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This is completely silly. Superhuman AI is inevitable because there is nothing magical about human brains. The human brain is only the very first intelligence t

This is completely silly. Superhuman AI is inevitable because there is nothing magical about human brains. The human brain is only the very first intelligence to evolve. We are probably very far away from the peak of what is possible. Human brains are incredibly small, a few pounds of matter. Any bigger and your mother would be killed giving birth or you would take 10x as long to grow up. They are incredibly energy constrained, only using a few watts of power. Because any more and you would starve to death. They are incredibly slow and energy inefficient; communication in the brain is done with chemical signals that are orders of magnitude slower than electricity and use much more energy. And they are very uncompact - neurons are enormous and filled with tons of useless junk that isn't used for computation. Compared to our transistor technology which is approaching the limits of physics and built on an atom by atom scale. That's just the hardware specs of the human computer. The software is hardly better. There are just more unknowns because we haven't finished reverse engineering it (but we are getting there, slowly.) But beyond that, the human brain evolved to be good at surviving on the Savanahs of Africa. We didn't evolve to be good at mathematics, or science, or engineering. It's really remarkable that our brains are capable of such things at all! We have terrible weaknesses in these areas. For instance, a very limited working memory. We don't realize how bad we are, simply because we have nothing else to compare ourselves to. Consider how even today, relatively primitive AIs are vastly superior to humans at games like chess. Human brains also didn't evolve to be good at chess after all. Even simple algorithms designed specifically for this game easily mop up humans. And play at a level of strategy far above what even the best human players can comprehend. Imagine an AI brain that is optimized for the purpose of mathematics, or computer programming, science, or engineering. Or at doing AI research... Imagine how much better it could be at these tasks than humans. It could quickly solve problems that would take the greatest human minds generations. It could manage levels of complexity that would drive humans crazy.

deathanatos 10y ago
> Superhuman AI is inevitable because there is nothing magical about human brains. I'm of the opinion that that's an assumption being made. An article I read at one point supposed that our brains could have, as a way of example, a linking to quantum mechanics that we are not aware of due to not having yet discovered it that causes self-awareness. The point was not so much the mechanism, but that we can't yet rule out such a mechanism existing that our brain could have but our silicon currently doesn't — because we have no real idea what consciousness is, and we've not constructed an AI that proves that no such mechanism exists. If consciousness is intelligence, this could matter more (but this could also be another assumption). (Unfortunately, I cannot find the article.) (The article also went on to note that we can copy computer programs, but not brains, and wondered if perhaps there is some relation to the previous problem. It was also advocating that we need a testable hypothesis around consciousness; to either prove or disprove the question "is it possible to clone a brain?" would be an extraordinary discovery either way. I found it interesting.) > Imagine an AI brain that is optimized for the purpose of mathematics, or computer programming, science, or engineering. Or at doing AI research... Imagine how much better it could be at these tasks than humans. It could quickly solve problems that would take the greatest human minds generations. It could manage levels of complexity that would drive humans crazy. I'm just wishing for an automatic soap dispenser that can reliably sense my hand.
- jacquesm 10y ago
  >An article I read at one point supposed that our brains could have, as a way of example, a linking to quantum mechanics that we are not aware of due to not having yet discovered it that causes self-awareness. That's not an article but a whole book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
  - deathanatos 9y ago
    Extremely close! It was actually posted on today's thread about consciousness[1], and what I was thinking of was [2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14263842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14263842 [2]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  That's indeed an assumption. But so far there isn't much evidence pointing at the quantum solution, and there are theories of how self-awareness can arise that don't require magic. It's reasonable to take the less magical assumptions until presented with (appropriate amount of) evidence to the contrary. Quantum-based self-awareness is a cop-out IMO, an open way to claim that it comes from God. Well, if that's true and it's beyond our reach, then we'll never build a self-aware AI ourselves. But assuming something is impossible doesn't help moving forward...
- nolemurs 10y ago
  > I'm of the opinion that that's an assumption being made. Not so much an assumption as a reasonable guess. Is it logically possible that there's something magical about human brains? Yes. But there are countless examples of things we thought were magical historically, and, as far as I know, exactly zero that we've ended up concluding actually were magical, and a large number that we're pretty confident aren't at this point. The smart money here is on "no, the human brain isn't magical."
  - ben_w 10y ago
nojvek 10y ago
I think AI fear is a bit hyped up in the valley right now but the fundamentals are true. You can think of intelligence as a couple of dimensions rather than just one dimension as the author is arguing. However I don't agree with his/her logic. You can think of the brain as a massively parallel computer. Intelligence can be gauged by total cores, memory and CPU per core, power usage and network bandwidth between cores. Sure different configurations will give different strengths but something optimized atomically for performance will be faster than a mushy brain. Now imagine a billion of this little pods placed all over the planet. With amazing bandwidth between the computers akin to our internet. Worst case: they think humans are the enemy and out think us to extinction. Best case: studying intelligence helps us figure out how Brians work. This helps us figure out how DNA nano manufacturing works. We figure out brain to brain and brain to AI networking. Now all humans are collectively a super computer being able to share knowledge and abilities. May be this is extended so animals are also included and Earth becomes a Pandora like planet where every living thing is connected and they all live in harmonius resource optimized world where AI tries to maximize happiness of every living being.
- kayoone 10y ago
  Would individual humans still have their own consciousness or would all of humanity be one giant highly optimized organism that has no individual needs, desires, dreams or fears? The concept of human could become irrelevant and our whole existence with it
- intended 10y ago
  No. The hype chamber in SV is on overdrive on AI at this point. Singularity AI concept has gone from the neat Sci Fi idea it was, to being treated as a serious possibility. This is Absurd. The modern version of Malthus, and a community of people who pride themselves on their reason, should do a basic sniff test. The author has it correct - human brains themselves are significantly impressive on a weight/power/capability scale. But forget all of the intelligence debate, consider the things that people magically ignore: emotions. Take a look at how people who are depressed function. They measured as being more aware than (better assessment of their surroundings/relations/self assesment) people who were not. At the same time, they lack motivation, or desire - there is a lack of impulsive force to move forward. Intelligence doesn't give human beings purpose. Emotion does. This isn't feel good psychobabble, its a fundamental part of good mind/body housekeeping which a huge chunk of SV follows every day to reach "peak performance". How are you going to create a general purpose AI which has any motive force? Its actually MORE LIKELY, that if a GP AI is created, its just going to sit on its ass and pretend not to understand instructions.
wamatt 10y ago
>They are incredibly slow and energy inefficient; Human brains are energy inefficient? Well, thats a first ;) "In 1990, the legendary Caltech engineer Carver Mead correctly predicted that our present-day computers would use ten million times more energy for a single instruction than the brain uses for a synaptic activation." "Last March, AlphaGo, a program created by Google DeepMind, was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained on a database of thirty million moves, running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent’s brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)" [1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-the-brain http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-t...
- Houshalter 10y ago
  In terms of energy consumed for individual computations, yes. Neurons use chemical reactions to communicate and this is terribly inefficient. Transistors use very small amounts of electricity in comparison. The main difference is computer technology is designed to be very general purpose. The brain is more like an ASIC that's hardwired to run one specific algorithm. GPUs are also computing 16 or more bits of precision, when real neurons are very low precision. There are some other differences, like how real brains are incredibly sparse and most of the synapses at any given time are dormant and not using much energy. They are also very sparsely connected to each other. While our current NNs are very dense and need to spend energy to compute every single connection each cycle.
  - duncanawoods 10y ago
    It seems premature to make judgements about efficiency when there is so much we do not understand about brain function and consciousness. When you can replicate all brain function, lets compare efficiency. Comparing to an asic reveals the source of your error rather than defends your position.
- Neeek 10y ago
  For that to be a fair comparison, wouldn't you need to look at all the energy consumed by the human brain over the many hours it took them to become a Go champion?
goatlover 10y ago
The assumption is that a singular intelligence (the superhuman AI) will eclipse that of many intelligences (humans plus tools). Any given intelligence might be more capable than me, but it's constrained by all the other intelligences in the environment.
andrepd 10y ago
> neurons are enormous and filled with tons of useless junk that isn't used for computation I just want to point out that some recent research indicates that this might not actually be true. Single neurons may be more complex than we thought since researchers managed to extract significant and complex functionality from single neurons (!). Not to mention glia seem to be important for cognition, and not just glue as we thought... So perhaps not as wasteful and kludgy as we might think :)
jacquesm 10y ago
> The human brain is only the very first intelligence to evolve. That may not even be true, we're just not smart enough to make the call one way or the other. Dolphins come to mind, as well as several other creatures (Squid, Apes). The fact that we can't rule it out is in a way proof that maybe we're not as smart as we would like to think we are.
ankurdhama 10y ago
It is always the case that Superhuman AI proponents comes up with the argument that "there is nothing magical about human brain". Yes, everybody agrees about that, even people who oppose Superhuman AI and are sane enough to not evoke mystical powers argument. The problem is: 1. Understand brain and simulate it to get intelligence. Sounds simple right? How about simulating a nuclear reaction, which we already understands, on my computer and generating nuclear power? 2. Once you understand something you can create it. This is a fallacy, a big one. We understand solar system, lets create one, whats the problem? 3. Simulating a brain will give you a brain, with all its limitations and problems that we have with human brain. Oh then we can tweak it to make more intelligent? Sorry you cant do that without changing the whole model completely, in which case it will no longer be a "brain".
- Houshalter 10y ago
  If you simulate a nuclear reaction you get... maybe a nice video of atoms smashing together? If you simulate a brain you get an intelligent computer program. Same with the solar system. We can create simulated solar systems. We will probably be able to make simulated brains. What is your point? Alright, assuming the first AI even is a simulated brain (I don't see why we can't invent intelligence from first principles first.) We could definitely tweak it. We know of drugs like amphetamines that enhance human ability. That's like Stone Age tech compared to what's possible if we had unlimited control over every neuron in the entire brain. Not to mention just adding more neurons and making a larger brain. This is just touching on what's possible, I could go on for ages on possible improvements.
  - ankurdhama 10y ago
    My point regarding the simulation argument is that there is a difference between computational simulation and physical simulation.
    - danidiaz 10y ago
      If I simulate a map I get a map. Are minds like maps, or like nuclear reactions?
interfixus 10y ago
Maybe, maybe not. Your opinion is based on assumptions, just like mine and everybody else's. Or at least I assume so :-/ When somebody comes up with a reasonable, detailed model of how my memories are stored (just to name an example), I shall once again start paying close attention to the whole AI field.
intended 10y ago
This is exactly the kind of blind non scientific belief that the article is decrying. There is nothing magical about anything. There is however a bunch of unkowns, and a lot of knowns that point in directions away from singularity babble. This is exactly the point of the article - that we aren't going to a singularity, we are going towards a "Cambrian explosion"
Ngunyan 10y ago
> The human brain is only the very first intelligence to evolve. What other intelligence evolved, and in what sense human brain is first in evolution?
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  s/first/first smart enough to invent science/. We've seen no other creatures on Earth being able to grow beyond using basic tools. But this also somewhat implies (which is GP's point) that we're close to the dumbest possible mind that evolution could make that could still develop science. Or think of it as a crude MVP that ended up being a production system.
  - Ngunyan 10y ago
    > s/first/first smart enough to invent science/. To claim something as first, there must be others in reality to have followed it. If there is no second, there would be no first. Is there a second intelligence to have invented science, or we are the only ones?
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Intelligence as an optimization process works orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. We've dominated the optimization happening on this planet. If we were to stop doing technology and wait a million years, then maybe we'd see a second species develop comparable intelligence.
restalis 10y ago
"communication in the brain is done with chemical signals that are orders of magnitude slower than electricity and use much more energy" A nitpick: the neurons actually do use electricity to send signals and (looking at the neuronal model in its history¹) it actually evolved to send signals along as fast as it could. The chemical component, AFAIK, is the physical implementation for memory, so this is kind of the storage class regarding operation performance. Overall though, I agree that our cerebral organ may not be the apogee of computational performance. ¹ As far as I remember, the dinosaur neurons didn't had myelin, which for some large animals caused non-trivial sensorial delay.

deathanatos 10y ago

> Superhuman AI is inevitable because there is nothing magical about human brains. I'm of the opinion that that's an assumption being made. An article I read at one point supposed that our brains could have, as a way of example, a linking to quantum mechanics that we are not aware of due to not having yet discovered it that causes self-awareness. The point was not so much the mechanism, but that we can't yet rule out such a mechanism existing that our brain could have but our silicon currently doesn't — because we have no real idea what consciousness is, and we've not constructed an AI that proves that no such mechanism exists. If consciousness is intelligence, this could matter more (but this could also be another assumption). (Unfortunately, I cannot find the article.) (The article also went on to note that we can copy computer programs, but not brains, and wondered if perhaps there is some relation to the previous problem. It was also advocating that we need a testable hypothesis around consciousness; to either prove or disprove the question "is it possible to clone a brain?" would be an extraordinary discovery either way. I found it interesting.) > Imagine an AI brain that is optimized for the purpose of mathematics, or computer programming, science, or engineering. Or at doing AI research... Imagine how much better it could be at these tasks than humans. It could quickly solve problems that would take the greatest human minds generations. It could manage levels of complexity that would drive humans crazy. I'm just wishing for an automatic soap dispenser that can reliably sense my hand.

jacquesm 10y ago
>An article I read at one point supposed that our brains could have, as a way of example, a linking to quantum mechanics that we are not aware of due to not having yet discovered it that causes self-awareness. That's not an article but a whole book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor%27s_New_Mind
- deathanatos 9y ago
  Extremely close! It was actually posted on today's thread about consciousness[1], and what I was thinking of was [2]. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14263842 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14263842 [2]: http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756 http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2756
TeMPOraL 10y ago
That's indeed an assumption. But so far there isn't much evidence pointing at the quantum solution, and there are theories of how self-awareness can arise that don't require magic. It's reasonable to take the less magical assumptions until presented with (appropriate amount of) evidence to the contrary. Quantum-based self-awareness is a cop-out IMO, an open way to claim that it comes from God. Well, if that's true and it's beyond our reach, then we'll never build a self-aware AI ourselves. But assuming something is impossible doesn't help moving forward...
nolemurs 10y ago
> I'm of the opinion that that's an assumption being made. Not so much an assumption as a reasonable guess. Is it logically possible that there's something magical about human brains? Yes. But there are countless examples of things we thought were magical historically, and, as far as I know, exactly zero that we've ended up concluding actually were magical, and a large number that we're pretty confident aren't at this point. The smart money here is on "no, the human brain isn't magical."
- ben_w 10y ago

nojvek 10y ago

I think AI fear is a bit hyped up in the valley right now but the fundamentals are true. You can think of intelligence as a couple of dimensions rather than just one dimension as the author is arguing. However I don't agree with his/her logic. You can think of the brain as a massively parallel computer. Intelligence can be gauged by total cores, memory and CPU per core, power usage and network bandwidth between cores. Sure different configurations will give different strengths but something optimized atomically for performance will be faster than a mushy brain. Now imagine a billion of this little pods placed all over the planet. With amazing bandwidth between the computers akin to our internet. Worst case: they think humans are the enemy and out think us to extinction. Best case: studying intelligence helps us figure out how Brians work. This helps us figure out how DNA nano manufacturing works. We figure out brain to brain and brain to AI networking. Now all humans are collectively a super computer being able to share knowledge and abilities. May be this is extended so animals are also included and Earth becomes a Pandora like planet where every living thing is connected and they all live in harmonius resource optimized world where AI tries to maximize happiness of every living being.

kayoone 10y ago
Would individual humans still have their own consciousness or would all of humanity be one giant highly optimized organism that has no individual needs, desires, dreams or fears? The concept of human could become irrelevant and our whole existence with it
intended 10y ago
No. The hype chamber in SV is on overdrive on AI at this point. Singularity AI concept has gone from the neat Sci Fi idea it was, to being treated as a serious possibility. This is Absurd. The modern version of Malthus, and a community of people who pride themselves on their reason, should do a basic sniff test. The author has it correct - human brains themselves are significantly impressive on a weight/power/capability scale. But forget all of the intelligence debate, consider the things that people magically ignore: emotions. Take a look at how people who are depressed function. They measured as being more aware than (better assessment of their surroundings/relations/self assesment) people who were not. At the same time, they lack motivation, or desire - there is a lack of impulsive force to move forward. Intelligence doesn't give human beings purpose. Emotion does. This isn't feel good psychobabble, its a fundamental part of good mind/body housekeeping which a huge chunk of SV follows every day to reach "peak performance". How are you going to create a general purpose AI which has any motive force? Its actually MORE LIKELY, that if a GP AI is created, its just going to sit on its ass and pretend not to understand instructions.

wamatt 10y ago

>They are incredibly slow and energy inefficient; Human brains are energy inefficient? Well, thats a first ;) "In 1990, the legendary Caltech engineer Carver Mead correctly predicted that our present-day computers would use ten million times more energy for a single instruction than the brain uses for a synaptic activation." "Last March, AlphaGo, a program created by Google DeepMind, was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained on a database of thirty million moves, running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent’s brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)" [1] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-the-brain http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-t...

Houshalter 10y ago
In terms of energy consumed for individual computations, yes. Neurons use chemical reactions to communicate and this is terribly inefficient. Transistors use very small amounts of electricity in comparison. The main difference is computer technology is designed to be very general purpose. The brain is more like an ASIC that's hardwired to run one specific algorithm. GPUs are also computing 16 or more bits of precision, when real neurons are very low precision. There are some other differences, like how real brains are incredibly sparse and most of the synapses at any given time are dormant and not using much energy. They are also very sparsely connected to each other. While our current NNs are very dense and need to spend energy to compute every single connection each cycle.
- duncanawoods 10y ago
  It seems premature to make judgements about efficiency when there is so much we do not understand about brain function and consciousness. When you can replicate all brain function, lets compare efficiency. Comparing to an asic reveals the source of your error rather than defends your position.
Neeek 10y ago
For that to be a fair comparison, wouldn't you need to look at all the energy consumed by the human brain over the many hours it took them to become a Go champion?

goatlover 10y ago

The assumption is that a singular intelligence (the superhuman AI) will eclipse that of many intelligences (humans plus tools). Any given intelligence might be more capable than me, but it's constrained by all the other intelligences in the environment.

andrepd 10y ago

> neurons are enormous and filled with tons of useless junk that isn't used for computation I just want to point out that some recent research indicates that this might not actually be true. Single neurons may be more complex than we thought since researchers managed to extract significant and complex functionality from single neurons (!). Not to mention glia seem to be important for cognition, and not just glue as we thought... So perhaps not as wasteful and kludgy as we might think :)

jacquesm 10y ago

> The human brain is only the very first intelligence to evolve. That may not even be true, we're just not smart enough to make the call one way or the other. Dolphins come to mind, as well as several other creatures (Squid, Apes). The fact that we can't rule it out is in a way proof that maybe we're not as smart as we would like to think we are.

ankurdhama 10y ago

It is always the case that Superhuman AI proponents comes up with the argument that "there is nothing magical about human brain". Yes, everybody agrees about that, even people who oppose Superhuman AI and are sane enough to not evoke mystical powers argument. The problem is: 1. Understand brain and simulate it to get intelligence. Sounds simple right? How about simulating a nuclear reaction, which we already understands, on my computer and generating nuclear power? 2. Once you understand something you can create it. This is a fallacy, a big one. We understand solar system, lets create one, whats the problem? 3. Simulating a brain will give you a brain, with all its limitations and problems that we have with human brain. Oh then we can tweak it to make more intelligent? Sorry you cant do that without changing the whole model completely, in which case it will no longer be a "brain".

Houshalter 10y ago
If you simulate a nuclear reaction you get... maybe a nice video of atoms smashing together? If you simulate a brain you get an intelligent computer program. Same with the solar system. We can create simulated solar systems. We will probably be able to make simulated brains. What is your point? Alright, assuming the first AI even is a simulated brain (I don't see why we can't invent intelligence from first principles first.) We could definitely tweak it. We know of drugs like amphetamines that enhance human ability. That's like Stone Age tech compared to what's possible if we had unlimited control over every neuron in the entire brain. Not to mention just adding more neurons and making a larger brain. This is just touching on what's possible, I could go on for ages on possible improvements.
- ankurdhama 10y ago
  My point regarding the simulation argument is that there is a difference between computational simulation and physical simulation.
  - danidiaz 10y ago
    If I simulate a map I get a map. Are minds like maps, or like nuclear reactions?

interfixus 10y ago

Maybe, maybe not. Your opinion is based on assumptions, just like mine and everybody else's. Or at least I assume so :-/ When somebody comes up with a reasonable, detailed model of how my memories are stored (just to name an example), I shall once again start paying close attention to the whole AI field.

intended 10y ago

This is exactly the kind of blind non scientific belief that the article is decrying. There is nothing magical about anything. There is however a bunch of unkowns, and a lot of knowns that point in directions away from singularity babble. This is exactly the point of the article - that we aren't going to a singularity, we are going towards a "Cambrian explosion"

Ngunyan 10y ago

> The human brain is only the very first intelligence to evolve. What other intelligence evolved, and in what sense human brain is first in evolution?

TeMPOraL 10y ago
s/first/first smart enough to invent science/. We've seen no other creatures on Earth being able to grow beyond using basic tools. But this also somewhat implies (which is GP's point) that we're close to the dumbest possible mind that evolution could make that could still develop science. Or think of it as a crude MVP that ended up being a production system.
- Ngunyan 10y ago
  > s/first/first smart enough to invent science/. To claim something as first, there must be others in reality to have followed it. If there is no second, there would be no first. Is there a second intelligence to have invented science, or we are the only ones?
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Intelligence as an optimization process works orders of magnitude faster than biological evolution. We've dominated the optimization happening on this planet. If we were to stop doing technology and wait a million years, then maybe we'd see a second species develop comparable intelligence.

restalis 10y ago

"communication in the brain is done with chemical signals that are orders of magnitude slower than electricity and use much more energy" A nitpick: the neurons actually do use electricity to send signals and (looking at the neuronal model in its history¹) it actually evolved to send signals along as fast as it could. The chemical component, AFAIK, is the physical implementation for memory, so this is kind of the storage class regarding operation performance. Overall though, I agree that our cerebral organ may not be the apogee of computational performance. ¹ As far as I remember, the dinosaur neurons didn't had myelin, which for some large animals caused non-trivial sensorial delay.