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> Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death, Ray Kurzweil and other futurists feed this mischaracterization by trumpeting the impending technological

> Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death, Ray Kurzweil and other futurists feed this mischaracterization by trumpeting the impending technological apotheosis of humanity, their breathless idiocy echoing through popular media. An unexpected jab in the second-last paragraph, seems the author has some strong opinions about AI. I wonder how he'd respond to Hawking's recently newsworthy worries.

agibsonccc 13y ago
FWIW, it's meant for people not necessarily in the AI field, but here's a general post on it[1]. (disclaimer I'm the author). A lot of people have strong feelings about where cognizant AI could be, I don't think fearmongering is the problem we should be focusing on. I think it should be more focused on the problem solving potential of these systems and how they will become more relevant as computers get better. [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-158494375-response-to-hawking-ai-helps-us-understand-a-world-we-endangered?published=t https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-1...
- com2kid 13y ago
  > Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death So is that line really necessary? It seems to do not but make assertions about the motives and beliefs of others, and to do such in a negative light. It adds no value to the article, but creates a negative impression in the reader's mind without giving any evidence as backing.
  - bostonpete 13y ago
    > So is that line really necessary? He's not the author of the original post -- he's the author of the linkedin post he linked to.
    - com2kid 13y ago
      Ah, confusion. Thank you for the correction.
  - agibsonccc 13y ago
    To reply anyways to contribute to the discussion, there is a lot of fear mongering about cognizant AI from people who don't create these systems themselves. With all of the marketing around things like big data, deep learning and other topics, it makes it seem like we're closer to cognizant AI than we really are. At the heart of all this is still statistics and machine learning which in and of itself is just statistics with a lot more data used to achieve a set of tasks such as predicting a future value or labeling some thing (such as a fraudulent event) Edit: I'd love to see some discussion on what people think we are close to. We have to ask ourselves, what is AI and what is considered intelligent? Is it mimicking the human brain as closely as possible (with all the flaws that come to mind such as bias) or is it making the heuristically best decision given a set of circumstances (game playing AI, maximum likelihood learning). Both of these mindsets can be beneficial. Let's just make sure we treat it for what it is: math and binary information.
    - aidenn0 13y ago
      A non cognizent AI that is capable of generating an similar AI better at generating AIs than itself is would run into the issue, regardless of whether it is cognizant.
DanAndersen 13y ago
Yeah, that felt like a weird and very out-of-place insult. I also thought this was an odd assertion: >In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe. It seems like when it comes to AI advances, there's always a shifting of goalposts as soon as an AI is able to do a task that was once thought to be a defining characteristic of human cognition. Why does it matter if a computer "feels good or bad" at the outcome of a competition for that competition to be somehow valid?
- stingraycharles 13y ago
  Yeah exactly. If anything, I would like to avoid emotions in AI, since emotions makes for an unpredictable outcome. That is the last thing you want in an AI, imho.
  - montecarl 13y ago
    This reminds me of the movie Sphere, when they discuss the ramifications of the unknown object having emotions: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/quotes?item=qt0360936 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/quotes?item=qt0360936
  - ithkuil 13y ago
    TL;DR don't conflate emotions with instinctive response. Emotions are orthogonal to rationality, that's why you can devise rational plans to minimize or maximize your likelihood of feeling an emotion. In other words it's perfectly rational to act in such a way to prevent sadness or pain, if that's the value you want to optimize for. You can imagine a creature (natural or artificial it doesn't matter) that feels emotions and nevertheless it doesn't start acting irrationally just whenever the emotion is strong enough. I could argue that human beings are in many cases such creatures; even apparently irrational behaviour caused by emotional response usually is not a bad strategy in the original environment where that instinctive reaction was selected for. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to create AI that simulate humans in all aspects, including unpredictability, just for the sake of it. But I understand some might be tempted to explore that area in order to research creativity, assuming it had something to do with unpredictability. Perhaps we are just fooling ourselves into thinking that our very failures are what enables us to be so $special (put whatever aspect you prefer in $special). Unfortunately we don't have much means to compare us with something else.
amasad 13y ago
Wired magazine has always been anti-strong-AI. One of their founding editors, Kevin Kelly, has written a lot about the critique of strong AI and the singularity as Kurzweil describe it
htns 13y ago
I don't know Kurzweil's real position, but I believe in one of his books he expected singularity by 2045. A lot of people don't protest the idea itself, but the optimistic schedule.
- stcredzero 13y ago
  If there will be hyper intelligent AI worthy of the name, we won't realize the singularity has happened at all.
  - onnoonno 13y ago
    Hehehe ... and what is a belief in a higher being, that cannot be proven to exist, commonly called? :-)
  - strlen 13y ago
    Vernor Vinge (who wrote one of the first essays on singularity) recently stated that we can tell the singularity has happened when a robot can clean an un-prepped bachelor's pad (robots can currently clean a prepared room, but they can't clean a room in an "as-is" state).
- Reedx 13y ago
  Yep, Kurzweil was actually just interviewed by CNN (on their new show Inside Man) about singularity and that's still around the time he predicts it'll happen.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
hemanthkumar 13y ago
Hello
hemanthkumar 13y ago
Hello123
bayesianhorse 13y ago
Sounds like a bible-thumper insulting a futurist.
squidbot 13y ago
I noticed that the author is an "assistant professor of philosophy and religion." When I ran across this part of the article, I couldn't help but think of the philosophers bursting in on Deep Thought in HHGTTG: "You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?" "That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

agibsonccc 13y ago

FWIW, it's meant for people not necessarily in the AI field, but here's a general post on it[1]. (disclaimer I'm the author). A lot of people have strong feelings about where cognizant AI could be, I don't think fearmongering is the problem we should be focusing on. I think it should be more focused on the problem solving potential of these systems and how they will become more relevant as computers get better. [1]: https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-158494375-response-to-hawking-ai-helps-us-understand-a-world-we-endangered?published=t https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-1...

com2kid 13y ago
> Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death So is that line really necessary? It seems to do not but make assertions about the motives and beliefs of others, and to do such in a negative light. It adds no value to the article, but creates a negative impression in the reader's mind without giving any evidence as backing.
- bostonpete 13y ago
  > So is that line really necessary? He's not the author of the original post -- he's the author of the linkedin post he linked to.
  - com2kid 13y ago
    Ah, confusion. Thank you for the correction.
- agibsonccc 13y ago
  To reply anyways to contribute to the discussion, there is a lot of fear mongering about cognizant AI from people who don't create these systems themselves. With all of the marketing around things like big data, deep learning and other topics, it makes it seem like we're closer to cognizant AI than we really are. At the heart of all this is still statistics and machine learning which in and of itself is just statistics with a lot more data used to achieve a set of tasks such as predicting a future value or labeling some thing (such as a fraudulent event) Edit: I'd love to see some discussion on what people think we are close to. We have to ask ourselves, what is AI and what is considered intelligent? Is it mimicking the human brain as closely as possible (with all the flaws that come to mind such as bias) or is it making the heuristically best decision given a set of circumstances (game playing AI, maximum likelihood learning). Both of these mindsets can be beneficial. Let's just make sure we treat it for what it is: math and binary information.
  - aidenn0 13y ago
    A non cognizent AI that is capable of generating an similar AI better at generating AIs than itself is would run into the issue, regardless of whether it is cognizant.

DanAndersen 13y ago

Yeah, that felt like a weird and very out-of-place insult. I also thought this was an odd assertion: >In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe. It seems like when it comes to AI advances, there's always a shifting of goalposts as soon as an AI is able to do a task that was once thought to be a defining characteristic of human cognition. Why does it matter if a computer "feels good or bad" at the outcome of a competition for that competition to be somehow valid?

stingraycharles 13y ago
Yeah exactly. If anything, I would like to avoid emotions in AI, since emotions makes for an unpredictable outcome. That is the last thing you want in an AI, imho.
- montecarl 13y ago
  This reminds me of the movie Sphere, when they discuss the ramifications of the unknown object having emotions: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/quotes?item=qt0360936 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120184/quotes?item=qt0360936
- ithkuil 13y ago
  TL;DR don't conflate emotions with instinctive response. Emotions are orthogonal to rationality, that's why you can devise rational plans to minimize or maximize your likelihood of feeling an emotion. In other words it's perfectly rational to act in such a way to prevent sadness or pain, if that's the value you want to optimize for. You can imagine a creature (natural or artificial it doesn't matter) that feels emotions and nevertheless it doesn't start acting irrationally just whenever the emotion is strong enough. I could argue that human beings are in many cases such creatures; even apparently irrational behaviour caused by emotional response usually is not a bad strategy in the original environment where that instinctive reaction was selected for. I'm not sure it would be a good idea to create AI that simulate humans in all aspects, including unpredictability, just for the sake of it. But I understand some might be tempted to explore that area in order to research creativity, assuming it had something to do with unpredictability. Perhaps we are just fooling ourselves into thinking that our very failures are what enables us to be so $special (put whatever aspect you prefer in $special). Unfortunately we don't have much means to compare us with something else.

amasad 13y ago

Wired magazine has always been anti-strong-AI. One of their founding editors, Kevin Kelly, has written a lot about the critique of strong AI and the singularity as Kurzweil describe it

htns 13y ago

I don't know Kurzweil's real position, but I believe in one of his books he expected singularity by 2045. A lot of people don't protest the idea itself, but the optimistic schedule.

stcredzero 13y ago
If there will be hyper intelligent AI worthy of the name, we won't realize the singularity has happened at all.
- onnoonno 13y ago
  Hehehe ... and what is a belief in a higher being, that cannot be proven to exist, commonly called? :-)
- strlen 13y ago
  Vernor Vinge (who wrote one of the first essays on singularity) recently stated that we can tell the singularity has happened when a robot can clean an un-prepped bachelor's pad (robots can currently clean a prepared room, but they can't clean a room in an "as-is" state).
Reedx 13y ago
Yep, Kurzweil was actually just interviewed by CNN (on their new show Inside Man) about singularity and that's still around the time he predicts it'll happen.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

hemanthkumar 13y ago

Hello

hemanthkumar 13y ago

Hello123

bayesianhorse 13y ago

Sounds like a bible-thumper insulting a futurist.

squidbot 13y ago

I noticed that the author is an "assistant professor of philosophy and religion." When I ran across this part of the article, I couldn't help but think of the philosophers bursting in on Deep Thought in HHGTTG: "You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?" "That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"