This is pretty absurd to point to as an intermediate goalpost; that's basically game over when it happens.
One might have said the same thing about corporations in 1900...
The current population explosion is evidence for, not against, this, IMO... stars also enjoy boom times, even as they consume the last of their resources, in ever more exotic formulations...
At the very least, any team attempting to keep a strong AI in containment should have stringent background checks for all engineers connected to the project, and the engineers should be screened in a borderline discriminatory fashion. Only engineers with families should be allowed to get near the containment. Single/lonely engineers or engineers undergoing divorces should be kept away. Engineers with debt should be kept away. I'd even go as far as to say that engineers who enjoy science fiction media should be banned from the project. Ideally you'd bring on professional psychologists to create a set of criteria designed to minimize the possibility of an engineer deliberately breaking containment.
But frankly it just shouldn't be attempted in the first place.
rm -rf rogueAI/
If that doesn't work, there's always a circuit breaker.
Unless we are near some kind of physical upper limit on intelligence, any AGI we build will easily out smart us, probably in ways we can't even conceive of.
Years ago, an A.I. designed to become an oscillator, i.e. produce a sinusoidal wave, learned to be an amplifier instead, taking advantage of the 60Hz noise that it got from the power grid. Its makers had not seen that coming. And we're talking about a very dumb machine by general intelligence standards.
The fact that it gets 60Hz from the grid confounds the results and might not be meaningful. The AI could for all we know have an easier time with the more difficult task of designing an amplifier.
As for it being 'game over', why? Is there something inherent in AI that would necessarily be inimical to human beings?
Because, the further part of the story goes, machines think quicker and they'll go on improving even quicker, all while having potentially different goals from us.
To be completely fair, the facts on the table are: 1) no one knows where the "intelligence ceiling" is, and 2) in many tasks where machines outperformed humans (image labeling, porn classification, speech-to-text, games like go or chess) they keep on improving, sometimes well beyond the human level.
Alexa, for example, is an Artificial Narrow Intelligence. It can process speech and then follow different scripts with instructions derived from that speech, but it often fails comically so you as the human have to talk to it just right for it to work. Not too different from a verbal command line.
Meanwhile a human personal assistant has general intelligence. You can just tell them what you want and they can understand and figure it out.
I'd venture that your coda nullifies the "Intelligence" part thoroughly and completely. She's an "Artificial Smart Assistant", at best.
Emotional
Logical
Intuitive
Social
Computational
Instinctive
Sexual
Experiential
and I can keep going, but you should get the point.
This isn't true. We have overwhelming evidence that these "skills" originate in different parts of the brain in all humans and if we disable those parts, those "skills" disappear. Those parts of the brain are unique and have their own structures. There is strong evidence that they require unique "hardware" and as such, are a "special kind of intelligence".
It started with carrying out list of simple instructions, then doing anything with images, then recognizing images, then drawing images, then simple games chess, recognize audio (though people realized this was stupid in the 60s with IBM speech synthesizers and so today people don't remember), and then Go (and less well known: backgammon, video games, ...). For most of those we now roll our eyes and go "how could they have been so stupid ?".
As for practical applications: robots run something between 3/4ths and 5/6ths of the stock market. Maybe you're unaware of this but that's the thing that decides how and where humans work (not just the ones also doing stocks, anyone working at any public company is partially directed by it, which in practice is nearly everyone).
AIs talk to humans more than humans do. AIs produce more writing than humans do. AIs judge more humans (for insurances, or creditworthiness) than humans do. Despite what you think AIs actually drive just a little under 1 millionth of total miles driven in the US today, going up exponentially. AIs currently drive a little more than a 1000 person city does.
In experimental settings, AIs have beat humans at convincing other people that they're human. At "chatting up" humans. Seriously. Not that it seems to take much at all to convince humans you're sentient: iRobots have convinced soldiers to threaten army technicians with guns into repairing them. There wasn't even that much AI involved, but that's got to count for something.
In research, I would argue there are already multifaceted artificial intelligences in reinforcement learning. There is nothing in those atari game playing AIs about the games. There used to be the score of the game, but the modern ones don't even have that. They can play any atari game, from Montezuma's revenge to pacman, which I'd argue are very different indeed. There must be some measure of "multifaceted" in there, surely ?
But let's keep it simple: could you make this problem a bit more accurate ? For example, which animals would you say exhibit an acceptable level of "multifaceted" intelligence ? Why do those animals qualify ? What would a good test be ? I'd love to find an interesting test for this.
Historically, people have both grossly overestimated and grossly underestimated future technological progress. Some people thought computers would never be able to play chess; others thought we'd have superhuman AGI in 2001. The bottom line is that people's past and current ignorance tells us nothing about what the future is actually going to be like.
That's quite a wide claim, seeing that we haven't seen much "recursive self improvement".
Edit: diction.
I’d expect computers to best us (at some investment cost) at virtually all games moving forward except writing funny limericks. We can always have our grandmasters or whatever train the computer with their own heuristics, which recalls the paranoia of grandmasters decades ago. We understand computers better now—if you can formalize the game, the computer can beat you.
In many ways, programming is already the formalization of a human space problem. Ai will likely take more role in implementation in the future, but I can’t imagine an AI that does the formalization itself.
It really is a new advancement to be able to solve Go. It is not just a logical extension of work we had already done or something that would be automatically solved by faster computers. We had to invent a new approach.
More controversially I'm not sure AGI is that hard to predict either. I wrote about it in my college entry essay 37 years ago and didn't thing it takes any great intellect to say if the brain is a biological computer and electronic computers get more powerful exponentially then at some point electronic ones will overtake. Of course a basic chess algorithm is fairly simple and an AGI one will be far more complicated but it can't be that mega complicated to fit in a limited amount of DNA building proteins building cells.
We can solve any board game now with alpha-zero but will that necessarily improve how fast we develop other types of intelligence?
I used to be in Rays camp but my girlfriend got into Computational Neuroscience and I talked with her and her colleagues got the impression very very few people think we’re close to general intelligence.
Human intelligence is a lot of things put together and we may get better at pieces but we don’t even have all the pieces and when we do try to put them together it doesn’t work. Look at criticisms of Europe’s Himan Brian project[1] (another example I had seems to be outdated), some believe we don’t understand too much to even begin to attempt modeling the brain.
Intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly. Humans can do this. It's not clear that anything else can.
AI developments have been phenomenal in the past few years. And the economic return makes me expect that this race will continue faster and faster. I don't think human brain project criticisms make this any less of a reality. Even now it is hard to find a well-defined task that can't be performed better by a computer than a human. Humans are really good at dealing with ambiguity though. So a robot might do better driving on well defined roads with nice lane boundaries, but humans are good at dealing with construction, or negotiating between difficult drivers.
We have already been able to generalize just about any modality you can think of to be processed by neural nets, and sometimes at the same time. If you squint this feels almost like different regions of the brain. (Vision, hearing, speech) But I have reservations about anthropomorphism since it can cause arguments that keep people from just making something that works.
If you think Kurzweil's predictions are a fiction, you are probably right. But I think that's mostly because predictions on those scales are very sensitive to interpretation.
For me, I think the future according to my perception of what Kurzweil is saying will probably be way different than reality. But the future of AI will probably have an equivalent impact and be just as surprising as if my perceptions were accurate.
I think these are well defined tasks:
1. Go to a bar and convince the best looking man or woman to come home with you for recreational sex.
2. Do this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ic7RNS4Dfo while being crushingly cute.
3. Negotiate Brexit.