5 ms·

The idea of the singularity is based upon the idea of recursive self improvement. I'm not sure how your claims are relevant.

by gfodor 8y ago

leesec 8y ago
I think (human)intelligence almost guarantees recursive self improvement; thus, if AGI = human intelligence or greater, it would also guarantee recursive self improvement.
- gfodor 8y ago
  The inverse case seems more likely, where non-human equivalent intelligence becomes sufficient to recursively self improve to superintelligence. Both the before and after states seem relatively unrelated to human intelligence, which is one arbitrary (and, likely uninteresting) point in what I would assume is a many dimensional space to quantify intelligence.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >I think (human)intelligence almost guarantees recursive self improvement That's quite a wide claim, seeing that we haven't seen much "recursive self improvement".
drb91 8y ago
It’d be a lot easier to believe not coming from a company selling ads. Google would be far more of a self improvement tool if it were not incentivized to sell you things you don’t want.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  I mean Kurzweil has found a home at Google but he has been talking about the singularity for far longer afaik.
  - drb91 8y ago
    He’s also been wrong his entire life. There’s a reason Google hired him: to make AI look good, despite being a near meaningless term. Edit: diction.
    - tim333 8y ago
      He predicted computers beating humans at chess by 2000 and it happened in 97 so sometimes he's not that far off.
      - drb91 8y ago
        I would like to claim I thought similarly, but that’s such a milquetoast claim I don’t think anyone would remember. Chess is simply a search problem, trivially scalable if you just throw cash at the problem.
        TaylorAlexander 8y ago
        It was not viewed as so obviously tractable at the time. In the future, solving the game of Go will seem easy too, but it was unknown just a few years ago if we would ever solve it.
        drb91 8y ago
        Perhaps that’s true. I also don’t see many claims with reason that go or chess is somehow a uniquely difficult problem, especially given the language turn of philosophy. NLP is the major problem moving forward with human intelligence, and this was known long before deep blue. People who talk otherwise are hyping milestones along the way, and neither chess nor go deal at all with semiotics. I’d expect computers to best us (at some investment cost) at virtually all games moving forward except writing funny limericks. We can always have our grandmasters or whatever train the computer with their own heuristics, which recalls the paranoia of grandmasters decades ago. We understand computers better now—if you can formalize the game, the computer can beat you. In many ways, programming is already the formalization of a human space problem. Ai will likely take more role in implementation in the future, but I can’t imagine an AI that does the formalization itself.
marricks 8y ago
Recursive self improvement in which field of intelligence? Does getting better and better pattern matching eventually lead to human level intelligence? Does improving pattern matching accelerate our ability at improving pattern matching even? We can solve any board game now with alpha-zero but will that necessarily improve how fast we develop other types of intelligence? I used to be in Rays camp but my girlfriend got into Computational Neuroscience and I talked with her and her colleagues got the impression very very few people think we’re close to general intelligence. Human intelligence is a lot of things put together and we may get better at pieces but we don’t even have all the pieces and when we do try to put them together it doesn’t work. Look at criticisms of Europe’s Himan Brian project[1] (another example I had seems to be outdated), some believe we don’t understand too much to even begin to attempt modeling the brain. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project
- gfodor 8y ago
  I don't see why people care about human intelligence as some kind of benchmark. It seems to me that using human intelligence as a framing is a poor mental model for making comparisons or predictions. I see no reason to believe AI capabilities will be modulated by human intellectual capacities. When AI falls short of human capacities for a given set of tasks or capabilities it's likely to fall way short, and when it isn't it's likely to be way more capable. In any case I wish human intelligence would be dropped from the language we use to talk about AI, it seems similar to talking about birds all the time when discussing aviation.
  - astazangasta 8y ago
    Because meaning is defined by humans; there is no other conceivable definition of "meaning". An AI that acts in some non-human fashion is no better than random noise.
  - emiliobumachar 8y ago
    That's because surpassing human general intelligence in any non-negligible amount is dangerous to humans.
Symmetry 8y ago
There are actually a bunch of different ideas that all go under the "singularity" label making the term fairly confusing. You describe one. Another is the idea that if AIs start designing computers you'll have a positive feedback loop in improvements in computer speed. Another is that we can't predict the actions of a smarter-than-human intelligence. And then there's Kurzweil's idea that progress tends to speed up and at some point we call it the Singularity for some reason. I just wanted to point this out because I've seen a number of arguments caused by people using the same words for very different ideas of "the singularity" without realizing it.

The idea of the singularity is based upon the idea of recursive self improvement. I'm not sure how your claims are relevant.

by gfodor 8y ago

The idea of the singularity is based upon the idea of recursive self improvement. I'm not sure how your claims are relevant.

leesec 8y ago

I think (human)intelligence almost guarantees recursive self improvement; thus, if AGI = human intelligence or greater, it would also guarantee recursive self improvement.

gfodor 8y ago
The inverse case seems more likely, where non-human equivalent intelligence becomes sufficient to recursively self improve to superintelligence. Both the before and after states seem relatively unrelated to human intelligence, which is one arbitrary (and, likely uninteresting) point in what I would assume is a many dimensional space to quantify intelligence.
coldtea 8y ago
>I think (human)intelligence almost guarantees recursive self improvement That's quite a wide claim, seeing that we haven't seen much "recursive self improvement".

drb91 8y ago

It’d be a lot easier to believe not coming from a company selling ads. Google would be far more of a self improvement tool if it were not incentivized to sell you things you don’t want.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
I mean Kurzweil has found a home at Google but he has been talking about the singularity for far longer afaik.
- drb91 8y ago
  He’s also been wrong his entire life. There’s a reason Google hired him: to make AI look good, despite being a near meaningless term. Edit: diction.
  - tim333 8y ago
    He predicted computers beating humans at chess by 2000 and it happened in 97 so sometimes he's not that far off.
    - drb91 8y ago
      I would like to claim I thought similarly, but that’s such a milquetoast claim I don’t think anyone would remember. Chess is simply a search problem, trivially scalable if you just throw cash at the problem.
      - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
        It was not viewed as so obviously tractable at the time. In the future, solving the game of Go will seem easy too, but it was unknown just a few years ago if we would ever solve it.
        drb91 8y ago
        Perhaps that’s true. I also don’t see many claims with reason that go or chess is somehow a uniquely difficult problem, especially given the language turn of philosophy. NLP is the major problem moving forward with human intelligence, and this was known long before deep blue. People who talk otherwise are hyping milestones along the way, and neither chess nor go deal at all with semiotics. I’d expect computers to best us (at some investment cost) at virtually all games moving forward except writing funny limericks. We can always have our grandmasters or whatever train the computer with their own heuristics, which recalls the paranoia of grandmasters decades ago. We understand computers better now—if you can formalize the game, the computer can beat you. In many ways, programming is already the formalization of a human space problem. Ai will likely take more role in implementation in the future, but I can’t imagine an AI that does the formalization itself.

marricks 8y ago

Recursive self improvement in which field of intelligence? Does getting better and better pattern matching eventually lead to human level intelligence? Does improving pattern matching accelerate our ability at improving pattern matching even? We can solve any board game now with alpha-zero but will that necessarily improve how fast we develop other types of intelligence? I used to be in Rays camp but my girlfriend got into Computational Neuroscience and I talked with her and her colleagues got the impression very very few people think we’re close to general intelligence. Human intelligence is a lot of things put together and we may get better at pieces but we don’t even have all the pieces and when we do try to put them together it doesn’t work. Look at criticisms of Europe’s Himan Brian project[1] (another example I had seems to be outdated), some believe we don’t understand too much to even begin to attempt modeling the brain. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project

gfodor 8y ago
I don't see why people care about human intelligence as some kind of benchmark. It seems to me that using human intelligence as a framing is a poor mental model for making comparisons or predictions. I see no reason to believe AI capabilities will be modulated by human intellectual capacities. When AI falls short of human capacities for a given set of tasks or capabilities it's likely to fall way short, and when it isn't it's likely to be way more capable. In any case I wish human intelligence would be dropped from the language we use to talk about AI, it seems similar to talking about birds all the time when discussing aviation.
- astazangasta 8y ago
  Because meaning is defined by humans; there is no other conceivable definition of "meaning". An AI that acts in some non-human fashion is no better than random noise.
- emiliobumachar 8y ago
  That's because surpassing human general intelligence in any non-negligible amount is dangerous to humans.

Symmetry 8y ago

There are actually a bunch of different ideas that all go under the "singularity" label making the term fairly confusing. You describe one. Another is the idea that if AIs start designing computers you'll have a positive feedback loop in improvements in computer speed. Another is that we can't predict the actions of a smarter-than-human intelligence. And then there's Kurzweil's idea that progress tends to speed up and at some point we call it the Singularity for some reason. I just wanted to point this out because I've seen a number of arguments caused by people using the same words for very different ideas of "the singularity" without realizing it.