The Singularity is not coming
cognitivesocialweb.com
cognitivesocialweb.com
Basically I believe it's an issue of cultural time perspective. We can't imagine the tools that will be in use in 2112. But, they won't seem so strange to the people of 2111.
> We can't imagine the tools that will be in use in 2112.
Pretty much just the hall-filling computers of the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx. Guitar-smashing jerks.
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-06-27/ruthless-ex...
I think big paradigm shifts are coming at much faster rates than anyone wants to admit. If you are looking at the past to predict what comes tomorrow, you are an idiot, at least in the field of computing. I feel like we are standing on the precipice of a hole so scary no one really wants to look down at it.
This is not about science increasing the rate of scientific progress. It's about computation improving the rate of computational progress. Particularly, the "Singularity" is about that happening in a world where strong AI exists.
And I'm not even going to harp on the fact that the number of computations per second that we perform on this planet has been undoubtedly exponential at least for a while, because that's not the real point.
The real point is that like the author says, human creativity is still the driving force in computational advances, and human creativity can't be sped up by periodically doubling clock rates or core counts.
If it could? Those doublings would happen even quicker, and the exponential growth we've seen so far would be nothing.
This does, of course, require that you believe that strong AI is possible at all, and that the entire process of creativity could eventually be put into software. If you don't believe in that in the first place, then there's no point having the argument at all - you don't argue the details of a nuclear chain reaction with someone that doesn't believe in neutrons.
Right now, the limits on our bandwidth is language and our sensory inputs. It's not completely ridiculous to think we could encode certain kinds of knowledge in more compact forms, and transmit them via an artificial sensory process that has higher higher bandwidth that audio/visual language based learning...
But computation doesn't improve the rate of computational progress. That's achieved by improvements in manufacturing. Computation does help a little, giving us better tools for chip design. But mainly it's manufacturing.
The only way for computational progress to exponentiate, past the limit of Moore's Law, is to use more physical resources - computers get literally bigger.
And so expensive that only the five richest crowned heads of Europe can afford them!
As long as it's people developing computing devices, that holds. But when you have a machine that is capable of improving its own software, you get a self reinforcing loop where computation improves the rate of computational progress.
If Moore's law where unlimited, such an AI would have infinite computational power in 36 months, with absolutely no increase in actual intelligence. But of course Moore's law is limited. Still, we could expect quite a bit of progress from a mere AI hardware designer.
Perhaps I just mistook your meaning - what do 'subjective months' mean? Why do they mean that the doubling time starts halving?
When hardware is twice as fast, the AI works twice as fast. In 9 months, it will do 18 months worth of work. Now keep the doubling up, and it will have done infinite work after 36 months.
Edit: also, from my understanding, the gains in transistor density largely depend on new discoveries in physics. Before a computer can aid in accelerating Moore's law it would need to be sufficiently advanced to generate new discoveries in physics, but at this point you'd have a computer smart enough that it Moore's law wouldn't matter much. Seems like putting the cart before the horse to me.
Now I did not assume "Moore's law" would accelerate. I assumed it would stay constant. The key point comes from the fact the AI (or AI hive) would trivially benefit from hardware speed-ups.
And yes, Moore's law won't really count, compared to the rest we will be able to do. I was just trying to be as conservative as possible. (Though Moore's law still holding until strong AI is quite wild).
The kind of design isn't an NP-complete problem but it certainly could be helped by a powerful AI.
Also, Moore's Law is breaking for speed but not for transistors-per-inch. That's why we're seeing multicode chip now.
If the rate of improvement were constant, the progress would be linear.
In short, something is improving the rate (but it probably includes more designers and better methods, not just more complexity management).
Material scientists , physicists, chemists, chip designers are all using software for modeling and exploration. And bigger/faster/better computers are helping drive innovations back into computer manufacturing. The process is feeding itself, and it has been for awhile.
I'm not arguing that the singularity is near either, but machines would have the advantage of creating offspring that are already as knowledgeable/intelligent as themselves. Something I couldn't do for my children.
Many discoveries come about by improving on and combining previous discoveries, so what needs to be improved to speed up science is better access, categorization and distribution of discoveries. And this is where I think a human-level AI would have an advantage over a human. Even if the AI is unable to retain more things in memory than a human it could clone itself and have an army of scientist AIs in charge of analyzing each new discovery and seeing how it might fit in with all other discoveries. Depending how resource-hungry the AI is we might be able have millions of brains working on every potential far-fetched hypothesis to see if it leads anywhere. It would be an industrialization of science.
That seems like it would have to lead to faster discoveries.
But I'm under the feeling that reality is much more complex: access to more information can as well inhibit creativity as it can inspire new discoveries.
I can't say I fully the relationship between the creative scientific process and information exchange/consumption, but I'm pretty sure that past a certain point, the more papers you read the less likely you are to come up with something new. At a macro scale, communication is definitely a driver of progress, but at a micro scale?...
Do you have any evidence this is a property of optimizing systems in general, as opposed to simply a limitation of human capabilities?
Of course, depending on the context whether something is "new" or not might not matter, it certainly does in academic research, but if you are making stuff work it's less of a factor.
Proponents of singularity have a broken understanding of "intelligence". We already have computers that perform plenty of intellectual tasks better than humans. Even learning itself, or coding and reprogramming itself. But this is not "intelligent" yet according to them. They'll only be satisfied when "intelligent" means mimicking a human being for no other reason other than mimicking a human being's sake. They don't want an intelligent computer, nor actual practical solutions to real problems. What they really want is a really complex fart app.
What computers do is not intellectual. Intelligence is probably just a stochastic random process of clawing one's way up a hill, but even with enormous computational power, it took the solar system 4.5 billion years of not-well-directed effort to produce us... (and to produce whatever creature that blotch was on the curiosity camera :). Only once we existed could the universe, through us, produce the works of art, literature, culture, and scientific knowledge that we've accumulated very rapidly.
But what matters, is that at the end of the day. For almost any practical and objective definition of "human intelligence" that you might write down. I can write a computer program that will follow those specs and execute it better than a human being. Today. Fact is, humans are nothing but machines and our computers are already better than us in most tasks. Talking about the point which "computers overtake human intelligence" is dismissing the hundreds of different sub-fields in AI research which already got way past that point. Not only with better processing (as you imply), but also with better algorithms than us.
Or we might stick with our current subjective and useless definitions of the word. And keep dreaming about how would it be when we get to somewhere undefined.
If that were true, how come humans are still superior in many (intelligence based) tasks? From games such as Go and Arimaa to more practical tasks such as laying out electronic parts on circuit boards (autorouting).
Mix in self-learning and generality, and I doubt that a better computer program could be programmed today.
If humans create artificial minds that are able to operate on their own, what we decide are the important problems to work on could end up becoming a moot point. You can't really negotiate with someone who's a lot smarter than you (not more than a chimpanzee can negotiate with humans).
If you're criticizing philosophers and researchers for "dreaming" about these ideas, you might want to have a look at some of the thoughts around what would happen if we created self-improving, human-level artificial intelligence. The consequences are potentially catastrophic to human existence, and hence justifies some effort even if you think it is completely unlikely. And whether it is unlikely or not is subject to strong debate. Have a look at
I've always found the concept of singularity naive.
Greatest discoveries haven't been done by the most intelligent persons.
Science isn't just a question of intelligence or will, it's also a question of timing, luck and duration.
Everything has a limit. Ants have limits. We have limits. And the supposed "all mighty AI" will have limits if it ever exists.
Logistics curves are a favorite concept on HN relating to resource usage, so imagine that intelligence follows a logistic curve, and humanity is way above ants, but still very close to the bottom. Once an AI gains the ability to iteratively improve its own mind, first software, and then hardware, it could accelerate up the curve and the separation between our intelligence and AI, if measured, would be approximately exponential until it's so far ahead of us it doesn't matter whether there's a hard limit (logistic curve) or not (true exponential curve).
My point is that intelligence isn't everything.
An AI may become more "intelligent" than a human being, but it doesn't mean any singularity will happen. It does not mean it can self-improve. It does not mean it can find solutions we did not think of.
It's a bit hyperbolic to say "we don't know what greater intelligence can do" and conclude "it will therefore do incredible things".
And to bounce on your answer, are we more intelligent than ants? Does it even make sense to say "we're more intelligent than ants"? Our differences with ants go far beyond intelligence.
The only reasons it wouldn't are if it didn't put effort into it (too busy watching Lost), or if intelligence cannot really be improved.
Humans might do the equivalent of rewriting software through thinking. But it's a more limited and slow process than could be accomplished with full read/write access to software running an AI that's completely malleable and rewritable in moments.
There's plenty of evidence that intelligence can be improved. Working memory is important. We have very limited working memory. We are frequently distracted by emotions. If an AI can operate at roughly equivalent speeds with greater working memory, and if it's not distracted by emotions, it may miss some of the "finer" points of life, but I can't imagine it not leapfrogging ahead of meager human progress.
Maybe it's not possible. Like the thing at the beginning of Fire Upon the Deep, if it is possible, we won't really know if it is until it exists. If it's got the temperment of a class 2 perversion or the Blight, we're toast. If it's a Power that finds us amusing or irrelevant, we might be okay.
http://singularity.org/research/
Even if you disagree with the ideas of what general artificial intelligence could do to the human existence on Earth and elsewhere, it is justified to spend some effort thinking about it. The potential consequences to human existence are all-encompassing. So when something is deemed a potential existential risk, it's worth thinking about.
If the current development in computing continues, I believe that superhuman artificial intelligence is inevitable. And that if we don't prepare for it properly, we might screw it up in a historical way.
Given this, I'm not sure why singularity promoters give that much of a shit whether people believe it. I'm certainly skeptical of it. Given I pretty much use a 40 year old text editor to write in a language that's about 20 years old and is just about approaching the discoveries that the Lispies made back in the 50s, I'm not sure what progress we're talking about. I write code that basically instructs a computer with pretty much the same level of semantic complexity as one does when giving instructions to a particularly stupid child.
But perhaps I've got this wrong. Perhaps the singularity will happen. I don't understand why the singularity promoters are so angry about people who are skeptical of their claims. While I was doing the rounds on Wikipedia a while back, I found this image...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Singularity_Deniers_...
Have a look at the image description before I cleaned it up:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Singula...
Apparently, if someone tells me that a super-intelligent AI will create a brain many hundreds of times better than our own and then allow us to live forever and my reaction isn't an immediate "oh my god, you are so, so right!" then I'm a 'singularity denier', equivalent in status to a holocaust denier. If the singularity idea is pretty much bound to happen as a result of emergent technological progress or whatever, why is my doxastic consent such an important requirement for it coming about?
I freely admit I'm probably not as smart a guy as Ray Kurzweil. But let's not forget: the history of bizarre cults shows us that smart people can believe some very stupid things.
In my case that would be because the default scenario for a technological singularity is Eternal Doom. By default, if AI researchers do not pay extreme attention, the first smarter-than-human AI will have different goals than we do, and recognize us as a threat to those goals and eliminate us all. Or squash us like bugs without even paying much attention. Or use our constituent atoms to maximize its goals. Or keep us drugged and lobotomised in soft cages, so that we're safe and happy. Or something.
And of course, we won't be able to stop it, because it will outsmart us at every turn (we can do the same to chimps).
This is why this singularity thing is at least worth looking into. Being able to nuke away our civilization is bad enough, but this could be even worse. Or it could turn our world into a paradise.
And of course, with more believers, there will be more donors to the organizations working on this, more researchers working on it… So belief does count, to some extent. (On the other hand, becoming angry at non-believers like a crusader is unlikely to spur positive reactions. By cleaning up this image description, you actually helped our cause.)
The safeguards need to be built into the self improving AI, no matter how 'dumb' it starts out as.
> Let’s have a hypothetical AI that researches artificial intelligence, and that constantly rewrites its own code to incorporate its finding into its own intelligence.
No,
A hypothetical General AI would double the amount of circuits involved in it's processes to double its intelligence and go from Monkey-brain-sized to human brain sized. Repeat as necessary. The intelligence algorithm running on those circuits doesn't have to improve (though we'd hope it would at least a little).
Of course, you would need an initial intelligent parallel algorithm. That might indeed be hard or impossible. But his argument in itself doesn't proving anything about this.
Sure, even with flexible general AI, some problems would remain hard but a lot of things aren't the Knap-sack problem. In fact there's no evidence the massive success of human intelligence has had much to do with tackling NP-complete problems. Instead, flexibility and pattern finding set human apart from both other animals and the most powerful artifact we can so-far create.
Just consider, Moore's Law continued at least for a fair period driven by humans whose innate intelligence didn't increase at all.
You are assuming the existence of not just an intelligent parallel algorithm but an infinitely scalable one (i.e. one that could actually take advantage of more circuits)! Because without that, you don't need to double the circuits - you could just give them more time.
Concepts that are beyond a particular intelligence will still be beyond it, even if the speed is increased.
People have a really hard time admitting that some people are truly fundamentally smarter than others. It's not just that they can think faster - they can think things that other people simply can not, even if they worked really hard at it.
I'm sure you've heard the saying "I didn't think of that". That's exactly it, even if it thinks faster, it will still never "think of that".
Uh the singularity may be a crack-pot idea in the end but it seems like brings out a whole of slew crackpot refutations.
No, I don't understand flexible human intelligence or even animal intelligence fully and neither do you or other human. That's why it's not been programmed.
I do know that doubling circuit size doesn't double speed.
People have a really hard time admitting that some people are truly fundamentally smarter than others.
And you'd have a hard coming up with any evidence for this "fundamental" rather than relative intelligence difference.
The singularity, crackpot or not, is based on the hypothesis that there is a single "neocortical algorithm". It may indeed be dubious theory but it's cobbled together from some real evidence. If you're going to have counter-arguments to this, why not do the same?
Honest question: can't this process of "thinking outside the box" be reduced to a logical process? Wouldn't a system which has ability to identify axioms, also have the ability to vary those axioms and try out alternatives?
In other words, why shouldn't better logical ability lead to better imagination?
I think Kurzweil is mostly the one who keeps going on about literal unending exponential growth. Vinge's original singularity idea was more about things just becoming irreversibly incomprehensible for regular humans, since ultimately limited or not, self-improving intelligences are going to end operating on a level very distant from human thought.
BTW: I disagree that intelligence and imagination are separate. I think intelligence necessarily includes imagination, so AI would include artificial "imagination" too.
I'd like progress to continue rather than to stagnate; and since progress has historically continued, that seems the way to bet. Those pundits predicting stagnation have historically been wrong. However, I find it curious that Kurzweil does not address the availability of innovations/discoveries (and the difficulty in finding them), in contrast to the compelling case he makes for historical progress. Are potential discoveries infinite? Is their density uniform, or do they become less likely as you go along because they are limited in supply (the assumption of the article)?
How would one sensibly model the supply of potential discoveries, since it is intrinsically unknown? Perhaps a mathematical model of computation might help, of computable functions and Kolomogorov/Solomonoff program length to compute them. Using this model, the search space of functions increases exponentially with program length - but at what rate would the number of "interesting" computable functions increase? And with what density (with respect to the search space, i.e. how hard they are to find)?
So my point is that if you look at paradigm shift rate not in volume but in impact, you'd get a linear rate.
For this reason, an AI given imagination and exploding resources would still only make linear progress.
How much impact did Newton have on the world by 1751? How much impact will Shannon have had by 2337?
I'm defining intelligence as sheer IQ, analogous to a computers' ability to process information. Imagination is so essentially human in nature that there is no way to describe current AI as "imaginative". For example, the person with the highest IQ in the world is not more creative than the best musician. Some of the smartest minds in the world cannot "think outside of the box" effectively, because their minds are not wired that way. Intelligence is not imagination.
Can anyone please explain how an intelligence-self-improving computer will shift from being incredibly smart to wildly imaginative?
That's the one hole in singularity that I can't figure out.
The answer is that it's not actually obvious that "intelligence and imagination could not be more separate" or that "imagination is...essentially human in nature," so when most people talk about AI, they are not excluding those abilities.
Besides - what if imagination is just heuristic to search solution space quicker? Maybe machine with orders of magnitude more processing power can give better solutions without using this heuristic? That would mean it's us who thinks inside the box (because we use this heuristic), and computers can search solution space exhautively, so they will come up with solutions that escape our heuristic - we wouldn't even consider such solutions.
Exponential search space is a killer. Some form of heuristic seems necessary. Perhaps we will one day be able to simulate the heuristics we ourselves use - and then improve on them (e.g. apply them to more data than we can; use more complex heuristics; etc along the lines you say). Given variation between intellectual abilities of human beings, it is does not have an obvious fixed limit, and we may be able to extend the range of that variability. Though I expect increasing the associations an "imagination" can find suffers from exponential explosion.
Like AIXI?
Some things that we consider significant today won't seem significant from the perspective of centuries. Similarly, someone in 1750 would be able to list significant new fields developed recently that we would omit. For example, Newton also did work in optics, which we pretty much forget about today.
I remember computers of 30 and 40 years ago. Today everyone in the world has free access to supercomputers that translate languages and search petabytes of data (aka Google). We didn't need to revolutionize basic physics to get here from punched cards.
Expect a similar revolution in the next 30 to 40 years.
Humans came from microbes, yet we couldn't care less about them. A super intelligent being would see us the same way.
Just seems silly.
"Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery."
-- Jean Paul Sartre
It's all just a bunch of tools! We could use them to be good to each other, or to just keep doing what we did; moving from scarcity of resources and horsepower and intellect, to artificial scarcity based on greed and control. Technology just amplifies the impact of our choices on us, others and our environment; but it doesn't make them for us.
But I suppose you did not read past the title? Sorry for hurting your faith in the Singularity...