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Comment by noobiemcfoob | Hacker News Reader

How curious that one of the best models of intelligence is one of its products created in an effort to emulate itself.

Right. Turing automated a part of the operation of his own mind, computers have always been AI.

But it seems (to me) that logic doesn't capture all of what we call intelligence, and that the effort to recapitulate the human mind solely on the basis of discrete logic machines is almost certainly going to fail. But I think that failure will be valuable, and that we should not avoid the attempt to make a sculpture of the mind.

Babbage had an automaton, the Silver Lady, that could imitate the dancing of a ballerina. We might be able to make "Silver Minds" that imitate the outward manifestations of the human personality, and so learn more about the nature and essence of thinking, as the Silver Lady must have of dancing. Certainly the craftsman who made her must have known a thing or two about ballet and physiology?

That's largely the idea behind the concept of "technological singularity". We are quite slow at developing the first version (it's still a work in progress) but that v1 will likely be able to build a v2 much faster and so on, leading to an "intelligence explosion".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

There is no actual evidence that such a scenario is "likely". At this point it's just a bunch of unsupported assumptions and shaky analogies.

The inevitability of the Singularity, and most of the rest of the baggage train that comes with Kurzweilanism reads more like a religious conviction, and less like a scientific certainty.

There are enormous gaps in reasoning that you just have to gloss over to go from the current state of the world to a post-singularity one, that you are expected to accept, on faith.

I personally think it's about as likely as the return of the Messiah in our lifetimes. That is to say, it is not.

Kurzweilanism=Gavinism

> We are quite slow at developing the first version (it's still a work in progress) but that v1 will likely be able to build a v2 much faster and so on, leading to an "intelligence explosion".

As with everything in nature, there are diminishing returns. It is not clear that any significant leaps in 'intelligence' are possible. At least to the extent proposed by 'singularity' advocates. Or that such an intelligence would be able to completely outclass humans, either in the current form, or augumented by tech.

As humans have evolved larger brains, intelligence went up extremely. Human brain size is limited by a lot of factors specific to human biology, like the fact that it needs to be small enough to fit through the birth canal, it can't take up too much of the body's energy, and it can't make us too top-heavy. It seems unlikely that human evolution ran into these limits right at the same time it finished making a maximally-intelligent mind. None of these limiting factors apply to AI. If/when we figure out how to make intelligent software, we make AIs, and then we improve them to be human-level intelligent, it seems really unlikely to me that we'll hit a limiting factor right there. I think if we ever create near-human-level intelligent AIs, we'll blow right past human-level intelligence and hit a limit further on that's not coincidentally placed at human-level intelligence.

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