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When Is the Singularity? Probably Not in Your Lifetime
- tempodox 11y agoThe “Singularity” would be the end of humanity, if it ever happened.
- ejolto 11y agoBy definition not in our lifetime then.
- danieltillett 11y agoWell the laws of physics means it would take some finite time from the initiation of the singularity to the end of all life even if the singularity was extremely hostile to humans.
- g00gler 11y agoWhat makes you say that?
- tempodox 11y agoHow long before “it” decided we were outdated and obsolete?
- r3bl 11y agoWell, a huge percentage of people who are actually working on the AI field (unlike Hawking, Gates and others) disagree with you: http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf (warning: PDF (obviously))
- tempodox 11y agoAnd the majority was never wrong, of course.
- visakanv 11y agoI was told that driverless cars would not be in my lifetime, and that a machine would not beat a human at Go in my lifetime. We'll see.
- Havoc 11y agoYeah think things will go faster than people expect. Just takes one unexpected key breakthrough and BAM way more progress than forecast.
- jobigoud 11y agoA lot of people fail to even consider the consequences of possible breakthroughs in disciplines that helps discover more breakthroughs. Cascading discoveries are already hard to think through very far, but discoveries that accelerate the pace at which we make discoveries make the whole thing very chaotic.
- LesZedCB 11y agoThis is described in The Singularity is Near (edit: or How to Create a Brain. I dont' remember which) as the Law of Accelerating Returns, and is exactly what this journalist falls prey to. Human brains are accustomed to viewing the world linearly, not exponentially. Cascading technological breakthroughs are exponential, and therefore highly unlikely to be able to be predicted correctly without accounting for that bias.
- melling 11y agoNo, what you are saying is inaccurate. There are plenty of people who've taken both sides of the predictions. Some people have been optimistic about beating the best players in the Go world: http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/ http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/ As for self-driving cars, they do work under good conditions but we still are at least a decade away. Plenty of people became optimistic about self-driving cars after the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge 11 years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005)
- Lewton 11y agoUnless there's a page 2 I'm missing, this is a terrible article. He seems to dismiss the singularity with 3 points 1. We don't understand human intelligence 2. "We've" been wrong about it before 3. Moores law is ending 1. Who says it has to be human intelligence? 2. That's not an argument 3. Moores law -might- be ending but datacenters are getting bigger and bigger
- ewzimm 11y agoSeems to be a lot of people thinking Moore's Law ending means that innovation in computers is over. It's really just the opposite. We can't rely on simple scaling anymore, so we need to take more innovative steps to push computing forward.
- _yosefk 11y agoThere's a limit to what you can do without "simple" scaling, meaning, without making cheaper, faster, smaller individual gates. That is, an architecture optimized for a given problem domain will give you maybe 1000x efficiency improvement over a more general architecture, but that's it. (Typically it will be <1000x, but let's say you're lucky; the point is, that's your last 1000x, and then you'll see no improvements, ever.) So if Moore's law is indeed over, progress will be slow, domain-specific, and decelerating due to diminishing returns (specializing for a problem domain is worth it as long as that domain is not too narrow but at some point it's too narrow to justify the investment into building specialized hardware for it; you'll be better off using something less specialized. GPGPU, which does not provide amazing performance in an absolute sense, but does beat CPUs on a large range of problems, is an example to this - any accelerator more efficient than GPGPU needs to be justifiable in the sense that GPGPU is already there wherever there's a need for GPU doing graphics, which is where GPUs do provide amazing performance in an absolute sense [you can totally beat GPGPU with more specialized hardware on most benchmarks, while you can't beat GPUs in graphics.]) I'm a chip & accelerator architect, so it's not like I'm particularly happy about this, I think I'm realistic though. A higher-caliber architect saying the same pessimistic thing is Bob Colwell. The one nice thing about really stopping at some manufacturing technology and not being able to improve any further is that the cost of using this technology will likely continue dropping for some years. Only when it reaches the bottom will progress have truly stopped.
- abtinf 11y agoTLDR the singularity hasn't happened yet so it will never happen. Typical low quality technology "journalism". "For starters, biologists acknowledge that the basic mechanisms for biological intelligence are still not completely understood, and as a result there is not a good model of human intelligence for computers to simulate." Duh. We don't know how the brain works yet. A big chunk of The Singularity is Near deals with how we build that understanding. Once we know how the brain works, computing will take advantage.
- danieltillett 11y agoWe don't even need to know that - we just need to design a system that can evolve. No single cell knows how a brain works, yet every day thousands of brains are created from single cells.
- atom-morgan 11y agoIsn't this the best course of action for AI anyways? Creating intelligence through evolution rather than reverse engineering the brain?
- Houshalter 11y agoI don't know about evolution, but most current AI work is done through first principles rather than copying the brain. Neural networks, despite the name, were only vaguely inspired by real neuroscience. And now are entirely rooted in basic calculus and maybe probability theory. It may very well happen the other way around, that AI researchers figure out intelligence and then use their discoveries to explain neuroscience. Which is already happening a bit, with a well known researcher recently proposing a theory on how the brain might implement a variation of the backpropagation algorithm. Figuring out the brain is like trying to reverse engineer messy spaghetti code that has gone through an obfuscating compiler. Although it may be possible to figure it out, it's probably faster to just write our own code.
- danieltillett 11y agoIt is if you have the raw computational power. At the moment our best computers are still a few orders of magnitude off the raw computational resources of the human brain. Of course the downside of doing this is we have really no idea of what the AI is thinking or why. This may not be the wisest way to create an AI.
- solo1717 11y agoThis article raises literally zero new points that have not been addressed over and over by futurists, "transhumanists", and others optimistic about the singularity. 1.) Moore's law still holds true at the moment. If and when it does stop the argument will begin to have some weight. The claim that Moore's law is about to stop has been made over and over since the 90s. Until then it is empty. 2) Moore's law continuing ad infinitum is not a necessity for the singularity. Distributed computing, neural chips, quantum and biological computing all provide avenues for continued vertical hardware evolution, not counting the Google method of rigging together thousands or millions of average machines to produce incredibly powerful supercomputers. 3) The sheer amount of data we are collecting continues to increase exponentially. (http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/04/schmidt-data/), much of which is applicable to machine learning algorithms which brings us to point 4. 4) The efficiency and adaptability of machine learning algorithms continue to improve year on year. See DeepMind's early videos playing video games., etc., etc. To imagine that we won't see new innovations just as incredible almost every year from here to 2050 is incredibly naive and unrealistically pessimistic. So considering that in each of the fundamental areas that we know are necessary for an AGI -- ie raw computing power, processable/interpretable data, efficiency/cleverness of algorithms -- we are achieving exponential growth year on year, it is reasonable to conclude we will get a machine that can pass the Turing test in our lifetimes. This is also ignoring the multitude of other areas that contribute to the likelihood of an intelligence explosion. Brain to computer and brain to brain interfaces are in their early days but already exist. As they become more practical they could lead to exponentially more efficient research. Systems like Watson will speed up scientific research as they evolve. Nootropics and electromagnetic brain stimulation also help in this area. Capitalism strongly incentivizes innovators to produce technology that automates ever more complex problems, or create tools that improve the efficiency of creating complex problem solving technology. This is an iterative, continuous process that we are all a part of, knowingly or not. Now that humanity has been connected with a sort of digital nervous system, and is thoroughly incentivized to all aim towards this intelligence explosion, one way or another, it is naive to think we won't continue to find novel ways of improving the efficiency of every single system we utilize no matter how macro- or microscopic, which creates an intelligence creating feedback loop. The singularity has already happened, its just not running fast enough yet for it to 'feel' magical and miraculous the way it will once human level intelligence is shown across multiple fields by integrated computer systems.
- creyer 11y agoIMHO the “Singularity” will be achieved when AI will invent new things. We have only reached the point where AI can only do improvements of something humans have created... Innovation is something hard for humans, so I don't know if we will see AI innovations anytime soon.
- the8472 11y agoI think your standard needs some work. Humans also only improve something other humans have created. And in niche applications AIs already outperform humans. http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ http://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/ Ctrl+F for "baffling"
- scrumper 11y agoThat is really interesting! Here's the paper. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63.4366&rep=rep1&type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.63....
- Rhapso 11y agoso the whole idea of the "singularity" has been overblown by fiction and media. The reason we call it a "singularity" is because it is part of the "acceleration" which is the observation that the rate of human progress in technology is increasing faster over time. The "singularity" is the point beyond which the rate of change is faster than humans can internalize and react to it. Super AIs and being uploaded to the great server in the sky are just ways we imagined an event literally defined by our inability to imagine it. The singularity could have a few outcomes: - The classical "humanity gets left behind by it's creations" doomsday - The rate of change caps out simply because humanity cannot drive change much faster than humanity can react to it. - The rate of change asymptotically approaches our capacity to handle it. Interestingly, even after the "singularity" happens these three states may be indistinguishable to us. Right now I am leaning towards the second outcome, that the singularity has come, and now we are simply crap at predicting the future because of it. I saw this a few months ago and considered it a potential symptom of that outcome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIPfpxFrlg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEIPfpxFrlg.
- numair 11y agoFor me, the tl;dr on the entire subject of the Singularity can be summarized as: "...the field of artificial intelligence has a long history of over-promising and under-delivering..." That being said, I think we are finally at the dawn of "useful AI," like when my iPhone correctly guesses where I am headed and gives me a time estimate. For normal humans such as myself, this is WAY cooler and more exciting.
- romaniv 11y ago>That being said, I think we are finally at the dawn of "useful AI" Were AI systems that outperformed humans in solving complex differential and integral equations useless? Were systems that diagnosed diseases better than doctors useless? Were systems that handled logistics at scale never possible before useless? All of those were created in the past (60s, 70s, 80s). The problem with AI was never the lack of results. It was the hype that far exceeded the results, however useful and practical they were.
- arca_vorago 11y agoThe real problem with people saying "not in your lifetime" is that they fail to understand the exponential nature of a self-improving AI entity. That's the whole reason it's the singularity. Lets say we create an AI that can rewrite and improve itself. The first iteration may take a year to actually be better. But then the next version is only a month away. Then the next is only a day. Suddenly the AI has self-improved beyond our understanding before we even realize or understand what happened. The true singularity is dangerous precisely because we won't know when it actually happens, and it will outpace us before we can respond. Preemptive drone strikes against AI programmers don't sound too far fetched given the direction things are going. Of course, the singularity is a zero-sum game, in the sense that the first entity there wins. Which is why I plan on programming the singularity AI as a copy of my consciousness so that I will be the singularity god.
- maxerickson 11y agoI think your plan just has the AI god more likely to be fond of you.
- arca_vorago 11y agoI consider that good enough. Also, confused about the downvotes with no response/explanation.
- eli_gottlieb 11y agoBasically, everyone is downvoting you because you're out of your mind.
- spectrum1234 11y agoVery poor quality times article. Read the two Wait But Why posts on this: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-1.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu... http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolu...
- Chris2048 11y ago"The notion of the Singularity is predicated on Moore’s Law" - is it?
- omurphyevans 11y agoNo, it's predicated on exponential growth, of which Moore's law was one small part...
- sago 11y agoBut the important question is whether Moore's law is a necessary part. There's a big difference between "a redundant part, if it fails, the whole thing continues" and "a necessary but not sufficient component".
- the8472 11y ago> it's predicated on exponential growth Is that part even necessary? Even linear growth with a higher constant factor than humans have due to faster iterations could rapidly outgrow human capabilities if we take a hypothetical human-level AI as starting point.
- Chris2048 11y agoCould human reproduction count as one of those exponential factors? if P(t+dt) = 1.1*P(t)?
- dekhn 11y agoNo, the article is wrong on that. Moore's Law is merely the simplest and most obvious example for our current generation to understand the occasional exponential scaling of technologies.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- awinter-py 11y agoless HUMINT more LOVEINT
- dekhn 11y agoWhile I concede it is unlikely anything resembling a Vingeian singularity is going to occur in my lifetime, I am actively working towards building the technology to bootstrap the singularity. It seems far more useful to spend time building new technology that people look at and consider real and surprising accomplishments (for example, AlphaGo), or to understand the neural correlates of intelligence, than to spend time pontificating about whether the singularity will occur.
- ild 11y agoYour view on singularity largely depends on your relationships with John Searle Chinese room argument; I accept it, and do not find Kurzweil views convincing.
- petervandijck 11y agoI read the Chinese room argument, it seems really naive. It's like saying "my neurons aren't conscious therefore I am not conscious", which is clearly not the case. We're made of matter, computers are made of matter, where is the difference?
- ild 11y ago> It's like saying "my neurons aren't conscious therefore I am not conscious", which is clearly not the case. You need to read Searle's works again; his point is actually the opposite - we are machines made out of biological neurons, which seem to have an externally unobservable property of being conscious; we do not know what it is caused by, but we can see today that it is possible to create a simulation of human behavior by means of logical gates. We have no idea if it will have mind or not. > We're made of matter, computers are made of matter, where is the difference? That's an odd argument. And actually does not contradict Searle at all.