3 ms·

When Newton came up with his universal law of gravitation, he also made an interesting observation. He had no idea why gravity worked the way it did, he could o

When Newton came up with his universal law of gravitation, he also made an interesting observation. He had no idea why gravity worked the way it did, he could only model its behavior numerically. It's been over 300 years and we're still trying to figure out exactly how gravity works. But in a way it doesn't matter: his law has given humanity tremendous abilities it didn't have before. When Deep Blue won the Jeopardy contest a couple of years ago, it was obvious that it wasn't intelligence in the sense that we commonly understood it. Yet it was able to beat the human champions. Deep Blue wasn't a model of a human player, but it didn't matter because for the purposes of its construction it performed just as well as one. My money says the singularity happens the exact same way -- we are able to "fake" more and more things that look exactly like intelligence until one day we're able to fake intelligence to a degree that it's virtually indistinguishable from our own. We're eventually able to do something that looks like moving our sentience into a computer even though it "won't really" be doing it. My guess is that we're hundreds of years away from that date, but whether it happens or not, the fact that an expert right now in the complexity of the underlying physical system has an opinion on the computational problem that probably won't be solved until after 2100 doesn't seem to me to be very relevant. Of course it's complicated. Of course we don't understand it. And of course we can't duplicate the structure of things we don't understand. I believe for any layman in the field all of that goes without saying?

robryan 14y ago
It is possible that the easiest way to simulate the brain in a way indistinguishable from an actual brain isn't to have something work in the same way. There is nothing to say that evolution has arrived at the perfect method.
uncompetence 14y ago
Small nit: Watson, not Deep Blue.
Retric 14y ago
The "singularity" is never going to happen because it assumes intelegence is a single thing that can be increased with more processing power and better algorithms. Completely ignoring things like information theory, over fitting, insanity, training data, and chaos theory. We can and probably will build reasonably general AI, but you far more likely to see each generation of AI being an ever smaller improvement than any sort of runaway exponential progression. Not to mention hardware progress has slowed to a relative standstill.
- joe_the_user 14y ago
  Suppose one has the means to build a flexible General AI with modern silicon technology. How could this not result in a thing whose abilities couldn't then be continuously increased at the rate regular silicon technology increased? The whole "diminishing returns will stop us" just seems like a comforting fairy tale for those who don't want to think about the consequences (which I suspect a bit of thought does show won't be as rosy as Kurzweill imagines). Edit: Hardware progress is still mostly following "Moore's Law". The only that's not increasing is processor speed. But if we build a "reasonably general AI", how could that box's capacities not be increased by tightly integration with other similarly intelligent boxes?
  - Retric 14y ago
    When a dumb AI comes up with the correct answer using a smart AI is not going to give you a better answer the old one is still correct. However, it could give you a wrong answer for whatever reason. As to diminishing returns, there is a window between a self driving car that's better than people and a 'perfect' self driving car but clearly that's a diminishing return situation, because it was giving you the perfect answer 99.99% of the time there is not a lot of room for improvement. PS: S curves often look like exponential curves but the real world has real limits so you can't have unlimited exponential progression of any type period end of story. And it looks like we are on the down slope when it comes to transistors. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-un... "Nvidia deeply unhappy with TSMC, claims 20nm essentially worthless" And that's for video cards which are embarrassingly parallel.
shawn-butler 14y ago
That's not really true about Newton by the way. Newton most likely believed he did not have a convincing argument he wanted to put his name to or advance that wouldn't also drag him into yet another round of having to deal with someone like Robert Hooke. At that point of his life, his ambition was greatly lessened and his success somewhat assured. There is firm evidence he had at least 3 serious views (and one fairly archaic one not many want to talk about) on the cause of physical gravitation. It is only the "modernists" who need for Newton be be not beholden to any of them that elevate and reiterate "Hypotheses non fingo" to some sort of rallying cry as if he had it tattooed on his torso.
cgio 14y ago
Singularity does not have to do with our perception of the intelligence of a machine. In singularity the importance/validity of that machine's perception of our intelligence is higher than our's. Therefore, I wonder whether we will be able to know it when we reach singularity.
michaelwww 14y ago
Kurzweil is saying much more. In The Age of Spiritual Machines he states "Artificial Intelligences claim to be conscious and openly petition for recognition of the fact. Most people admit and accept this new truth." What cluster of running software by which algorithms produces this consciousness 16 years from now?
reasonattlm 14y ago
I'd wager against that incremental model. I'd say that strong artificial intelligence is far more likely to happen via bottom-up modeling of the existing human brain as a starting point. The computational capacity for reductionist simulations that will exist probably 20 years from now, and as computational capacity increases those simulations start to become emulations. I don't expect to see massive gains over that time in the other way of doing it. Once you have crude human brain models, a lot of very unethical things will start to happen in the course of further development. (e.g. countless deaths of intelligent beings if you're in the continuity identity boat, and probably a lot of unavoidable pain and suffering regardless of your take on identity). That seems hard to prevent given the enormous advantages that will accrue as a result; there is a strong incentive for people to adopt the pattern identity point of view so as to justify what they are going to do with mind copies in the course of development. The important point is that once you have human brain models, from there the path to many different forms of strong artificial intelligence is just a matter of iterating those models. This seems far more likely to produce results than constructing new forms of intelligence progressively and de novo.
dredmorbius 14y ago
Deep Blue's Jeopardy performance was in large part due to its buzzer speed. It also managed to answer questions correctly, but game mechanics also played a role. http://ken-jennings.com/blog/archives/2554 http://ken-jennings.com/blog/archives/2554

robryan 14y ago

It is possible that the easiest way to simulate the brain in a way indistinguishable from an actual brain isn't to have something work in the same way. There is nothing to say that evolution has arrived at the perfect method.

uncompetence 14y ago

Small nit: Watson, not Deep Blue.

Retric 14y ago

The "singularity" is never going to happen because it assumes intelegence is a single thing that can be increased with more processing power and better algorithms. Completely ignoring things like information theory, over fitting, insanity, training data, and chaos theory. We can and probably will build reasonably general AI, but you far more likely to see each generation of AI being an ever smaller improvement than any sort of runaway exponential progression. Not to mention hardware progress has slowed to a relative standstill.

joe_the_user 14y ago
Suppose one has the means to build a flexible General AI with modern silicon technology. How could this not result in a thing whose abilities couldn't then be continuously increased at the rate regular silicon technology increased? The whole "diminishing returns will stop us" just seems like a comforting fairy tale for those who don't want to think about the consequences (which I suspect a bit of thought does show won't be as rosy as Kurzweill imagines). Edit: Hardware progress is still mostly following "Moore's Law". The only that's not increasing is processor speed. But if we build a "reasonably general AI", how could that box's capacities not be increased by tightly integration with other similarly intelligent boxes?
- Retric 14y ago
  When a dumb AI comes up with the correct answer using a smart AI is not going to give you a better answer the old one is still correct. However, it could give you a wrong answer for whatever reason. As to diminishing returns, there is a window between a self driving car that's better than people and a 'perfect' self driving car but clearly that's a diminishing return situation, because it was giving you the perfect answer 99.99% of the time there is not a lot of room for improvement. PS: S curves often look like exponential curves but the real world has real limits so you can't have unlimited exponential progression of any type period end of story. And it looks like we are on the down slope when it comes to transistors. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-unhappy-with-tsmc-claims-22nm-essentially-worthless http://www.extremetech.com/computing/123529-nvidia-deeply-un... "Nvidia deeply unhappy with TSMC, claims 20nm essentially worthless" And that's for video cards which are embarrassingly parallel.

shawn-butler 14y ago

That's not really true about Newton by the way. Newton most likely believed he did not have a convincing argument he wanted to put his name to or advance that wouldn't also drag him into yet another round of having to deal with someone like Robert Hooke. At that point of his life, his ambition was greatly lessened and his success somewhat assured. There is firm evidence he had at least 3 serious views (and one fairly archaic one not many want to talk about) on the cause of physical gravitation. It is only the "modernists" who need for Newton be be not beholden to any of them that elevate and reiterate "Hypotheses non fingo" to some sort of rallying cry as if he had it tattooed on his torso.

cgio 14y ago

Singularity does not have to do with our perception of the intelligence of a machine. In singularity the importance/validity of that machine's perception of our intelligence is higher than our's. Therefore, I wonder whether we will be able to know it when we reach singularity.

michaelwww 14y ago

Kurzweil is saying much more. In The Age of Spiritual Machines he states "Artificial Intelligences claim to be conscious and openly petition for recognition of the fact. Most people admit and accept this new truth." What cluster of running software by which algorithms produces this consciousness 16 years from now?

reasonattlm 14y ago

I'd wager against that incremental model. I'd say that strong artificial intelligence is far more likely to happen via bottom-up modeling of the existing human brain as a starting point. The computational capacity for reductionist simulations that will exist probably 20 years from now, and as computational capacity increases those simulations start to become emulations. I don't expect to see massive gains over that time in the other way of doing it. Once you have crude human brain models, a lot of very unethical things will start to happen in the course of further development. (e.g. countless deaths of intelligent beings if you're in the continuity identity boat, and probably a lot of unavoidable pain and suffering regardless of your take on identity). That seems hard to prevent given the enormous advantages that will accrue as a result; there is a strong incentive for people to adopt the pattern identity point of view so as to justify what they are going to do with mind copies in the course of development. The important point is that once you have human brain models, from there the path to many different forms of strong artificial intelligence is just a matter of iterating those models. This seems far more likely to produce results than constructing new forms of intelligence progressively and de novo.

dredmorbius 14y ago

Deep Blue's Jeopardy performance was in large part due to its buzzer speed. It also managed to answer questions correctly, but game mechanics also played a role. http://ken-jennings.com/blog/archives/2554 http://ken-jennings.com/blog/archives/2554