6 ms·

The Singularity is Far

37 points by __ 18y ago

eru 18y ago
I mis-read "The Singularity is Fair" at first. I am slightly disappointed. An article about distributional aspects of ever-increasing technological progress would have been interesting.
ars 18y ago
Personally I believe the singularity will never happen. For one reason: The entire premise of the singularity is that humans will be able to invent a machine that is smarter than them. Or at the very least invent a machine that can invent another machine smarter than itself. I think that premise is simply wrong. I think it's impossible. Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI. No one has any idea how to program an AI - no matter the computing speed. Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today - why would you think we can do one tomorrow? One argument is basically evolutionary design - let the machine invent itself. The big problem with that is no one even knows how to create an algorithm to measure smartness! If you can't create a fitness function, you can never create an evolutionary design. So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.
- technoguyrob 18y ago
  So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers. One of Kurzweil's really strong points was to treat "AI" as a very loose term. That is, it could for example mean replacing every human neuron with a manmade (e.g., silicon) counterpart. This has already been done on a small scale in rats (I can't find the reference, but it's in his book). "Upgrading humanity" IS artificial intelligence if you take artificial to be functionally equivalent to manmade: man has "upgraded" himself, and hence created something artificially intelligent.
- swombat 18y ago
  There are many ways to invent. Intentional design is just one of them, and so far the least effective one. Many great discoveries in fields like medicine and biology were by accident and enlightened stabs in the dark, not by careful prediction, modeling and subsequent measurement. Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI. If you had given doctors around then 1920s an infinite budget and armies of test subject, they would still not have been able to even propose an idea for a working wide-spectrum anti-bacterial pill to vanquish most of that age's deadliest diseases. Yet, by accident, they stumbled on penicillin, and did beat out all those diseases. Accident is a powerful force. So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers. The singularity doesn't have to come through pure-silicon computing. If we enhance human intelligence enough, we get a similar result.
  - ars 18y ago
    You missed the point with your example of anti-bacterial pill. It's not the execution that is missing with AI, it's the ideas. In 1920 you most certainly can come up with the idea of killing bacteria by eating something - people did it every day! Sure they had no idea if it works, or why it works, or what to eat. But the basic idea: eat something and make the illness go away was there. There are no ideas in AI. AI reaserchers these days are working on sub-problems, vision recognition, speech, pretending to reply to someone, but none of them have any ideas on how to make AI work. They just hope that by putting all these things together something will come out - and they will probably be able to make a robot that is a smart as a dog for example. But they have no ideas for how to program creativity - no one does.
    - swombat 18y ago
      I'm afraid you're the one who's missing the point. People in the 1920's weren't so used to eating something and making diseases go away. Diseases were accepted as a fact of life (or rather death), and if you had told someone around that time that within a few decades they'd be able to swallow a little pill and cure most of the deadliest diseases of that time, they'd have laughed at your face and considered you a hopeless optimist. Imagine someone came up to you today and suggested that in 20 years' time you can get a jab that will protect you from cancer, aids, degenerative diseases, heart disease, cholesterol problems, baldness, and erectile dysfunction all at once - you'd laugh at them and call them a spammer. Yet the biotech and nanotech revolutions are just around the corner and who knows, they might bring just that, though anyone who believes that they will is indeed very optimistic. AI researchers might be working on sub-problems, but who's to say that they won't stumble on a bigger solution while working on those sub problems? And, again, you're missing the point even more by failing to see that AI is not the only path to a singularity. Enhancing human intelligence can be just as effective. If we create "trans-humans" who are vastly more intelligent than we are, we still get a singularity. We can do that biologically, cybernetically... etc.
- smanek 18y ago
  Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today That's kind of silly. First of all, the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect) says we are getting smarter in a very real sense. Second, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Today, we're taught what great men had to struggle for 50 years ago - so each new great man will get a little further. A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago. Who knows what another 50 years will bring?
  - cglee 18y ago
    We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Disagree. Pretty soon, you're going to have to spend 40 years in specialized schooling just to even try to understand where the giants before us went, let alone ended. Human knowledge only seems sequential, but I don't think it is. The fact that archeologists are continually surprised by how advanced the "ancients" were shows how much knowledge humanity has lost and reinvented (or in some cases, not).
    - technoguyrob 18y ago
      Not if you have silicon neurons that can process information a hundred times faster (since they use electromagnetic signals, not chemical agents, to pass information)! ;-) But I beg the question... EDIT: I sort of disagree with you. I'm in graduate school right now, and 90% of a modern mathematician's life is spent on keeping up with the progress of others, particularly in the last 50 years. That is true. However, over time, we also filter out the unimportant stuff. While automorphic forms may be an important field today so that we can bring in fresh minds to try to tackle the Langlands Program, once that is solved there won't be as much of an emphasis. I knew "more" calculus than Isaac Newton when I was 12 in the sense that I had learned things like Stoke's theorem that he had not even known about, but Newton's knowledge was much more of a mess, as well. The stuff you learn from textbooks is not how researchers originally discovered things. Think of the analogy of starting a fresh startup codebase that looks horrible, but becomes very polished and clean after several refactorings; it may take weeks to introduce a person to the former codebase, but for the latter it may only take a good one-hour tutorial.
- gus_massa 18y ago
  You don't have to design the machine. Once you have enough computer power, you can use genetic algorithms (or another method). Con: It can be slow. Pro: It worked at least once.
  - JulianMorrison 18y ago
    Ugh, no. You would just create a super-parasite. Evolution is parsimonious. You would need to know how to build a mind the simple way in order to direct evolution down just that one path that leads to minds - and meanwhile you'd have cruelly killed millions of by-then thinking feeling persons who didn't quite measure up. And who knows what other tendencies you'd have created aside from intelligence? The whole thing would be a nightmare.
  - ars 18y ago
    That only works if you have a fitness function. No one does.
    - gus_massa 18y ago
      No one has a fitness function for a search interface. But Google does a lot of A/B tests and the interface evolve. I think that they are not using random mutations in the code. They design the "mutations". But the important point is that they don't have a theoretical fitness function.
      - ars 18y ago
        Of course they have a fitness function! What do you think an A/B test IS? It's a fitness function!
- dejb 18y ago
  Do you believe in evolution? The process of human evolution is a tale of smarter and smarter animals coming from less intellegent ones. Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.
  - aswanson 18y ago
    I think his chief exception is the timetable laid out. He is not saying he doesn't believe in evolution. He disagress with someone's extrapolation, that is all.
    - dejb 18y ago
      I was replying to a comment not the parent post. The one where the guy proposed that it would be impossible for humans to create anything smarter than ourselves. Sometimes the indentation on comments can be a little tough to keep up with.
  - tom_rath 18y ago
    No, the process of human evolution is a tale of organisms adapting to their environment. There is no guarantee that human beings will evolve into something more intelligent. If the average person is granted the ability to manufacture their own reality without any need for earthy concerns, one might think evolutionary forces would push people into becoming marginally intelligent beings focused on decadence.
    - dejb 18y ago
      No there is no guarantee. However in the past it is safe to say that, on average, the human evolutionary path involved an increase in intelligence. Whether that is 'the tale' I will leave to poetic license. I did this to disprove the notion that beings could not produce beings of greater intelligence in the parent post. To disprove a general statement you only have to show one contrary instance. Here is a link you may find useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic
      - 18y ago
- JulianMorrison 18y ago
  I don't agree we can't build a machine that out-thinks us, because the early iterations at least would be specialist self-improvement tools - NOT general intelligence. Glorified whole-program optimizers. AI needs to be built from a theory of mind and a theory of intelligence - but there is reason for hope, as a combination of neuroscience and mathematics (cf: AIXI) is attacking this question. AI also needs to be built from a theory of "friendliness" (goals compatible with humanity) and there are people (cf: SIAI) working on this. Your message strikes me as having the "mankind will never achieve heavier-than-air flight" quality. (As opposed to the "mankind will never exceed lightspeed" quality - there is no fundamental physics in the way.)
  - aswanson 18y ago
    ...there is no fundamental physics in the way He didn't say that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297576
- sown 18y ago
  So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers. I thought that was the entire point.
- 13ren 18y ago
  I agree, in that I think we can't make a machine that is fundamentally smarter than us. But I think it's possible to create a machine that is as smart as a human. Now, since some human beings seem to be smarter than others, I think it's possible to build a machine that is closer to the "smart" end. And, of course, with the help of such machines, we will be able to do this better and better (as with knowledge and technology in general). Therefore, we could build many Einstein-level intelligences (or a bit better, since he wasn't perfect). Behind this, my key point is that "more intelligence" is an illusion. Einstein was a function of his times (there was the unexplained lack of motion through the ether, for one thing) and, like Newton, saw further than most because he SOTSOG. He wasn't fundamentally smarter than you - though he might have been able to keep track of more ideas than you, and track their relations to other ideas, and he might have been more free of convention (the humility to admit he didn't know, and the arrogance that you don't either), and more dedicated than you. Ie. he was probably smarter, but not fundamentally. Being able to accept that you don't know, and therefore to be open to see, is the important thing. Not intelligence.
  - eru 18y ago
    We could still build faster Einsteins.
    - 13ren 18y ago
      Yes, and more of them. But they're not fundamentally smarter than us; it's just another technology (which is a great thing).
      - eru 18y ago
        And cheaper Einsteins.
  - byrneseyeview 18y ago
    So if we can have something that is just like the person who invents an equal-to-humanity intelligence, but operating a hundred times faster, with perfect recall, and able to shut down senses or arbitrarily reorder goals, you don't think we could tell this being "Do what your meatspace predecessor did, approximately" and have something even faster, in less time than the original took? And that this process couldn't be repeated?
marvin 18y ago
This essay is not very well written. The author's points are pretty hard to grasp, and it's even harder to see how they support his central point. I'll just go over them: -No civilization has been more advanced than ours. There is no historical reason to claim that we are about to "return to normality". +Predicting future technological development has (almost) never worked. +We might in the future find out that Kurzweil's ideas were bad. -> History is overflowing with examples of this. -"Suppose that all over the universe, civilizations arise and continue growing exponentially until they exhaust their planets’ resources and kill themselves out. [...] I wish reading the news each morning furnished me with more reasons not to be haunted by this vision of existence". -> Suppose instead that reality is just a dream, and you are the only conscious mind in existence. There is little reason to believe any of this. And (ad hominem alert) no doomsayer has ever been right, although the profession always has a comfortable number of practitioners. -"AI hasn't made any progress". -> No one has ever sent anything into orbit, so it might be impossible. -"There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster". -> Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time? +"Yet while I believe that the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s near". -> Yes, specific technological predictions have never been very successful. We will probably have some of these technologies by 2045, and also some we weren't able to think of.
- hhm 18y ago
  Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time? That's correct. I'm sure flies and dogs are Turing machines as much as we are (if we are), yet we are considered to be much more intelligent beings than both of them. A computer capable of a level of intelligence as big to us, as we are to a dog, would be pretty impressive. But I think he's not talking about that, as he says: The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs, but if the singularity mind was bigger than us, but of the same nature, we would be able to compute it with pencil and paper, or in a computer, and to analyze it to see how it works (very slowly, as a Turing machine).
hhm 18y ago
I liked this description of our current world: I see a world that really did change dramatically over the last century, but where progress on many fronts (like transportation and energy) seems to have slowed down rather than sped up; a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans, and supercharging its climate; a world where technology is often powerless to solve the most basic problems, millions continue to die for trivial reasons, and democracy isn’t even clearly winning out over despotism; a world that finally has a communications network with a decent search engine but that still hasn’t emerged from the tribalism and ignorance of the Pleistocene. We are a world in great deficit excepting for: a) Internet, b) Google. Wow!
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
I'm a singularitarian, but I think it's going to be 500-1000 years. I also think it's going to be close call with the doomsday scenario. I took special note of the closing remarks: "...before we transcend the human condition and upload our brains to computers, a reasonable first step might be to bring the 17th-century Enlightenment to the 98% of the world that still hasn’t gotten the message..."
- schtog 18y ago
  Where do you get those numbers from? I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses about the state of the world so far into the future. You just mean it is a hell of a lot longer than 20-30 years before we are there?
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    "I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses " Really? 3 Okay. Let's try it again. 42 Looks to me like guessing is a pretty easy thing to do. Perhaps you were looking for some kind of formula? As if a piece of math would make you more comfortable about even 5 years from now? I think you're taking the underlying logic to the singularity a little too literally. It's all general trends with general statements to back them up. Wonderful piece of speculation, which I agree with. But it ain't science. It ain't logic. Kurzweil just speculates using a lot of mathematics. I grok it. But I'm not selling my house to buy a bunch of EverReady batteries to power my nanobot Zoot suit any time soon. It's a guess. Get over it. It's all guessing.
    - schtog 18y ago
      What I said: "I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses about the state of the world so far into the future." You quoted as: "I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses " Not the same...Try to keep an honest debate, shall we? --- No on the contrary I am not taking it literally but with a big grain of salt. Of couse there is guessing. But there are educated guesses and blurbs. Your guess is pointless, it has no validity at all. You could just as well say "blahaba" because it is not based on anything(at least it doesn't seem to be).
np 18y ago
The first singularity has already happened - it happened the moment human beings started to create perpetuating social structures. A corporation, a society, a nation, a community are all instances of gestalt intelligence.
mynameishere 18y ago
a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans... A great example of how a smart person, and a decent writer, can still drive an essay into inane irrelevancy when trying to wrap up with a snappy conclusion. No--the problems associated with agricultural runoff and AI tech are completely different, have completely different economic contexts, and should never be in the same article. I'm surprised the last sentence wasn't "Vote for Obama!"
- ericb 18y ago
  You took your smart, decent, criticism and made it inane and irrelevant with an ad hominem attack as your snappy conclusion. You related the singularity to this year's US Presidential candidates, two topics that have completely different contexts. Please tell me the irony was intentional... :-)
  - ryanwaggoner 18y ago
    Actually, the author says this in the first paragraph: "...nor do they obviate the need to address mundane matters such as war, poverty, disease, climate change, and helping Democrats win elections." So I'd say that it was a fair statement by the commenter above.
    - ericb 18y ago
      Missed that. My mistake.
- willchang 18y ago
  One of the points of the article seemed to have missed you. If the singularity is possible, there is still the question of whether humanity will go extinct first. At some point, AI researchers are going to have trouble breathing Earth's atmosphere -- or do AI researchers not breath air like the rest of us?
  - DabAsteroid 18y ago
zandorg 18y ago
I studied AI at University, and it was mostly about search. I learned Prolog, which was a real eye-opener about functions that can find paths backwards, a kind of reverse search. I also learned about Bayes, and have come up with an algorithm (myself) which is similiar to Bayes, but it's top secret at the moment.
- sown 18y ago
  There is a bit of a renaissance going on within some arcane fields of AI. There is work underway to try to create a real thinking machine, with the idea that we have come a long way in our understanding about neuroscience, etc.
acgourley 18y ago
The essay seems directed against a straw man. The author implies that because people think a singularity is near they are somehow expending energy to bring it to fruition instead of spending energy on what he feels to be more important problems. He would have a valid target if he was only talking about a small number of people involved in projects like the singularity institute, but he seems to be aiming wider. He even acknowledges that the people working at the institute are justified in the same way people worrying about asteroid collisions are justified. So who is he criticizing, then? Who are these people who are wasting energy chasing a singularity instead of solving modern problems? The only other targets I can think of are scientists and engineers moving their respective fields up the exponential, but they are doing their respective work precisely because of current problems in the world, not because of some far off possibility.
iuguy 18y ago
The first half of the last century was defined by physics, the latter by chemistry. The first part of this century appears to see technological advances at simlar rates on the biological scale. We're still making headway in physics and chemistry, but it's in the fields of genetics, stem cell research and so on where we're doing things that were unthinkable less than two decades ago. Whilst I agree that the problems with AI are more due to a lack of knowledge of how to implement ratherh than a limitation of current technology (i.e. our approach sucks rather than the tech), I believe that our singularity will arrive when we stop having to think about how to translate the carbon wetware to silicon hardware.
lakeeffect 18y ago
have none of you seen the thirteenth floor, we are already living singularity.
stcredzero 18y ago
How about, "The Singularity does a Grover Impression?" "Near!...Far!...Near!...Far!..."

37 points by __ 18y ago

eru 18y ago

I mis-read "The Singularity is Fair" at first. I am slightly disappointed. An article about distributional aspects of ever-increasing technological progress would have been interesting.

ars 18y ago

Personally I believe the singularity will never happen. For one reason: The entire premise of the singularity is that humans will be able to invent a machine that is smarter than them. Or at the very least invent a machine that can invent another machine smarter than itself. I think that premise is simply wrong. I think it's impossible. Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI. No one has any idea how to program an AI - no matter the computing speed. Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today - why would you think we can do one tomorrow? One argument is basically evolutionary design - let the machine invent itself. The big problem with that is no one even knows how to create an algorithm to measure smartness! If you can't create a fitness function, you can never create an evolutionary design. So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers.

technoguyrob 18y ago
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers. One of Kurzweil's really strong points was to treat "AI" as a very loose term. That is, it could for example mean replacing every human neuron with a manmade (e.g., silicon) counterpart. This has already been done on a small scale in rats (I can't find the reference, but it's in his book). "Upgrading humanity" IS artificial intelligence if you take artificial to be functionally equivalent to manmade: man has "upgraded" himself, and hence created something artificially intelligent.
swombat 18y ago
There are many ways to invent. Intentional design is just one of them, and so far the least effective one. Many great discoveries in fields like medicine and biology were by accident and enlightened stabs in the dark, not by careful prediction, modeling and subsequent measurement. Let's assume you give the smartest people on earth an unlimited budget and computing power. None of them will be able to even propose an idea for a working AI. If you had given doctors around then 1920s an infinite budget and armies of test subject, they would still not have been able to even propose an idea for a working wide-spectrum anti-bacterial pill to vanquish most of that age's deadliest diseases. Yet, by accident, they stumbled on penicillin, and did beat out all those diseases. Accident is a powerful force. So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers. The singularity doesn't have to come through pure-silicon computing. If we enhance human intelligence enough, we get a similar result.
- ars 18y ago
  You missed the point with your example of anti-bacterial pill. It's not the execution that is missing with AI, it's the ideas. In 1920 you most certainly can come up with the idea of killing bacteria by eating something - people did it every day! Sure they had no idea if it works, or why it works, or what to eat. But the basic idea: eat something and make the illness go away was there. There are no ideas in AI. AI reaserchers these days are working on sub-problems, vision recognition, speech, pretending to reply to someone, but none of them have any ideas on how to make AI work. They just hope that by putting all these things together something will come out - and they will probably be able to make a robot that is a smart as a dog for example. But they have no ideas for how to program creativity - no one does.
  - swombat 18y ago
    I'm afraid you're the one who's missing the point. People in the 1920's weren't so used to eating something and making diseases go away. Diseases were accepted as a fact of life (or rather death), and if you had told someone around that time that within a few decades they'd be able to swallow a little pill and cure most of the deadliest diseases of that time, they'd have laughed at your face and considered you a hopeless optimist. Imagine someone came up to you today and suggested that in 20 years' time you can get a jab that will protect you from cancer, aids, degenerative diseases, heart disease, cholesterol problems, baldness, and erectile dysfunction all at once - you'd laugh at them and call them a spammer. Yet the biotech and nanotech revolutions are just around the corner and who knows, they might bring just that, though anyone who believes that they will is indeed very optimistic. AI researchers might be working on sub-problems, but who's to say that they won't stumble on a bigger solution while working on those sub problems? And, again, you're missing the point even more by failing to see that AI is not the only path to a singularity. Enhancing human intelligence can be just as effective. If we create "trans-humans" who are vastly more intelligent than we are, we still get a singularity. We can do that biologically, cybernetically... etc.
smanek 18y ago
Humans are not getting smarter. If we can't even propose an idea for an AI today That's kind of silly. First of all, the Flynn Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flynn_Effect) says we are getting smarter in a very real sense. Second, we stand on the shoulders of giants. We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Today, we're taught what great men had to struggle for 50 years ago - so each new great man will get a little further. A 100 years ago we couldn't propose an idea to land a man on the moon - yet we could be done 50 years ago. Who knows what another 50 years will bring?
- cglee 18y ago
  We each get to start where the greatest minds before us ended. Disagree. Pretty soon, you're going to have to spend 40 years in specialized schooling just to even try to understand where the giants before us went, let alone ended. Human knowledge only seems sequential, but I don't think it is. The fact that archeologists are continually surprised by how advanced the "ancients" were shows how much knowledge humanity has lost and reinvented (or in some cases, not).
  - technoguyrob 18y ago
    Not if you have silicon neurons that can process information a hundred times faster (since they use electromagnetic signals, not chemical agents, to pass information)! ;-) But I beg the question... EDIT: I sort of disagree with you. I'm in graduate school right now, and 90% of a modern mathematician's life is spent on keeping up with the progress of others, particularly in the last 50 years. That is true. However, over time, we also filter out the unimportant stuff. While automorphic forms may be an important field today so that we can bring in fresh minds to try to tackle the Langlands Program, once that is solved there won't be as much of an emphasis. I knew "more" calculus than Isaac Newton when I was 12 in the sense that I had learned things like Stoke's theorem that he had not even known about, but Newton's knowledge was much more of a mess, as well. The stuff you learn from textbooks is not how researchers originally discovered things. Think of the analogy of starting a fresh startup codebase that looks horrible, but becomes very polished and clean after several refactorings; it may take weeks to introduce a person to the former codebase, but for the latter it may only take a good one-hour tutorial.
gus_massa 18y ago
You don't have to design the machine. Once you have enough computer power, you can use genetic algorithms (or another method). Con: It can be slow. Pro: It worked at least once.
- JulianMorrison 18y ago
  Ugh, no. You would just create a super-parasite. Evolution is parsimonious. You would need to know how to build a mind the simple way in order to direct evolution down just that one path that leads to minds - and meanwhile you'd have cruelly killed millions of by-then thinking feeling persons who didn't quite measure up. And who knows what other tendencies you'd have created aside from intelligence? The whole thing would be a nightmare.
- ars 18y ago
  That only works if you have a fitness function. No one does.
  - gus_massa 18y ago
    No one has a fitness function for a search interface. But Google does a lot of A/B tests and the interface evolve. I think that they are not using random mutations in the code. They design the "mutations". But the important point is that they don't have a theoretical fitness function.
    - ars 18y ago
      Of course they have a fitness function! What do you think an A/B test IS? It's a fitness function!
dejb 18y ago
Do you believe in evolution? The process of human evolution is a tale of smarter and smarter animals coming from less intellegent ones. Also Humans can invent chess algorithms that can beat the best chess player in the world.
- aswanson 18y ago
  I think his chief exception is the timetable laid out. He is not saying he doesn't believe in evolution. He disagress with someone's extrapolation, that is all.
  - dejb 18y ago
    I was replying to a comment not the parent post. The one where the guy proposed that it would be impossible for humans to create anything smarter than ourselves. Sometimes the indentation on comments can be a little tough to keep up with.
- tom_rath 18y ago
  No, the process of human evolution is a tale of organisms adapting to their environment. There is no guarantee that human beings will evolve into something more intelligent. If the average person is granted the ability to manufacture their own reality without any need for earthy concerns, one might think evolutionary forces would push people into becoming marginally intelligent beings focused on decadence.
  - dejb 18y ago
    No there is no guarantee. However in the past it is safe to say that, on average, the human evolutionary path involved an increase in intelligence. Whether that is 'the tale' I will leave to poetic license. I did this to disprove the notion that beings could not produce beings of greater intelligence in the parent post. To disprove a general statement you only have to show one contrary instance. Here is a link you may find useful http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic
    - 18y ago
JulianMorrison 18y ago
I don't agree we can't build a machine that out-thinks us, because the early iterations at least would be specialist self-improvement tools - NOT general intelligence. Glorified whole-program optimizers. AI needs to be built from a theory of mind and a theory of intelligence - but there is reason for hope, as a combination of neuroscience and mathematics (cf: AIXI) is attacking this question. AI also needs to be built from a theory of "friendliness" (goals compatible with humanity) and there are people (cf: SIAI) working on this. Your message strikes me as having the "mankind will never achieve heavier-than-air flight" quality. (As opposed to the "mankind will never exceed lightspeed" quality - there is no fundamental physics in the way.)
- aswanson 18y ago
  ...there is no fundamental physics in the way He didn't say that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297576 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=297576
sown 18y ago
So don't wait for the singularity - it's not coming. Work on upgrading humanity, not computers. I thought that was the entire point.
13ren 18y ago
I agree, in that I think we can't make a machine that is fundamentally smarter than us. But I think it's possible to create a machine that is as smart as a human. Now, since some human beings seem to be smarter than others, I think it's possible to build a machine that is closer to the "smart" end. And, of course, with the help of such machines, we will be able to do this better and better (as with knowledge and technology in general). Therefore, we could build many Einstein-level intelligences (or a bit better, since he wasn't perfect). Behind this, my key point is that "more intelligence" is an illusion. Einstein was a function of his times (there was the unexplained lack of motion through the ether, for one thing) and, like Newton, saw further than most because he SOTSOG. He wasn't fundamentally smarter than you - though he might have been able to keep track of more ideas than you, and track their relations to other ideas, and he might have been more free of convention (the humility to admit he didn't know, and the arrogance that you don't either), and more dedicated than you. Ie. he was probably smarter, but not fundamentally. Being able to accept that you don't know, and therefore to be open to see, is the important thing. Not intelligence.
- eru 18y ago
  We could still build faster Einsteins.
  - 13ren 18y ago
    Yes, and more of them. But they're not fundamentally smarter than us; it's just another technology (which is a great thing).
    - eru 18y ago
      And cheaper Einsteins.
- byrneseyeview 18y ago
  So if we can have something that is just like the person who invents an equal-to-humanity intelligence, but operating a hundred times faster, with perfect recall, and able to shut down senses or arbitrarily reorder goals, you don't think we could tell this being "Do what your meatspace predecessor did, approximately" and have something even faster, in less time than the original took? And that this process couldn't be repeated?

marvin 18y ago

This essay is not very well written. The author's points are pretty hard to grasp, and it's even harder to see how they support his central point. I'll just go over them: -No civilization has been more advanced than ours. There is no historical reason to claim that we are about to "return to normality". +Predicting future technological development has (almost) never worked. +We might in the future find out that Kurzweil's ideas were bad. -> History is overflowing with examples of this. -"Suppose that all over the universe, civilizations arise and continue growing exponentially until they exhaust their planets’ resources and kill themselves out. [...] I wish reading the news each morning furnished me with more reasons not to be haunted by this vision of existence". -> Suppose instead that reality is just a dream, and you are the only conscious mind in existence. There is little reason to believe any of this. And (ad hominem alert) no doomsayer has ever been right, although the profession always has a comfortable number of practitioners. -"AI hasn't made any progress". -> No one has ever sent anything into orbit, so it might be impossible. -"There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster". -> Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time? +"Yet while I believe that the latter kind of singularity is possible, I’m not at all convinced of Kurzweil’s thesis that it’s near". -> Yes, specific technological predictions have never been very successful. We will probably have some of these technologies by 2045, and also some we weren't able to think of.

hhm 18y ago
Correct, but the consequences of this are just speculation. My speculation: Being 1000 times faster gives you entirely different capabilities. What's the use of decoding an MP3 in anything less than real-time? That's correct. I'm sure flies and dogs are Turing machines as much as we are (if we are), yet we are considered to be much more intelligent beings than both of them. A computer capable of a level of intelligence as big to us, as we are to a dog, would be pretty impressive. But I think he's not talking about that, as he says: The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs, but if the singularity mind was bigger than us, but of the same nature, we would be able to compute it with pencil and paper, or in a computer, and to analyze it to see how it works (very slowly, as a Turing machine).

hhm 18y ago

I liked this description of our current world: I see a world that really did change dramatically over the last century, but where progress on many fronts (like transportation and energy) seems to have slowed down rather than sped up; a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans, and supercharging its climate; a world where technology is often powerless to solve the most basic problems, millions continue to die for trivial reasons, and democracy isn’t even clearly winning out over despotism; a world that finally has a communications network with a decent search engine but that still hasn’t emerged from the tribalism and ignorance of the Pleistocene. We are a world in great deficit excepting for: a) Internet, b) Google. Wow!

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

I'm a singularitarian, but I think it's going to be 500-1000 years. I also think it's going to be close call with the doomsday scenario. I took special note of the closing remarks: "...before we transcend the human condition and upload our brains to computers, a reasonable first step might be to bring the 17th-century Enlightenment to the 98% of the world that still hasn’t gotten the message..."

schtog 18y ago
Where do you get those numbers from? I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses about the state of the world so far into the future. You just mean it is a hell of a lot longer than 20-30 years before we are there?
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  "I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses " Really? 3 Okay. Let's try it again. 42 Looks to me like guessing is a pretty easy thing to do. Perhaps you were looking for some kind of formula? As if a piece of math would make you more comfortable about even 5 years from now? I think you're taking the underlying logic to the singularity a little too literally. It's all general trends with general statements to back them up. Wonderful piece of speculation, which I agree with. But it ain't science. It ain't logic. Kurzweil just speculates using a lot of mathematics. I grok it. But I'm not selling my house to buy a bunch of EverReady batteries to power my nanobot Zoot suit any time soon. It's a guess. Get over it. It's all guessing.
  - schtog 18y ago
    What I said: "I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses about the state of the world so far into the future." You quoted as: "I don't see how you possibly could make any guesses " Not the same...Try to keep an honest debate, shall we? --- No on the contrary I am not taking it literally but with a big grain of salt. Of couse there is guessing. But there are educated guesses and blurbs. Your guess is pointless, it has no validity at all. You could just as well say "blahaba" because it is not based on anything(at least it doesn't seem to be).

np 18y ago

The first singularity has already happened - it happened the moment human beings started to create perpetuating social structures. A corporation, a society, a nation, a community are all instances of gestalt intelligence.

mynameishere 18y ago

a world quickly approaching its carrying capacity, exhausting its natural resources, ruining its oceans... A great example of how a smart person, and a decent writer, can still drive an essay into inane irrelevancy when trying to wrap up with a snappy conclusion. No--the problems associated with agricultural runoff and AI tech are completely different, have completely different economic contexts, and should never be in the same article. I'm surprised the last sentence wasn't "Vote for Obama!"

ericb 18y ago
You took your smart, decent, criticism and made it inane and irrelevant with an ad hominem attack as your snappy conclusion. You related the singularity to this year's US Presidential candidates, two topics that have completely different contexts. Please tell me the irony was intentional... :-)
- ryanwaggoner 18y ago
  Actually, the author says this in the first paragraph: "...nor do they obviate the need to address mundane matters such as war, poverty, disease, climate change, and helping Democrats win elections." So I'd say that it was a fair statement by the commenter above.
  - ericb 18y ago
    Missed that. My mistake.
willchang 18y ago
One of the points of the article seemed to have missed you. If the singularity is possible, there is still the question of whether humanity will go extinct first. At some point, AI researchers are going to have trouble breathing Earth's atmosphere -- or do AI researchers not breath air like the rest of us?
- DabAsteroid 18y ago

zandorg 18y ago

I studied AI at University, and it was mostly about search. I learned Prolog, which was a real eye-opener about functions that can find paths backwards, a kind of reverse search. I also learned about Bayes, and have come up with an algorithm (myself) which is similiar to Bayes, but it's top secret at the moment.

sown 18y ago
There is a bit of a renaissance going on within some arcane fields of AI. There is work underway to try to create a real thinking machine, with the idea that we have come a long way in our understanding about neuroscience, etc.

acgourley 18y ago

The essay seems directed against a straw man. The author implies that because people think a singularity is near they are somehow expending energy to bring it to fruition instead of spending energy on what he feels to be more important problems. He would have a valid target if he was only talking about a small number of people involved in projects like the singularity institute, but he seems to be aiming wider. He even acknowledges that the people working at the institute are justified in the same way people worrying about asteroid collisions are justified. So who is he criticizing, then? Who are these people who are wasting energy chasing a singularity instead of solving modern problems? The only other targets I can think of are scientists and engineers moving their respective fields up the exponential, but they are doing their respective work precisely because of current problems in the world, not because of some far off possibility.

iuguy 18y ago

The first half of the last century was defined by physics, the latter by chemistry. The first part of this century appears to see technological advances at simlar rates on the biological scale. We're still making headway in physics and chemistry, but it's in the fields of genetics, stem cell research and so on where we're doing things that were unthinkable less than two decades ago. Whilst I agree that the problems with AI are more due to a lack of knowledge of how to implement ratherh than a limitation of current technology (i.e. our approach sucks rather than the tech), I believe that our singularity will arrive when we stop having to think about how to translate the carbon wetware to silicon hardware.

lakeeffect 18y ago

have none of you seen the thirteenth floor, we are already living singularity.

stcredzero 18y ago

How about, "The Singularity does a Grover Impression?" "Near!...Far!...Near!...Far!..."