Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
1. Philosophers and AI theoreticians have a hard time defining what they mean by the term "intelligence". Talking about systems millions of times more intelligent than a human is nonsense unless you can define what it is you're talking about.
2. Whatever intelligence is it only makes any sense within the context of some environment. Environments impose a multitude of constraints. In the "intelligence explosion" scenario the environment is assumed to be constraint free, or something close to it.
3. Be wary of people trying to sell you ideas based on fear. It's usually snake oil, concealing some other agenda - such as trying to obtain or maintain grant money for projects.
4. That many top AI people have "bug out" houses is simply false. An exaggeration, intended to add drama to the article.
5. Historically, the predictions of top AI researchers have not proven to be particularly accurate, although that does not mean that this will always be the case.
No need to be millions of times smarter, whatever that may mean.
Another scary thing is the combination of the internet of things that is currently taking shape, and the fact that a lot of computer systems are backdoored by governments.
Nice attack vector for smart software (not counting accidental vulnerabilities).
You can only define things to a certain level. No matter the topic, you could always complain about a lack of definition. xkcd.com/309 comes to mind.
Expecting computers to be millions of times faster then humans has some appeal for 2 reasons.
1) Machines are already millions of times more powerful then humans in some tasks. For example mail delivery is now done with the speed of light which travels millions of times faster then a human.
2) Would we consider a million people to be a million times more intelligent than one single person? In some sense, I think so. So when we can clone a brain and we clone it a million times - voila.
Presumably it goes Top AI -> Successful and wealthy -> has vacation home in quiet, rural area.
The author seems to paint it as Top AI -> has a rogue AI bunker
6. While it is about sure that in the future they will be technology that is for indistinguishable from magic, this does not imply that every magical thing we can think of will be true at some point in the future.
7. The whole premise rests on recursively improving AI. The human race has been making tool to help make them better tools for at least 50,000 years (lower bound to be uncontroversial). We do have amazing tools now, and tools that automatically do other tools, but we have not witnessed an accelerated auto-recursive thingamagig.
I've never seen liverwurst icecream. I don't have to taste it to know with 99% certainty that it's a bad idea.
On a more serious note, I've never strapped 500 roman candles on my back and lit them all at once in an attempt at making a "jetpack". Again, I don't need to perform the experiment to know I would likely receive burns and possibly die.
The remarkable thing about our brains is that we have the ability to predict what will happen in our heads, empathize with the actor in that scenario, and then come to a conclusion about if we want that scenario to play out. So, to apply this to your counterpoint, I don't have to see an accelerated auto-recursive thingamajig to know it is likely going to be impossible to control and a bad idea.
That's very true, but I don't think it completely obliterates the relevance of the point being made in TFA. The truth is, we don't know exactly what a trans-human AI will be capable of, and whether or not it would do (or attempt to do) things that would be harmful to humanity. Now I'm certainly not arguing for stopping AI research! But maintaining awareness of this issue and reminding people to keep the unintended consequences in mind, is probably a valuable thing.
Don't get me wrong... I don't put a lot of stock in "fear of AI" (Matrix and Terminator jokes aside), so long as the AIs are locked in "the box" (to use Yudkowsky's term) and one can simply power the machine off and end the AI. Despite the (seeming) fact that Yudkowsky has talked his way out of "the box" a few times, playing the role of the AI, I think that we're a LONG way from an AI that can "go autonomous", talk it's way out of "the box" and become destructive. The scenario strikes me as highly unlikely, but just on the borderline of plausible enough to keep an eye on.
"This spring Hollywood will weigh in with Transcendence, starring Johnny Depp as an AI researcher targeted by violent extremists who think we’re crossing a Rubicon that will be a disaster for humanity."
Remember how the world was about to be finished on 21Dec2012 and and the Hollywood movie associated with the fad?
People must really understand that Watson is, like almost any successful AI (not AGI) product today, "just" a huge statistical pattern matching machine. Watson does not feel anything. Watson does not know what soccer is. Watson knows that a label "Soccer" has a distance of x to label Y and Z. Watson can answer Jeopardy questions, and now medical questions, but it's structurally unable to learn the slightest new task. So please, let's credit Watson for what Watson is good at, but stop using it to tell us AGI is coming.
Arguably, that's all a human brain is as well. I don't want to start some big debate here over symbolic reasoning versus statistical pattern matching, but there seems to be quite a bit of contemporary thought along the lines of our brains being largely based on "pattern matching" as a foundational mechanism.
BUT... if we only care about the outcome and the utility of the AGI, and don't expect it to be fully "human like" then I think that Watson (and Deep Blue, etc.) do represent steps on that road.
You can probably guess that I lean towards the latter viewpoint. I fall back on the oldchestnut that "We didn't build airplanes that fly by flapping their wings like birds, but they fly nonetheless" as an analogy. We may not build machines that think like humans, but they will still be intelligent, nonetheless.
I'm not even sure whether that's a meaningful distinction. Searle's Chinese Room et cetera.
I'm with you in the wing analogy, I fully agree. I just don't think Watson or Deep Blue is a significant approach even in that direction.
Human-like or not, we have certain expectations from our hypothetical AGI in terms of the kind of new problems it can solve without too much help. I guess what it mean is: I think it needs to be able to solve a problem it wasn't designed upfront to solve. No serious system I've ever seen attempts to do that.
Fair enough. :-)
The man in the room may not understand Chinese, but he is using a dictionary, which to a casual observer appears suspiciously thick. Just how thick would the dictionary need to be in order to provide a sensible response for all possible lines of enquiry?
Searle's argument reduces a room which understands Chinese to a dictionary which understands Chinese. A strange loop indeed.
With regard to serious systems attempting to solve AGI — are you aware of Jeff Hawkins' work on hierarchical temporal memory?
I haven't followed any recent research, sorry.
The AIs are of the "hive mind" kind and it is common to refer to it as "A transnational corporation."
Known identities are "IBM", "Google", "Unilever", "Monsanto" etc.
These AI's are beholden to nobody, define and persue their own goals, by manipulating their environment to their advantage.
And they're better at it than humans: They decide for themselves when, where and how much tax they want to pay, and they are not afraid to remind parliamentary inquiries about this fact.
For at least 10 years, it has been evident that these AI's are politically far more astute and successful than humans, and the latest "trade-agreement" negotiations, what little we get to know about them, is clearly an unmitigated powergrab by these AIs.
The fact that the hive-minds are composed of humans does not in any way change this conclusion.
And now: Imagine how your life would be, if Google, the company, truly hated you, personally, and were out to get you.
I'd go further and say that companies are alive (or at least independently intelligent) in a real sense. Companies are lively: "If you prick us, do we not bleed? [...] and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?" They will lobby and sue to protect their interests, butt heads with other rival corporations, and hold grudges.
However, I've found it difficult to convince anyone that we should consider companies alive, or at least entities that are qualitatively different in intelligence from the humans that enable them. The argument usually centers on that a company is just a bunch of humans, so it is best understood as such. However, the 'more is different' effect (e.g. you can better understand a human as an independent entity than as a bunch of cells even though it is entirely composed of them), and the selection pressure molding corporations (optimizing profit), I believe leads to a new type of collective intelligence (one different from human intelligence) -- basically a true AI, as you are arguing.
http://kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2011/04/the_search_for.ph...
[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Gone-Away-World-Vintage-Contempora...
- CEO of the Singularity Institute
I believe he also said that if you die now or soon, you don't just lose a few decades off your life but possibly immortality.
It might be possible for an AI to be roughly as "intelligent" (depending on how one measures this) as the smartest humans, but that intelligence is the result of many millions or even billions of years of accumulated evolutionary learning.
It might be -- for fundamental information and machine learning theory reasons -- fundamentally harder to go where there are no roads. Start looking into combinatorics and the problems of searching large spaces.
The observation that genius is often tied to madness may be indirect circumstantial evidence for this. When we try to push the boundaries of human intellect, we seen to run rapidly into weird problems.
"Welcome to the Desert of the Real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.”[1]
Also:
http://sysopmind.com/singularity/aibox
One happy thought is that the AI uses us as slaves to build a way off the planet to a place more habitable for an AI. Someplace nice with lots of raw material for chips and lots of energy. Maybe a super massive blackhole, maybe another solar system nearby.
And humans can be useful to, as expendable biological robots that are cheap to manufacture and run while also being intelligent and versatile. Although most of us probably wouldn't call that living.
Does HN agree or disagree a significant number of those "bug out" people truly exist?
Also see: "metamorphosis of prime intellect" and "mind war: the singularity" and to a lesser extent "a young lady's illustrated primer"
"a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves"
I'm dumber than a high level AI of fiction, and I could find your little cabin or panic room easily. A machine with drones, access to tax/real estate records, etc would have no problem here. Heck, why not just hire a mercenary group to fish these guys out of their little holes? AI money is as good as human money.
Well, he does spend most of the article gushing over the magic insight of Kurzweil. It's really a "baby's first exposure to the concept of self-advancing AI" article with a movie promo thrown in at the end. (Maybe? I just skimmed.)
I visit rural Maine frequently and often hear residents talk about their guns, and their "readiness" for world ending events. Yet most have done nothing to actually prepare, beyond living remotely and stock up on some guns.
At most it's possible that Hugo deGaris plausibly might have a "bug out" house, but I doubt that anyone else does.
TL:DR - whether AI can become significantly smarter than Humans really fast depends on intelligence return on computational investment.
http://multiverseaccordingtoben.blogspot.com/2010/10/singula... http://jetpress.org/v22/goertzel-pitt.htm
You might find some other related commentary with the search term "scary idea", which is what Ben has labeled Yudkowsky's side of the FOOM debate typified by the "That Alien Message" story. TL;DR: Goertzel takes friendliness seriously but considers a fast, hard FOOM to be implausible and worrying over it detrimental to the cause.
I don't know of anyone else with qualifications to be counted as a "top AI researcher" that has covered these topics in any significant detail. Those few times I have seen the topic mentioned in interviews (with Pei Wang and Hugo de Garis, for example), it's dismissed out of hand as crazy-talk. You may find some discussion of this at the various AGI conferences though (use search terms like "friendly" or "safe" on the youtube channels).
The reason no one is worrying about this is because "AI" is still a) just a bunch of math (and still surprisingly stupid) b) nowhere near sentient.
My Kinect can barely follow my hand or consistently recognize what I'm saying with any accuracy. I'm really not concerned with it plotting my demise.
My radium coated watch face can barely illuminate my timepiece, I'm not worried about the dangers of these radioactive elements.
For example, if the universe just went 1 hour back in time, why would anything go differently the second time around?
Unless you can prove something is truly random in the universe, and not affected by anything else, are we not just on autopilot? I get the feeling from the moment of the big bang, I was going to exist and inevitably write this comment billions of years later, and nothing could stop it. I mean, 1+1=2. It doesn't matter how many times you run the simulation again, you get the same answer.
If you "ran" the universe over again from the big bang, then the probability that you would exist is essentially zero. I don't know enough about neuroscience to speculate on whether quantum mechanics has any relevance to brain functions over the course of a lifetime but from a physics standpoint it isn't inconceivable.
On a more philosophical note: if there is some true randomness in how our brain works do you think that that actually gives us any more control over our lives? It doesn't really change anything in my view.
"True randomness" in the sense that randomness is part of our current understanding of physics is just something not being determined by the prior state of the physical universe. It is, therefore, indistinguishable from things being determined by something that is neither part of nor itself determined by any set of things within the physical universe, i.e., "true randonmness" is empirically indistinguishable from the action of causes which are not themselves determined by the physical state of the universe.
Or, IOW, free will (that is, the ability to act other than in a manner determined by the prior state of the universe) requires (but is not implied by) a physical universe in which "true randomness" exists.
So, true randomness in the physical universe doesn't imply free will, but it is necessary for free will to exist.
God does indeed play dice with the universe. Eternity would be too boring without it. Of course, it doesn't hurt that he is both the dice and the one rolling them...
Maybe that's just what it wants you to thing... ;-)
I am reminded of Arthur C. Clark who wrote about the SDI project.
"Though it might be possible, at vast expense, to construct local defense systems that would 'only' let through a few percent of ballistic missiles, the much touted idea of a national umbrella was nonsense. Luis Alvarez, perhaps the greatest experimental physicist of this century, remarked to me that the advocates of such schemes were 'very bright guys with no common sense.'"
"Looking into my often cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that a total defense might indeed be possible in a century or so. But the technology involved would produce, as a by-product, weapons so terrible that no one would bother with anything as primitive as ballistic missiles."
Clarke, Arthur C. "Presidents, Experts, and Asteroids."Science, June 5, 1998. Reprinted as "Science and Society" inGreetings, Carbon-Based Bipeds! Collected Essays, 1934-1998. St. Martin's Press, 1999: 526.
Philosophically speaking, why would AI want to destroy humanity, wouldn't it be just as bad as humanity itself?
There aren't any big arguments that such trends won't continue. It seems that the dynamics of groups supports living in denial.
I can't recall who (and couldn't find it through Google) the quote by the AI researcher who said something like "show me what the brain (or mind) is doing and I can build a machine to do it too". Well, we don't know what the mind or brain is doing and until we identify the epistemological principles we are just groping in the dark. Self-awareness my just be an artifact or consequence of the biological implementation of the epistemological principles behind intelligence and that an AI does not necessarily need to be self-aware.
Having said that, I hope the singularity can translate "the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak"
This opens up a possibility that once a general intelligence is built, without awareness, it can be miss-used for the benefit of its creator or who eventually controlls it.
[0] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-che...
[1]: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
Thanks for pointing this out. Very interesting!
Whatever nature can build, we can build better given enough time and resources. We have more building blocks available to us, and we have intelligence. Nature merely had lots of time.
fun fact: Bill Joy (vi, bsd, sun) has misgivings about AI.
http://thelawsofrobotics2013.iankerr.ca/files/2013/09/15-Apo...