Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by marvin | Hacker News Reader

This essay is not very well written. The author's points are pretty hard to grasp, and it's even harder to see how they support his central point. I'll just go over them:

-No civilization has been more advanced than ours. There is no historical reason to claim that we are about to "return to normality".

+Predicting future technological development has (almost) never worked.

+We might in the future find out that Kurzweil's ideas were bad. -> History is overflowing with examples of this.

-"Suppose that all over the universe, civilizations arise and continue growing exponentially until they exhaust their planets’ resources and kill themselves out. [...] I wish reading the news each morning furnished me with more reasons not to be haunted by this vision of existence". -> Suppose instead that reality is just a dream, and you are the only conscious mind in existence. There is little reason to believe any of this. And (ad hominem alert) no doomsayer has ever been right, although the profession always has a comfortable number of practitioners.

-"AI hasn't made any progress". -> No one has ever sent anything into orbit, so it might be impossible.

-"There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster". -> Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time?

+"Yet while I believe that the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s near". -> Yes, specific technological predictions have never been very successful. We will probably have some of these technologies by 2045, and also some we weren't able to think of.

Turing complete: "Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster".

This view has always fascinated me: if AI is possible, it's possible right now (in terms of hardware). What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions).

But it's true that faster hardware can open our eyes: (decades ago) the inventor of a new way to use silicon to make CPU's faster said that once the extra silicon was available, the solution was obvious to him. But before then, no one had even tried to think of it. It was already possible before, but the greater power (more silicon) made it practical to think in those terms.

"What's missing knowing how to do it (software inventions)".

Not really, the scope of the hardware plays an important role. Consider: that you could perform the processing needed to play Half Life 2 on an abacus. But even if the abacus wielder followed the commands exactly and emulated the x86 instructions with paper and pencil, would anything actually emerge from the exercise that would be enlightening in anyway?

Probably not, since it would take a few thousand years (I'm handwaving here) to compute the contents of the first frame.

You're right, if the difference is that great. e.g. your handwaving of 1/50 sec to 4000 years, is about 50*10^11= 5,000,000,000,000 = a factor of 5 trillion (12 orders of magnitude).

I was thinking that 1 second's thought in a few months would be reasonable - but you are quite right, I don't have any real idea of the factor. Maybe that would be plausible if we found very efficient AI implementations, but the initial attempts of actually doing it at will undoubtedly be quite inefficient. And the slowness of feedback is a huge factor in coding, as well....

Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time?

That's correct. I'm sure flies and dogs are Turing machines as much as we are (if we are), yet we are considered to be much more intelligent beings than both of them. A computer capable of a level of intelligence as big to us, as we are to a dog, would be pretty impressive. But I think he's not talking about that, as he says: The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs, but if the singularity mind was bigger than us, but of the same nature, we would be able to compute it with pencil and paper, or in a computer, and to analyze it to see how it works (very slowly, as a Turing machine).

If the singularity mind was bigger than us, but of the same nature, we would be able to compute it with pencil and paper, or in a computer, and to analyze it to see how it works (very slowly, as a Turing machine).

My impression is that we couldn't, just like we couldn't decode an audio file that stream forever without real-time decoding. Once we "compute it" "very slowly," the AI will already have improved twice, tenfold, a thousandfold. It will be fruitless.

Not to mention, even if the AI is simply a Von Neumann machine with really impressive specs, what makes you think we'd be able to decode it? If you gave me a RAM chip, I wouldn't know what to do with it without an EE book. Now imagine a technology a thousand times more advanced.

What I mean: given enough time, we'd be able to analyze a specific computation (not all real-time computations of such mind). However, our patience, lives and our universe too is finite, so it could set practical limits to our task. Say: decoding X signal would only take me more time than the universe to end, so, that's anyway an impossible task. But we should be able, in principle and with infinite time, to analyze any computation. (Well, we should first set a meaning for "analyze" in this context)

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