-air flight" quality. (As opposed to the "mankind will never exceed lightspeed" quality - there is no fundamental physics in the way.)
Ugh, no. You would just create a super-parasite. Evolution is parsimonious. You would need to know how to build a mind the simple way in order to direct evolution down just that one path that leads to minds - and meanwhile you'd have cruelly killed millions of by-then thinking feeling persons who didn't quite measure up. And who knows what other tendencies you'd have created aside from intelligence? The whole thing would be a nightmare.
No one has a fitness function for a search interface. But Google does a lot of A/B tests and the interface evolve.
I think that they are not using random mutations in the code. They design the "mutations". But the important point is that they don't have a theoretical fitness function.
No, the process of human evolution is a tale of organisms adapting to their environment. There is no guarantee that human beings will evolve into something more intelligent.
If the average person is granted the ability to manufacture their own reality without any need for earthy concerns, one might think evolutionary forces would push people into becoming marginally intelligent beings focused on decadence.
No there is no guarantee. However in the past it is safe to say that, on average, the human evolutionary path involved an increase in intelligence. Whether that is 'the tale' I will leave to poetic license. I did this to disprove the notion that beings could not produce beings of greater intelligence in the parent post. To disprove a general statement you only have to show one contrary instance.
That was my point. That there exists a process (evolution) where greater intelligence can spring from lesser intelligence. I agree the mechanism is quite different but it demonstrates there is no fundamental obstacle to the process of increasing intelligence.
Perhaps this is one of the mental leaps that creationists are not able/willing to make. Their belief in an ultimate intelligence producing lesser intelligences is at least logically consistent.
>Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.
Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.
That's ok for chess - it has well defined rules, and more importantly a fitness function. That's where all the work is - define a function to tell you if your permutation was a good one.
But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.
> Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.
It is also possible that each individual neuron in the brain is stupid! They don't have any idea of whatever task is being processed, human intelligence is just the result of random connections being made and reinforced by positive feedback.
> But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.
I think it would accurate to say that the fitness functions are more difficult to define and perhaps they are not available at on such a constant basis. But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.
I general I think that whenever a decision making process is automated it tends to lose it's mystic and people then view it less as intelligence and more as a dumb process. Yes chess is just a baby step but it does demonstrate that something that humans used to think of as a significant indicator of intelligence can be achieved.
>But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.
What I'm saying is that to evaluate AI you need I (artificial or otherwise).
So I don't think random permutations will ever get you there, because if we ever manage to write the fitness function, we are almost there anyway. (And no one knows how to do that.)
Maybe one day all of humanity will take part in the great AI race, and every person will help evaluate AI's to find the best one. I'm not sure it'll be enough though, you simply need far far too many permutations for it to ever work.
It would be interesting to use say WoW as a test bed for AI, make sure it always joins a team and see how good you can make it (emphasize the helping other members of the team part). Then send it to second life.
But, I still don't think it'll ever be enough. In particular it'll never be able to design for creativity.
With all the searching and interactions on the internet these days I think there will be plenty of feedback from humans to develop AI if it can be done.
I know about the Turing test, but it will never be able to test for creativity. Only basic speech - and that's not enough to launch the singularity which require a machine that can invent.
It isn't just basic speech. It is whatever is required to convince the examiner that the subject is a human. You could ask the subject for some creative input on a particular topic. That is allowed under the Turing test.
I think that creativity in solving a task is actually quite amenable to automation for a Turing-passing program. Generate a whole bunch of 'ideas' by combining existing concepts in different ways and then test them for usefulness. (Now imagine doing this with a million different Turing processes on your desktop computer - I think there would be some pretty creative ideas generated.) If the program can't tell if an idea is good or at least OK then it is never going to pass the Turing test.
If you are talking about creative in the sense of 'amuses humans' like music or art then the computer is of course at a huge, unfair and pointless disadvantage.
If a program can complete the Turing test then it is likely it will already be a lot smarter than the examiner.
I think his chief exception is the timetable laid out. He is not saying he doesn't believe in evolution. He disagress with someone's extrapolation, that is all.
I was replying to a comment not the parent post. The one where the guy proposed that it would be impossible for humans to create anything smarter than ourselves. Sometimes the indentation on comments can be a little tough to keep up with.
Comments
Personally I believe the singularity will never happen.
For one reason: The entire premise of the singularity is that humans will be able to invent a machine that is smarter than them. Or at the very least invent a machine that can invent another machine smarter than itself.
I think that premise is simply wrong. I think it's impossible.
Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI.
No one has any idea how to program an AI - no matter the computing speed.
Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today - why would you think we can do one tomorrow?
One argument is basically evolutionary design - let the machine invent itself. The big problem with that is no one even knows how to create an algorithm to measure smartness! If you can't create a fitness function, you can never create an evolutionary design.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today
That's kind of silly. First of all, the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect) says we are getting smarter in a very real sense.
Second, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Today, we're taught what great men had to struggle for 50 years ago - so each new great man will get a little further.
A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago.
Who knows what another 50 years will bring?
We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended.
Disagree. Pretty soon, you're going to have to spend 40 years in specialized schooling just to even try to understand where the giants before us went, let alone ended. Human knowledge only seems sequential, but I don't think it is. The fact that archeologists are continually surprised by how advanced the "ancients" were shows how much knowledge humanity has lost and reinvented (or in some cases, not).
Not if you have silicon neurons that can process information a hundred times faster (since they use electromagnetic signals, not chemical agents, to pass information)! ;-)
But I beg the question...
EDIT: I sort of disagree with you. I'm in graduate school right now, and 90% of a modern mathematician's life is spent on keeping up with the progress of others, particularly in the last 50 years. That is true. However, over time, we also filter out the unimportant stuff. While automorphic forms may be an important field today so that we can bring in fresh minds to try to tackle the Langlands Program, once that is solved there won't be as much of an emphasis. I knew "more" calculus than Isaac Newton when I was 12 in the sense that I had learned things like Stoke's theorem that he had not even known about, but Newton's knowledge was much more of a mess, as well. The stuff you learn from textbooks is not how researchers originally discovered things. Think of the analogy of starting a fresh startup codebase that looks horrible, but becomes very polished and clean after several refactorings; it may take weeks to introduce a person to the former codebase, but for the latter it may only take a good one-hour tutorial.
You nailed it with the code analogy, human knowledge is continually refactored and slowly but surely increased with each successive generation. To say we aren't getting smarter is absurd, we are getting both smarter and more knowledgeable at an ever increasing rate.
You are assuming that the required knowledge can be presented in a modular way, to reduce its complexity.
Knowledge can only be simplified so much... what if the knowledge required for AI, after being made as simple as possible, is still more complex than the most gifted human being can understand?
I like to think that the ultimate nature of reality is simple and beautiful. But all I can be sure of is that the things that I can see are simple enough for me to grasp.
We've already designed, or grown might be a more accurate description, working (most of the time) systems which defy understanding [in full] by the most gifted humans. See the world financial system, our national electricity grid, Windows, Wikipedia, etc. etc. We may not be able to design AI, but we are going to develop it.
We can design/grow some things that we cannot understand.
Does it follow that we can therefore design/grow all things that we cannot understand?
Well the thing is, the code analogy works really well for things like algorithms, math, and factual knowledge. Really, the things you are talking about that cannot be modularized are things that require large amounts of training. However, the training algorithm may be able to be modularized and encoded thus enabling the AI to learn these things. This is the goal of machine learning.
A training algorithm selects a hypothesis from a hypothesis space.
What happens if the hypothesis space does not include the true hypothesis?
Defining the hypothesis space is tricky - though the training/search part is also tricky :-).
>A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago.
What!?! That is not true. How about the book From the earth to the Moon, written in 1865? And the ideas there were correct! They couldn't do, but they could imagine it.
Even 2000 years ago you could imagine throwing a rock really really high and getting to the moon. Again, you couldn't do it, but you could imagine it.
No one has any ideas for how to implement AI - none. It's not a matter of not being able to execute the ideas - there aren't any.
And BTW the Flynn Effect has stopped.
the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect) says we are getting smarter in a very real sense.
Are Flynn-Effect gains g gains?
There are many ways to invent. Intentional design is just one of them, and so far the least effective one.
Many great discoveries in fields like medicine and biology were by accident and enlightened stabs in the dark, not by careful prediction, modeling and subsequent measurement.
Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI.
If you had given doctors around then 1920s an infinite budget and armies of test subject, they would still not have been able to even propose an idea for a working wide-spectrum anti-bacterial pill to vanquish most of that age's deadliest diseases. Yet, by accident, they stumbled on penicillin, and did beat out all those diseases.
Accident is a powerful force.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
The singularity doesn't have to come through pure-silicon computing. If we enhance human intelligence enough, we get a similar result.
You missed the point with your example of anti-bacterial pill.
It's not the execution that is missing with AI, it's the ideas. In 1920 you most certainly can come up with the idea of killing bacteria by eating something - people did it every day! Sure they had no idea if it works, or why it works, or what to eat. But the basic idea: eat something and make the illness go away was there.
There are no ideas in AI. AI reaserchers these days are working on sub-problems, vision recognition, speech, pretending to reply to someone, but none of them have any ideas on how to make AI work.
They just hope that by putting all these things together something will come out - and they will probably be able to make a robot that is a smart as a dog for example.
But they have no ideas for how to program creativity - no one does.
I'm afraid you're the one who's missing the point. People in the 1920's weren't so used to eating something and making diseases go away. Diseases were accepted as a fact of life (or rather death), and if you had told someone around that time that within a few decades they'd be able to swallow a little pill and cure most of the deadliest diseases of that time, they'd have laughed at your face and considered you a hopeless optimist.
Imagine someone came up to you today and suggested that in 20 years' time you can get a jab that will protect you from cancer, aids, degenerative diseases, heart disease, cholesterol problems, baldness, and erectile dysfunction all at once - you'd laugh at them and call them a spammer. Yet the biotech and nanotech revolutions are just around the corner and who knows, they might bring just that, though anyone who believes that they will is indeed very optimistic.
AI researchers might be working on sub-problems, but who's to say that they won't stumble on a bigger solution while working on those sub problems? And, again, you're missing the point even more by failing to see that AI is not the only path to a singularity. Enhancing human intelligence can be just as effective. If we create "trans-humans" who are vastly more intelligent than we are, we still get a singularity. We can do that biologically, cybernetically... etc.
Are you not reading what I wrote? You yourself just suggested a method of curing all those things you wrote. So obviously it's possible to imagine them. You don't know how exactly, but you have a starting point: inject some sort of protective something that will do it.
Why do you think I would laugh at them? It seems quite plausible to me.
You are totally wrong about people in 1920. People 2000 years ago even were eating various plants for their medicinal effect. Some of the books from that time (or a little later) still exist! And some of them even work (willow bark for pain for example).
That does not exist with AI. Give me any idea at all of a programming method (besides random permutation) that will, eventually, even with a lot of work, result in AI.
You don't realize just how much harder creating creativity is from anything else humanity has ever done. Create a mechanism that will create something new that has never existed before? (And is not simply a reshuffling of other things.) Computers can not do that, and I don't think will ever be able to do that. (Again, except by trying everything randomly.) Even humans rarely do that - and the ones that do have no idea how they do it, so what makes you think we can program such a thing?
Read some quotes from Mark Kac about magician genius and you'll start to understand the problem. No one has any idea how they make their leaps. A regular genius simply can not do what they do. So why do you think we can program a computer to do such a thing, when we can not even understand how it's done in the first place?
AI is not coming. And on top of all that computing speed has hit a wall. The entire premise depends on computers getting faster and faster. They aren't right now. Intel can not make CPU's run any faster than they are right now. Instead they are adding cores.
Now I expect that to be solved at some point, but it means the exponential growth curve broke. And that means no more singularity.
That's something I don't see much talk of. But it's over, there is no more exponential growth in computing speed.
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
One of Kurzweil's really strong points was to treat "AI" as a very loose term. That is, it could for example mean replacing every human neuron with a manmade (e.g., silicon) counterpart. This has already been done on a small scale in rats (I can't find the reference, but it's in his book).
"Upgrading humanity" IS artificial intelligence if you take artificial to be functionally equivalent to manmade: man has "upgraded" himself, and hence created something artificially intelligent.
I agree, in that I think we can't make a machine that is fundamentally smarter than us.
But I think it's possible to create a machine that is as smart as a human. Now, since some human beings seem to be smarter than others, I think it's possible to build a machine that is closer to the "smart" end. And, of course, with the help of such machines, we will be able to do this better and better (as with knowledge and technology in general). Therefore, we could build many Einstein-level intelligences (or a bit better, since he wasn't perfect).
Behind this, my key point is that "more intelligence" is an illusion. Einstein was a function of his times (there was the unexplained lack of motion through the ether, for one thing) and, like Newton, saw further than most because he SOTSOG. He wasn't fundamentally smarter than you - though he might have been able to keep track of more ideas than you, and track their relations to other ideas, and he might have been more free of convention (the humility to admit he didn't know, and the arrogance that you don't either), and more dedicated than you. Ie. he was probably smarter, but not fundamentally.
Being able to accept that you don't know, and therefore to be open to see, is the important thing. Not intelligence.
So if we can have something that is just like the person who invents an equal-to-humanity intelligence, but operating a hundred times faster, with perfect recall, and able to shut down senses or arbitrarily reorder goals, you don't think we could tell this being "Do what your meatspace predecessor did, approximately" and have something even faster, in less time than the original took? And that this process couldn't be repeated?
We could still build faster Einsteins.
Yes, and more of them.
But they're not fundamentally smarter than us; it's just another technology (which is a great thing).
And cheaper Einsteins.
I don't agree we can't build a machine that out-thinks us, because the early iterations at least would be specialist self-improvement tools - NOT general intelligence. Glorified whole-program optimizers.
AI needs to be built from a theory of mind and a theory of intelligence - but there is reason for hope, as a combination of neuroscience and mathematics (cf: AIXI) is attacking this question. AI also needs to be built from a theory of "friendliness" (goals compatible with humanity) and there are people (cf: SIAI) working on this.
Your message strikes me as having the "mankind will never achieve heavier-than-air flight" quality. (As opposed to the "mankind will never exceed lightspeed" quality - there is no fundamental physics in the way.)
...there is no fundamental physics in the way
He didn't say that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297576
You don't have to design the machine. Once you have enough computer power, you can use genetic algorithms (or another method).
Con: It can be slow.
Pro: It worked at least once.
Ugh, no. You would just create a super-parasite. Evolution is parsimonious. You would need to know how to build a mind the simple way in order to direct evolution down just that one path that leads to minds - and meanwhile you'd have cruelly killed millions of by-then thinking feeling persons who didn't quite measure up. And who knows what other tendencies you'd have created aside from intelligence? The whole thing would be a nightmare.
That only works if you have a fitness function. No one does.
No one has a fitness function for a search interface. But Google does a lot of A/B tests and the interface evolve.
I think that they are not using random mutations in the code. They design the "mutations". But the important point is that they don't have a theoretical fitness function.
Of course they have a fitness function! What do you think an A/B test IS? It's a fitness function!
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
I thought that was the entire point.
Do you believe in evolution? The process of human evolution is a tale of smarter and smarter animals coming from less intellegent ones.
Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.
No, the process of human evolution is a tale of organisms adapting to their environment. There is no guarantee that human beings will evolve into something more intelligent.
If the average person is granted the ability to manufacture their own reality without any need for earthy concerns, one might think evolutionary forces would push people into becoming marginally intelligent beings focused on decadence.
No there is no guarantee. However in the past it is safe to say that, on average, the human evolutionary path involved an increase in intelligence. Whether that is 'the tale' I will leave to poetic license. I did this to disprove the notion that beings could not produce beings of greater intelligence in the parent post. To disprove a general statement you only have to show one contrary instance.
Here is a link you may find useful
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic
Back at ya: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution
Sexual activity aside, human creative activity did not 'produce beings of greater intelligence'.
> Sexual activity aside
That was my point. That there exists a process (evolution) where greater intelligence can spring from lesser intelligence. I agree the mechanism is quite different but it demonstrates there is no fundamental obstacle to the process of increasing intelligence.
Perhaps this is one of the mental leaps that creationists are not able/willing to make. Their belief in an ultimate intelligence producing lesser intelligences is at least logically consistent.
>Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.
Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.
That's ok for chess - it has well defined rules, and more importantly a fitness function. That's where all the work is - define a function to tell you if your permutation was a good one.
But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.
> Except the machine is extremely stupid! It doesn't have any idea on how to play chess, it just tries every possibility one after the other until it finds a good one.
It is also possible that each individual neuron in the brain is stupid! They don't have any idea of whatever task is being processed, human intelligence is just the result of random connections being made and reinforced by positive feedback.
> But it doesn't work for AI, because there are no fitness functions there.
I think it would accurate to say that the fitness functions are more difficult to define and perhaps they are not available at on such a constant basis. But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.
I general I think that whenever a decision making process is automated it tends to lose it's mystic and people then view it less as intelligence and more as a dumb process. Yes chess is just a baby step but it does demonstrate that something that humans used to think of as a significant indicator of intelligence can be achieved.
>But if you are saying that there is no test for AI, you are just basically defining AI as an impossibility.
What I'm saying is that to evaluate AI you need I (artificial or otherwise).
So I don't think random permutations will ever get you there, because if we ever manage to write the fitness function, we are almost there anyway. (And no one knows how to do that.)
Maybe one day all of humanity will take part in the great AI race, and every person will help evaluate AI's to find the best one. I'm not sure it'll be enough though, you simply need far far too many permutations for it to ever work.
It would be interesting to use say WoW as a test bed for AI, make sure it always joins a team and see how good you can make it (emphasize the helping other members of the team part). Then send it to second life.
But, I still don't think it'll ever be enough. In particular it'll never be able to design for creativity.
You do know aboutthe Turing test right?
With all the searching and interactions on the internet these days I think there will be plenty of feedback from humans to develop AI if it can be done.
I know about the Turing test, but it will never be able to test for creativity. Only basic speech - and that's not enough to launch the singularity which require a machine that can invent.
It isn't just basic speech. It is whatever is required to convince the examiner that the subject is a human. You could ask the subject for some creative input on a particular topic. That is allowed under the Turing test.
I think that creativity in solving a task is actually quite amenable to automation for a Turing-passing program. Generate a whole bunch of 'ideas' by combining existing concepts in different ways and then test them for usefulness. (Now imagine doing this with a million different Turing processes on your desktop computer - I think there would be some pretty creative ideas generated.) If the program can't tell if an idea is good or at least OK then it is never going to pass the Turing test.
If you are talking about creative in the sense of 'amuses humans' like music or art then the computer is of course at a huge, unfair and pointless disadvantage.
If a program can complete the Turing test then it is likely it will already be a lot smarter than the examiner.
I think his chief exception is the timetable laid out. He is not saying he doesn't believe in evolution. He disagress with someone's extrapolation, that is all.
I was replying to a comment not the parent post. The one where the guy proposed that it would be impossible for humans to create anything smarter than ourselves. Sometimes the indentation on comments can be a little tough to keep up with.