5 ms·

Will AI Surpass Human Intelligence By 2020?

9 points by DarrenMills 17y ago

DanielStraight 17y ago
For some definition of human intelligence, yes. For some, no. Same answer as every other year since the invention of the computer. This is not an interesting question (or article) without providing some reason for why your particular definition of human intelligence (the article doesn't give any definition at all) is the right one to consider.
- human_v2 17y ago
  Human intelligence can't exist outside of humans. We have a unique brain structure, allowing us to do what we do. But if we put our brain in a robot, it wouldn't work unless you built the robot in such a way that it believes it is human. Only then can you have an artificial human intelligence. The robot needs to be able to connect with humans on a meaningful level. This would be difficult if everyone just stared at the funny looking robot trying to act human. I think rather than creating Skynet, we're going to start upgrading our own hardware; adding robots to ourselves until there is no human left. I think with this practice, the new AI would be compassionate towards humans. Then again I also think about how teenagers hate their parents. Would a super-intelligent being come to loathe their parents (us)? I like to think that a super intelligence would understand that violence doesn't solve anything. But then again, that's why we have Sci-fi -- as a kind of list of things to make sure they don't happen. Humans are no longer king of the hill. Evolve or perish.
  - DanielStraight 17y ago
    This is a contradiction: "adding robots to ourselves until there is no human left", "the new AI would be compassionate towards humans." If we use people as the foundation for building AI which eventually abandons all human foundation, then the result would not be human. It's as if you had a car and every day replaced a single part with the part for a different car. In the end, the original car would no longer exist, even though there was, as it were, a continuous camera shot of the transformation. This is a tangent, I admit, but the contradiction needs resolved.
    - human_v2 17y ago
      Not every human would become a robot. Not every robot would have started as a human. This is where homo sapiens branches in the phylogeny of life. Some become robots, some stay human. Those that stay human may eventually evolve into dwarves and night-elves and maybe tauren. Those that turn into robots may want to explore reality like the wanderer in TNG, season 1, episode 7. (that's what i want to do anyway) Basically, what you're telling me, is that an ape that evolved into a human is no longer an ape. True, but not true. It just so happens that historically, in evolution, changes were subtle. Humans are neat because it will be the first time that a species evolved into something that barely resembles, if at all, the generation of life that spawned them.
russell 17y ago
No. Real AI is like fusion power. It will arrive in 40 years, for any definition of now. We are barely scratching the surface of our knowledge of the brain. We are orders of magnitude away from its processing power. We dont even have an agreed upon definition of consciousness. Will ever get there? Sure. But first we will see prostheses like vision and augmentation mind computer interfaces.
- fnid 17y ago
  Do you believe that Real AI must be modeled on the brain? I'm not sure that is a requirement. I think we can produce AI without fully understanding the brain. I expect AI to be something greater than the brain. If we use the brain as a guide or the summit of achievement, then at most we'll get only as smart as a human, or group of humans considering the massive amount of information storage and retrieval possible. I don't know... I wonder.
  - russell 17y ago
    Actually, I dont think real AI will be modeled on the brain, but I do think understanding the brain will be key. There are 100 billion parallel processing components with some significant fraction of a quadrillion interconnections. I think that there is a lot to learn there.
- roundsquare 17y ago
  Is there some definition of "Real AI" that I'm missing? A quick google search doesn't show me anything useful.
parse_tree 17y ago
There is no way in hell AI will "surpass human intelligence" by 2020, using any reasonable interpretation of the sentence. I guess it makes a good headline though.
drcode 17y ago
no.
- hendler 17y ago
  yes. Intelligence in any one measure. We'll create an intellegence that can out-do a human. Because if we can define an intelligence and understand it - coding it up might be the easier part. As an integrated whole? - mimicking humans? not so sure.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
fjabre 17y ago
It doesn't need to be that intelligent - it only has to fool us into thinking it is. Remember the Turing test..?
- dejb 17y ago
  To pass the Turing test AI would most likely need to be a lot more intelligent than humans. Being able to convincingly emulate something is harder than merely running your own 'native operating system'.
  - fnid 17y ago
    Actually, studies have shown that it's not that difficult to fool most humans. One study I remember simply repeated phrases back to the human in the form of a question. Human: I ate pizza today. AI: You ate pizza today? Human: Yes it was delicious. AI: How delicious was it? One participant actually guarded her screen from the researchers because she was having such an intimate conversation with what she thought was another person.
    - dejb 17y ago
      The Turing tester would need to be deliberately testing to see if the other party was a bot for the test to be convincing. This is the 'standard interpretation' of the Turing test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#The_standard_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#The_standard_interp...
      - roundsquare 17y ago
        Additionally, you can fool people with some simple tricks like what was mentioned. In the Loebner Prize the programmer and/or person being "tested" was allowed to pick the topic. One of the programs that won did so by picking the topic "silly conversations" and having the machine output gibberish. The judge thought this was a person being silly (how could a computer be silly?) and rated it a human. Someone who knows anything about AI/NLP won't fall for this though. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/loebner-rev-html/loebner-rev-html.html http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/loebner-r...
jimfl 17y ago
Certainly not. A natural intelligence could eventually coalesce from emergent properties of H. Sapiens networked information processing systems, but not within 10 years.
kunqiana 17y ago
perhaps in certain domains of knowledge such as chess.
patio11 17y ago
In 2009, yes, it looks like a sure bet that AI will pass human intelligence by 2020. In 2019, yes, it will look to be a sure bet that AI will pass human intelligence by 2030. Meanwhile computers will continue doing more and more important things by the boring expedient of taking lots of data and crunching on it. See: credit scores, which nobody considers "artificial intelligence" despite the fact that it essentially involves having a sophisticated algorithm make evidence-based predictions of the future based on what could easily be confused with a character judgment.
Devilboy 17y ago
Kurzweil on 2029: Although computers routinely pass the Turing Test, controversy still persists over whether machines are as intelligent as humans in all areas.
diiq 17y ago
I would feel more comfortable with such predictions if research were clearly walking the wooded path to AI. Moore's law works because 1. We already have processors 2. We have a metric to measure processor speed Then the path we're hiking is one mostly of incremental improvments, with occasional boulder of innovation. Whereas the 'intelligent' agents we currently have do not seem particularly similar in quality to intelligence we already know; the path from contemporary AI to strong AI is hardly a trail at all --- it's all boulders; innovation all the way up. [The claim I make about 'quality' is vague; in part necessarily so. If I could pinpoint my discomfort with current methods, I could propose a new course of action based on a new metric. Nevertheless I feel that the high-mathematical bent of current machine learning techniques (proto-value RL, statistical relational methods, etc) will lead to excellent answers, but does not point towards the flexibility of general intelligence. Yrom the other camp, low-level connectionist methods have not to my mind offered significant results in problem solving.]
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
tphyahoo 17y ago
If AI surpassed even lobster intelligence by that date it would be quite an achievent.
- Tichy 17y ago
  What do Lobsters do that is so complicated?
  - wlievens 17y ago
    Basic sight, locomotion, independent operation for years without human supervision. And they taste great.
jeffcoat 17y ago
This one's easy: anyone making a clear, testable predication about what's going to happen 10 years from now is going to be Wrong.
joe_the_user 17y ago
I think it's worth separating two statements that seem similar: "Computer will surpass human intelligence" and "Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence". The two statements aren't necessarily equivalent if we say AI involves an explicit understanding of what constitutes intelligence. AI doesn't seem to be making great progress on the understanding intelligence front. However raw computers might exceed human intelligence if we are able to, say, just directly simulate a brain but, say, increase the clock speed and maybe the number of neurons. But if it turns out that we create something highly intelligent that way, we will be creating something potentially dangerous since we really will have no understanding of how benevolent it will or won't be.

9 points by DarrenMills 17y ago

For some definition of human intelligence, yes. For some, no. Same answer as every other year since the invention of the computer. This is not an interesting question (or article) without providing some reason for why your particular definition of human intelligence (the article doesn't give any definition at all) is the right one to consider.

human_v2 17y ago
Human intelligence can't exist outside of humans. We have a unique brain structure, allowing us to do what we do. But if we put our brain in a robot, it wouldn't work unless you built the robot in such a way that it believes it is human. Only then can you have an artificial human intelligence. The robot needs to be able to connect with humans on a meaningful level. This would be difficult if everyone just stared at the funny looking robot trying to act human. I think rather than creating Skynet, we're going to start upgrading our own hardware; adding robots to ourselves until there is no human left. I think with this practice, the new AI would be compassionate towards humans. Then again I also think about how teenagers hate their parents. Would a super-intelligent being come to loathe their parents (us)? I like to think that a super intelligence would understand that violence doesn't solve anything. But then again, that's why we have Sci-fi -- as a kind of list of things to make sure they don't happen. Humans are no longer king of the hill. Evolve or perish.
- DanielStraight 17y ago
  This is a contradiction: "adding robots to ourselves until there is no human left", "the new AI would be compassionate towards humans." If we use people as the foundation for building AI which eventually abandons all human foundation, then the result would not be human. It's as if you had a car and every day replaced a single part with the part for a different car. In the end, the original car would no longer exist, even though there was, as it were, a continuous camera shot of the transformation. This is a tangent, I admit, but the contradiction needs resolved.
  - human_v2 17y ago
    Not every human would become a robot. Not every robot would have started as a human. This is where homo sapiens branches in the phylogeny of life. Some become robots, some stay human. Those that stay human may eventually evolve into dwarves and night-elves and maybe tauren. Those that turn into robots may want to explore reality like the wanderer in TNG, season 1, episode 7. (that's what i want to do anyway) Basically, what you're telling me, is that an ape that evolved into a human is no longer an ape. True, but not true. It just so happens that historically, in evolution, changes were subtle. Humans are neat because it will be the first time that a species evolved into something that barely resembles, if at all, the generation of life that spawned them.

russell 17y ago

No. Real AI is like fusion power. It will arrive in 40 years, for any definition of now. We are barely scratching the surface of our knowledge of the brain. We are orders of magnitude away from its processing power. We dont even have an agreed upon definition of consciousness. Will ever get there? Sure. But first we will see prostheses like vision and augmentation mind computer interfaces.

fnid 17y ago
Do you believe that Real AI must be modeled on the brain? I'm not sure that is a requirement. I think we can produce AI without fully understanding the brain. I expect AI to be something greater than the brain. If we use the brain as a guide or the summit of achievement, then at most we'll get only as smart as a human, or group of humans considering the massive amount of information storage and retrieval possible. I don't know... I wonder.
- russell 17y ago
  Actually, I dont think real AI will be modeled on the brain, but I do think understanding the brain will be key. There are 100 billion parallel processing components with some significant fraction of a quadrillion interconnections. I think that there is a lot to learn there.
roundsquare 17y ago
Is there some definition of "Real AI" that I'm missing? A quick google search doesn't show me anything useful.

parse_tree 17y ago

There is no way in hell AI will "surpass human intelligence" by 2020, using any reasonable interpretation of the sentence. I guess it makes a good headline though.

drcode 17y ago

no.

hendler 17y ago
yes. Intelligence in any one measure. We'll create an intellegence that can out-do a human. Because if we can define an intelligence and understand it - coding it up might be the easier part. As an integrated whole? - mimicking humans? not so sure.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

fjabre 17y ago

It doesn't need to be that intelligent - it only has to fool us into thinking it is. Remember the Turing test..?

dejb 17y ago
To pass the Turing test AI would most likely need to be a lot more intelligent than humans. Being able to convincingly emulate something is harder than merely running your own 'native operating system'.
- fnid 17y ago
  Actually, studies have shown that it's not that difficult to fool most humans. One study I remember simply repeated phrases back to the human in the form of a question. Human: I ate pizza today. AI: You ate pizza today? Human: Yes it was delicious. AI: How delicious was it? One participant actually guarded her screen from the researchers because she was having such an intimate conversation with what she thought was another person.
  - dejb 17y ago
    The Turing tester would need to be deliberately testing to see if the other party was a bot for the test to be convincing. This is the 'standard interpretation' of the Turing test http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#The_standard_interpretation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test#The_standard_interp...
    - roundsquare 17y ago
      Additionally, you can fool people with some simple tricks like what was mentioned. In the Loebner Prize the programmer and/or person being "tested" was allowed to pick the topic. One of the programs that won did so by picking the topic "silly conversations" and having the machine output gibberish. The judge thought this was a person being silly (how could a computer be silly?) and rated it a human. Someone who knows anything about AI/NLP won't fall for this though. http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/loebner-rev-html/loebner-rev-html.html http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~shieber/Biblio/Papers/loebner-r...

jimfl 17y ago

Certainly not. A natural intelligence could eventually coalesce from emergent properties of H. Sapiens networked information processing systems, but not within 10 years.

kunqiana 17y ago

perhaps in certain domains of knowledge such as chess.

patio11 17y ago

In 2009, yes, it looks like a sure bet that AI will pass human intelligence by 2020. In 2019, yes, it will look to be a sure bet that AI will pass human intelligence by 2030. Meanwhile computers will continue doing more and more important things by the boring expedient of taking lots of data and crunching on it. See: credit scores, which nobody considers "artificial intelligence" despite the fact that it essentially involves having a sophisticated algorithm make evidence-based predictions of the future based on what could easily be confused with a character judgment.

Devilboy 17y ago

Kurzweil on 2029: Although computers routinely pass the Turing Test, controversy still persists over whether machines are as intelligent as humans in all areas.

diiq 17y ago

I would feel more comfortable with such predictions if research were clearly walking the wooded path to AI. Moore's law works because 1. We already have processors 2. We have a metric to measure processor speed Then the path we're hiking is one mostly of incremental improvments, with occasional boulder of innovation. Whereas the 'intelligent' agents we currently have do not seem particularly similar in quality to intelligence we already know; the path from contemporary AI to strong AI is hardly a trail at all --- it's all boulders; innovation all the way up. [The claim I make about 'quality' is vague; in part necessarily so. If I could pinpoint my discomfort with current methods, I could propose a new course of action based on a new metric. Nevertheless I feel that the high-mathematical bent of current machine learning techniques (proto-value RL, statistical relational methods, etc) will lead to excellent answers, but does not point towards the flexibility of general intelligence. Yrom the other camp, low-level connectionist methods have not to my mind offered significant results in problem solving.]

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

tphyahoo 17y ago

If AI surpassed even lobster intelligence by that date it would be quite an achievent.

Tichy 17y ago
What do Lobsters do that is so complicated?
- wlievens 17y ago
  Basic sight, locomotion, independent operation for years without human supervision. And they taste great.

jeffcoat 17y ago

This one's easy: anyone making a clear, testable predication about what's going to happen 10 years from now is going to be Wrong.

joe_the_user 17y ago

I think it's worth separating two statements that seem similar: "Computer will surpass human intelligence" and "Artificial Intelligence will surpass human intelligence". The two statements aren't necessarily equivalent if we say AI involves an explicit understanding of what constitutes intelligence. AI doesn't seem to be making great progress on the understanding intelligence front. However raw computers might exceed human intelligence if we are able to, say, just directly simulate a brain but, say, increase the clock speed and maybe the number of neurons. But if it turns out that we create something highly intelligent that way, we will be creating something potentially dangerous since we really will have no understanding of how benevolent it will or won't be.