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Let's say I accept that higher, human-like, intelligence is reproducible. It still doesn't follow that beyond that is some sort of yet in-conceived 'super inte

Let's say I accept that higher, human-like, intelligence is reproducible. It still doesn't follow that beyond that is some sort of yet in-conceived 'super intelligence'; that intelligent machines can outstrip humanity in any meaningful way and build even more intelligent machines than themselves and on and on in a virtuous cycle as the Singularity predicts.

fixermark 13y ago
Given that we have assumed human-like intelligence is reproducible, let's assume only slightly further that intelligence can be represented as some pattern, P, that can be reproduced in media other than human brains (I'm assuming you are meaning "reproducible" in terms of "reproducible within a machine", not the uninteresting meaning of "Every human born has reproduced intelligence"). If P exists, we have all kinds of faster, better, more durable strata we could encode it into than the one evolution happened to hit upon, and that encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. That may not necessarily imply that P can be improved upon exponentially (but if I were your stock advisor---or for that matter, licensed to be so---I'd humbly suggest that wagering against the _total possibility_ that something can be improved tends to be a losing wager). But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. It's worth noting that Kurzweil's book doesn't necessarily predict infinite, unbounded growth in intelligence (I'd assume that what we'd call "intelligence" is susceptible to the S-curve of diminishing returns like other technologies). But one doesn't need infinite, unbounded intelligence growth to build something that fundamentally transforms the world we live in.
- clavalle 13y ago
  > encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. >But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. These are HUGE leaps to make. Not to mention that thinking faster =\= thinking better, which is to say that there is no reason to assume that faster intelligence would not be understandable to the human brain.
  - fixermark 13y ago
    I think we're debating definitional points. In this context, I was equating thinking faster and thinking better; if you and I would---when faced with a problem---arrive at conclusion Q, and the AI would arrive at Q twice as fast, it's thinking better. So if we distinguish thinking faster (I've doubled the rate at which the algorithm runs) from thinking better (I've refined the algorithm so it only takes half as many "brain cycles" or what have you), I don't disagree that there's no guarantee that a faster AI would improve its own algorithm---but I would disagree that a human-level AI with twice the thought speed of a human wouldn't "outstrip humanity." It stands to reason that it should be able to outstrip humanity on any problem domain requiring cognition, simply by definition of measurement (if the machine is coming up with answers twice as fast as its human counterparts, it's "outstripping humanity"). I also hold to the assertion that it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders-of-magnitude past organic brains. The fastest nerve impulses are clocked in the range of 120 m/s. If you took the pattern of a human brain and replaced the meat with electronic switching, you'd be improving the raw rate of flow by about a million. Given that you've already conceded hypothetically that P is reproducible, electronics alone (without such niceties as optic fiber for any really big jumps), you'd be looking at the processes of P occurring at an (upper-bound) million times the speed it does in the human brain. Does this prove a lower-bound improvement? No; after all, it's not raw speed but switching and parallelization that matters if we're replicated a human brain. But I submit to you that the lower bound of improvement by transitioning from meat to electronic is probably more than '2'. ;)
- clavalle 13y ago
  I wish I could reply to your last comment directly. HNs comment system is sometimes beyond my understanding. I make the better vs. faster distinction because, if merely faster, the creative works and solutions to problems such an intelligence could cook up would be fathomable to humans, whereas if they are thinking better somehow, that is not a given. Kurzweil, Vinge et al predict intelligence that would leave ordinary humans behind. It could be that the problem space (reality) and 'algorithms' (for lack of a better term) used to approach that problem space in what we would term creative and intelligent ways, are as such that even a million fold increase in raw speed would not help very much. All that being said, I hope we do create durable intelligence at least up to our own capabilities. I personally think it is our responsibility to seed our part of the universe with intelligence and that is really the only practical way to extend intelligence into the wider cosmos.
Houshalter 13y ago
For one machines could simply be faster than humans. Transistors are thousands to millions of times faster than neurons. In the time it takes a human to solve a problem, an AI could solve thousands. Not to mention improvements in the algorithm itself, or increasing the size of a brain.

fixermark 13y ago

Given that we have assumed human-like intelligence is reproducible, let's assume only slightly further that intelligence can be represented as some pattern, P, that can be reproduced in media other than human brains (I'm assuming you are meaning "reproducible" in terms of "reproducible within a machine", not the uninteresting meaning of "Every human born has reproduced intelligence"). If P exists, we have all kinds of faster, better, more durable strata we could encode it into than the one evolution happened to hit upon, and that encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. That may not necessarily imply that P can be improved upon exponentially (but if I were your stock advisor---or for that matter, licensed to be so---I'd humbly suggest that wagering against the _total possibility_ that something can be improved tends to be a losing wager). But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. It's worth noting that Kurzweil's book doesn't necessarily predict infinite, unbounded growth in intelligence (I'd assume that what we'd call "intelligence" is susceptible to the S-curve of diminishing returns like other technologies). But one doesn't need infinite, unbounded intelligence growth to build something that fundamentally transforms the world we live in.

clavalle 13y ago
> encoding alone could be considered 'super intelligence' in the sense that it would easily out-think you and I. >But it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders of magnitude past our slower-than-a-speeding-bullet organic thought machinery. These are HUGE leaps to make. Not to mention that thinking faster =\= thinking better, which is to say that there is no reason to assume that faster intelligence would not be understandable to the human brain.
- fixermark 13y ago
  I think we're debating definitional points. In this context, I was equating thinking faster and thinking better; if you and I would---when faced with a problem---arrive at conclusion Q, and the AI would arrive at Q twice as fast, it's thinking better. So if we distinguish thinking faster (I've doubled the rate at which the algorithm runs) from thinking better (I've refined the algorithm so it only takes half as many "brain cycles" or what have you), I don't disagree that there's no guarantee that a faster AI would improve its own algorithm---but I would disagree that a human-level AI with twice the thought speed of a human wouldn't "outstrip humanity." It stands to reason that it should be able to outstrip humanity on any problem domain requiring cognition, simply by definition of measurement (if the machine is coming up with answers twice as fast as its human counterparts, it's "outstripping humanity"). I also hold to the assertion that it wouldn't take too many improvements to get orders-of-magnitude past organic brains. The fastest nerve impulses are clocked in the range of 120 m/s. If you took the pattern of a human brain and replaced the meat with electronic switching, you'd be improving the raw rate of flow by about a million. Given that you've already conceded hypothetically that P is reproducible, electronics alone (without such niceties as optic fiber for any really big jumps), you'd be looking at the processes of P occurring at an (upper-bound) million times the speed it does in the human brain. Does this prove a lower-bound improvement? No; after all, it's not raw speed but switching and parallelization that matters if we're replicated a human brain. But I submit to you that the lower bound of improvement by transitioning from meat to electronic is probably more than '2'. ;)
clavalle 13y ago
I wish I could reply to your last comment directly. HNs comment system is sometimes beyond my understanding. I make the better vs. faster distinction because, if merely faster, the creative works and solutions to problems such an intelligence could cook up would be fathomable to humans, whereas if they are thinking better somehow, that is not a given. Kurzweil, Vinge et al predict intelligence that would leave ordinary humans behind. It could be that the problem space (reality) and 'algorithms' (for lack of a better term) used to approach that problem space in what we would term creative and intelligent ways, are as such that even a million fold increase in raw speed would not help very much. All that being said, I hope we do create durable intelligence at least up to our own capabilities. I personally think it is our responsibility to seed our part of the universe with intelligence and that is really the only practical way to extend intelligence into the wider cosmos.

Houshalter 13y ago

For one machines could simply be faster than humans. Transistors are thousands to millions of times faster than neurons. In the time it takes a human to solve a problem, an AI could solve thousands. Not to mention improvements in the algorithm itself, or increasing the size of a brain.