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Comment by mimixco | Hacker News Reader

I love Ray Kurzweil and he's an undisputed genius, but like many other believers in The Singularity, he's convinced of something that has never been proven to be true.

No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence, which is the ability to bring a new and unforeseen solution to an existing problem. I need only a cite a few examples to show this is true: Uber cars run over people. Facial recognition claims black people are criminals just for being black. Facebook's AI software lets in fake news.

These are all errors that could be avoided by actual human intelligence. The fact of the matter is that we don't really know where intelligence or creativity comes from. It's unlikely that we ever will. (See "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" for one reason.) While machines are great at doing things faster than people can do them, they're not good at inventing new solutions or doing something that humans couldn't do, given enough time.

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> No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence, which is the ability to bring a new and unforeseen solution to an existing problem. I need only a cite a few examples to show this is true: Uber cars run over people. Facial recognition claims black people are criminals just for being black. Facebook's AI software lets in fake news.

Burden of proof is not on your claim, but rather on Kurzweil's, but since you made a claim and tried to back it up, I feel compelled to point out that it's a non-sequitur. Just because something hasn't been done before, doesn't mean it's not possible. Many people said going to the moon was impossible. Might be interesting to look at Russell's Teapot.

> doesn't mean it's not possible

In general, that which nature has demonstrated is can usually be replicated. A bird (flight), a floating log (ships), a fish (submarine), an asteroid (space travel), etc. Nature has demonstrated intelligence: a human.

However, just like nature has not demonstrated superluminal travel, it has not demonstrated super-intelligence; so that is still a question.

Nature never demonstrated Seaborgium, but we were still able to create it.

But it did make all the naturally occurring elements heavier than iron with a similar process.

Sure. And nature made intelligent organisms so we could take the fundamentals and build something that nature hasn't.

I never said it was impossible, just that it's not as certain as Kurzweil makes it out to be.

what do you understand by super-intelligence?

Intelligence that behaves like the AI singularity.

The AI singularity, while the assumption is often that it will be smarter "per entity" does not really require individual AI entities to get smarter than a human, as long as we assume that human level intelligence continues to scale if you speed them up and increase the number of entities working together. In that case we could still get the singularity "just" by getting to a level where an AI can optimize its performance and resource use so that it eventually beats us on sheer number of "human-brain-second-equivalents" dedicated to improvement at any moment.

what is the AI singularity? a super-intelligent entity.

Just FYI, going to the moon is also impossible. See "Van Allen Belts."

> No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence, which is the ability to bring a new and unforeseen solution to an existing problem

It's easy to disprove absolute claims such as yours. Yes AI can create new things and it's only getting better. You just need 1 example. Read up on AlphaGO. It was able to beat humans by coming up with techniques that no human has ever and possibly would never have come up with because of how illogical they seem to even the masters of Go.

Look into GANS. AI can create new things.

Contemporary AIs don't create new things via creative insight or intuitiveness. A trained NN is only good at the one thing it has been trained at. That isn't true intelligence, no matter how astounding the results.

You're responding to someone mentioning AlphaGo, surely you've heard of AlphaZero. A trained NN can be good at several things.

Creative insight or intuitiveness… What are those exactly? Intuitiveness is so vague of a concept I feel it could accurately describe how some NN behave on the surface, if you didn't know how they are implemented. Intuitiveness in humans is just hidden layers.

Corollary: if you had perfect knowledge of how the human brain work you wouldn't find it so magical and it wouldn't feel so out of reach to replicate its high level emergences.

> A trained NN is only good at the one thing it has been trained at.

I don't know about you, but I only learnt how to read and write thanks to being taught (trained) by other humans.

In contrast, AlphaZero managed to master the games of Chess, Shōgi and Go without ever seeing a single game played, just by being told the rules once, and playing against itself.

The other way of looking at it is that AlphaGoZero was provided with perfect information consisting of every relevant objective fact about the game of Go up front, and thus had perfectly targeted success criteria for the millions of iterations AlphaZero needed to run to get good at it.

I didn't need this to be able to start learning to read, and if the human race learned in this manner, written language wouldn't exist.

And I'm not even sure how one would begin to assemble all relevant information about the space "what words and syntax actually mean" which is a bit more difficult to define than a Go board, or a success function that could describe optimal understanding of books in order to teach computers how to intepret language like AlphaGoZero learned to estimate a mathematical optimization problem in disguise as a board game. Unless your criteria for 'learning to read' is satisfied with parsing text to perform Chinese room tricks in selected domains, or satisfied with textual insights on the level that Dr Seuss appears to have been unfavourably disposed towards green eggs and ham!

I actually taught myself the skill of reading. Real reading, including understanding what the words and sentences mean. While learning countless other things that 5-year-old kids usually learn, partially on my own, partially taught by my parents.

And almost all of that stuff was way more useful than mastering Chess or Go.

The means to do those things were programmed by humans. While the computer is faster at assessing all of the possibilities, it isn't coming up with anything that wasn't made by possible by the human-programmed software.

We now have to have safety belts for Amazon workers to keep them from being run over by robots!

It's unclear to me if you are familiar with GANs, mentioned by grandparent.

A software can hallucinate entirely new photographs that did not exist before of a certain category of objects, like a "dog" or a "burger" or a "celebrity".

Of course it was "made possible" by the human-programmed software, but very very indirectly. In particular, the programmer doesn't really know deeply how it does its thing, and cannot possibly create the same result himself manually.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKQp28OqwNQ

"Ever" is a very long time. But I'd be comfortable saying AGI won't arrive in my lifetime, at least not electronic AGI. Note that I single out electronic AGI here due to both our complete lack of understanding of how to model intelligence, and the prohibitive energy cost of modelling the brain if we did understand how to do so.

OTOH advances in genome understanding could yield e.g. a super smart chimp, or dolphin, something like that. That would also be "artificial" intelligence then, and it would be general, just not electronic.

Unfortunately we are still vastly better at making a worse mouse (or cow) than a better one, to paraphrase biologist Anne McLaren. Sure, evolution did eventually make a super smart chimp, but it took 7 million years of tinkering.

Sure, but I think you'll agree that it's a dark horse, far more dark than Moore's law or Dennard scaling.

haha. maybe no computer by the current definition of computer. but I would say that it's a bit extreme to say humans are going to be the only higher intelligence species.

the only thing that I think we should have disagreement on is if we want it to happen and of course the timeline.

for the if question: I believe we (humans) want to do this. Long term it is going to basically mean immortality and I would not think about intelligent machines as a new rival species, I would think of it as an evolution of our species - it's actually a great way of transcending our biological limitations.

for the timeline piece: I don't think it's going to happen within our lifetimes. I also think it's going to be a process where for a very long period of time we will be hybrids (we will augment ourselves with hardware that will make us smarter/more capable and this in turn will lead to us building even better and more comprehensive hardware. At some point we'll figure out that the biological part is just getting in the way and we'll completely remove it).

>No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence, which is the ability to bring a new and unforeseen solution to an existing problem.

This is already false, given the many examples of machine learning out performing humans in a variety of tasks. Google's data center efficiency comes to mind (IIRC saving 30% in energy usage over human-found solutions). So does AlphaGO.

Outperforming in these cases just means "doing it faster," as I said. There is no algorithm which can produce results which were not inherent in the algorithm itself. There is no software which can "jump the box" and come up with a solution which was not already present in the software as it was written. The computer is merely processing all the options faster than a human could.

When we say that software "found" something new, it's only that it found it faster than we would, using the algorithm we wrote.

What makes you think there is anything in the human mind that is not inherent in the algorithms encoded in the human mind itself?

What you are effectively arguing for is a supernatural element to the brain. You're free to believe that of course, but it is pointless to have this discussion if people on side believe in a materialistic universe and people on the other side believe part of the process does not follow the natural laws of our universe.

With a materialistic interpretation, there is simply no reasonable argument for why a brain is anything but a computer we don't understand well enough yet.

> There is no algorithm which can produce results which were not inherent in the algorithm itself.

There are algorithms that can find tumors or Alzheimer signs on medical imagery where expert doctors can't see them.

This is not just "doing it faster", it's doing it differently in a way that we cannot do.

> The computer is merely processing all the options faster than a human could

No, it's also processing many, many more options. You know how you can keep a bunch of stuff in short term memory while working on a problem and that helps you get a good grasp of it so you can get that insight. Now imagine if you could keep thousands of concepts and ideas in your short term memory while you are pondering a problem. You are going to find solutions you wouldn't have the means to thought otherwise. It's not just speed, it's breadth of reasoning, and it let you see new horizons.

> There is no algorithm which can produce results which were not inherent in the algorithm itself.

This is a tautology. The same is true for humans.

The interesting thing is that a computer, like a human, can learn on its own something that a human did not tell it. That's what machine learning does.

A random number generator or binary enumerator could output results that were not inherent in its programming.

Or if you pose they don't, then you need to explain better what is so special about human brains that they can produce results not baked in by natural programming.

Yeah I guess if you're going to change the definition of what you said than you are right.

The point stands that ML is better than human at certain tasks and does it in a different, non-human-understandable way.

> These are all errors that could be avoided by actual human intelligence.

Do you think that dogs are intelligent? Can you imagine some situation where the dog intelligence is not enough to solve it?

Unlike dogs intelligence, the intelligence of computers is improving. Now they can play chess and go like a grand master, but 30 years ago it was an impossible task.

The problems you cite are real, but sometimes people fail at them too (drivers regularly run over people, witness misidentify suspect because they have a skin color that is not the skin color of most of the people they see, people actually believe and like fake news). Just give some years until the interface with the real world is improved and computers have more "street" knowledge to apply in difficult situations.

> See "Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle" for one reason.

I have now idea about how this is related.

It's related because it says that the observer cannot escape the observation; he's creating it. We cannot objectively assess our intelligence or creativity because we are the ones observing them. If we can't understand or assess how they came to be, we can't replicate them.

This is not logically sound at all.

We can replicate a great many things we don't fully understand.

Text to speech is a good example. Early text to speech were format based - many of them tried to physically emulate the human vocal tract. And it gets passable results, but the best current results comes from throwing away that and not try to understand and model precisely how we talk, but instead "just" apply machine learning approaches to create a model. The result replicates human speech vastly better, despite us explicitly "giving up" on understanding precisely how to model the underlying system.

The same is true for a huge amount of other control problems, where we often achieve far better results at replicating something when we don't try to understand or assess exactly how something came to be or works, but instead design systems to learn by example.

We still may see benefits from trying to achieve a deeper understanding, but there is little to suggest that there is some universal law that we need to understand something to replicate it.

Humans make all those same mistakes.

Exactly. Software inherits the limits of the people who program it. It doesn't expand upon or escape them. Actual human intelligence, in contrast, can "jump the box" and come up with something that didn't exist in the original materials as presented to the person.

> Uber cars run over people. Facial recognition claims black people are criminals just for being black. Facebook's AI software lets in fake news.

Humans do all of those things too. We might not believe they are the right things to do, but doing them certainly doesn't rule out the presence of a human-like intelligence.

In fact, it does. It shows that human bias (facial recognition) and the inability to posit all possible outcomes (Uber; halting problem) are built-in to the software we write.

While another human may be able to overcome one's racial basis or another driver wouldn't have run over that biker, the fact remains that the software did which shows that it inherits human frailties and limitations. It doesn't surpass them.

Bias is an inevitable problem but a fixable one. There are also tradeoffs to the way bias works in computers vs humans. If you can successfully point out bias to a computer it will be happy to adjust accordingly, whereas human bias is notoriously stubborn and some humans will even deliberately or covertly embrace their biases despite being aware of them.

> the fact remains that the software did which shows that it inherits human frailties and limitations. It doesn't surpass them.

Well sure, some of them, but it's not as if there aren't other areas where the computer is already superior, e.g. no intoxicated driving, tired driving, road rage, racing or otherwise diving at dangerous speeds, high speed/risky lane merging, driving while eating or applying makeup, texting or watching youtube or fiddling with a GPS or having your kid cry out in the back seat etc etc. So there are a lot of improvements there. Of course, I don't think those systems are anywhere near human-like intelligence, but the current flaws are not a demonstration that these problems cannot be overcome.

> No computer will ever demonstrate actual intelligence

Such statements are impossible to be proven right, as, assuming you consider yourself actually intelligent, that implies we are not inside a computer ourselves, which I'd argue is impossible to prove.

If we're running in a simulation, the host computation hardware may be different from what you imagine a computer to be. For example, we could be an experiment of "is life possible in a euclidean universe".

Since the current standard model of physics requires an 11-dimensional universe for all the math to work out, it's quite possible that we live in a space which we cannot understand. That makes it even less likely that we could program a computer which would understand it better than we do.

> that implies we are not inside a computer ourselves, which I'd argue is impossible to prove.

Perhaps not. But some statements cannot be disproven and yet still should not be taken seriously.

But I think you are right that, while correct in claiming that the Singularity has never been proven, mimixco is also making statements that cannot be proven.

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