Comment by exratione | Hacker News Reader

Comment by exratione | Hacker News Reader

This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective:

- Intelligence greater than human is possible

- Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered

- Intelligence can be built

- Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences

Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you can emulate a human brain, coupled with a continued increase in processing power per unit cost. Massive parallelism to start with, followed by some process to produce smarter intelligences.

All arguments against this sound somewhat silly, as they have to refute one of the hard to refute points above. Do we live in a universe in which, somehow, we can't emulate humans in silico, or we can't advance any further towards the limits of computation, or N intelligences of capacity X when it comes to building better intelligences cannot reverse engineer and tinker themselves to build an intelligence of capacity X+1 at building better intelligences? All of these seem pretty unlikely on the face of it.

Part of the problem with trying to formalize this argument is that intelligence is woefully underdefinined. There are plenty of initially reasonable sounding definitions that don't necessarily lead to the ability to improve the state of the art w.r.t. 'better' intelligence.

For instance much of modern machine learning produces things that from a black box perspective are indistinguishable from an intelligent agent, however it'd be absurd to task Alpha-go to develop a better go playing bot.

There are plenty of scenarios that result in a non-intelligence explosion, i.e. the difficulty in creating the next generation increases faster than the gains in intelligence. Different components of intelligence are mutually incompatible: speed and quality are prototypical examples. There are points where assumptions must be made and backtracking is very costly. The space of different intelligences is non-concave and has many non-linearity, exploring it and communicating the results starts to hit the limits of speed of light.

I'm sure there are other potential limitations, they aren't hard to come up with.

Why isn't it possible (or likely, even) that the difficulty of constructing capacity X+1 grows faster than the +1 capacity? Self-improvement would slow exponentially when it takes three times the resources/computation/whatever to construct something that's twice as good at self-improving, for example.

You're arguing that it's not an exponential that doesn't continue to the right indefinitely.

But what if it follows a sigmoid instead, but the plateau is much higher than the current level?

This is what punctuated equilibria look like -- even if the 'new thing' isn't actually a singularity, it may be enormously disruptive and completely displace whatever came before.

> This is what punctuated equilibria look like -- even if the 'new thing' isn't actually a singularity, it may be enormously disruptive and completely displace whatever came before.

Right, and this is a much more plausible claim than one of "singularity".

>You're arguing that it's not an exponential that doesn't continue to the right indefinitely.

Kalminer's post neither assumes that nor claims it to be so.

The argument is not that an exponential growth is impossible, it is that it cannot be assumed from what we currently know, because we don't know how the problem of bootstrapping intelligence scales. In fact, the idea that exponential growth would occur over any period of time, let alone indefinitely, is speculative - which is not a claim that it is impossible.

I think the point he is trying to make is that there are boundaries to intelligence. I think of it this way - no matter how smart an AI is, it still would take 4.3 years to reach Alpha Centauri going at the speed of light. An AI still needs to run experiments, collect evidence, conjure hypothesis, reach consensus, etc.. Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?

Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?

A major managerial problem with humans is sorting out our irrational emotional biases and keeping everyone working on something resembling the appointed task. Can you imagine the productivity gain if that problem suddenly went away?

But our emotional biases are also what keeps us on the appointed task!

So emotions are a problem to be solved and moved past...

I don't want your world. Dystopias suck.

I don't want that world either. But achieving it is a wet dream for a business.

The challenge that Elon Musk et al are warning us about is what role will humans have after we achieve this dystopia.

> But achieving it is a wet dream for a business.

I don't know about that. Businesses depend on manipulating our emotions in order to get us to buy stuff.

You can successfully manipulate emotions without having any of your own. Recommendation engines are getting really good at it.

But we, humans, aren't going at anything like the speed of light. What if we tweaked our DNA to produce human beings with the working memory capacity of 50 items instead of the normal 7-ish [1]? One such researcher would be able to work faster, on more problems at once, and to consider more evidence and facts. The next bottleneck for that person, of course, would be the input/output capacity (reading, writing, typing, communicating), but even with those limitations, I bet they would be a lot more efficient than the average "normal" human. The question is - would you call such a person more "intelligent"?

[1] http://www.human-memory.net/types_short.html

Or we get more humans and then it's a coordination problem right? I mean there is a point in comparing individual vs collective intelligence. This is a bit like communist systems. They work in theory because you get to plan the economy centrally, but in fact more chaotic systems (unplanned) do better (check growth of capitalist countries vs communist ones).

Sure there are boundaries. But the limit of these boundaries may be way above what humans are doing. Computers, unlike humans aren't limited to the domain of the physical. An AI may well be able to meaningfully organize (read: hack) all of the worlds computers because it can self-replicate, increase computing power, communicate very complex information very fast, etc. We're limited by the output of fingers and vocal chords, by the size of our brains, by imprecise and slow memory formation and recall, by the input we can get from mostly eyes and ears, computers aren't.

An AI may well be able to reach consensus on millions of hypotheses per second.

Also, something that is very overlooked IMO is that the engineering process does not need to happen in silico, even though I am not a defendant of using it, bioengineering is a possibility.

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