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Why is this all of a sudden such a hot topic? We're nowhere near anything resembling general intelligence even at the level of a toddler. Barring any kind of ha

Why is this all of a sudden such a hot topic? We're nowhere near anything resembling general intelligence even at the level of a toddler. Barring any kind of hardware innovations we will not get there any time soon either with just software.

frabcus 12y ago
I think it's because Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence is the first general reader overview of the subject, and it came out middle of last year. Musk definitely read it, and I assume it's doing the rounds of the tech elite. It is a good book, worth reading with plenty of references. It amusingly makes its own point - it tries to analyse what AIs might be and do and how to control them. The analysis is such a mess, and shows our collective knowledge of this is such a mess, you can't help but agree with the author we need to put more attention to it.
ProAm 12y ago
It's not. Sam Altman has a blog that gets a lot of readers that why it seems more important than it really is currently.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Good point.
ggreer 12y ago
> We're nowhere near anything resembling general intelligence even at the level of a toddler. Barring any kind of hardware innovations we will not get there any time soon either with just software. Should people have discussed the control and proliferation of nuclear weapons decades before their invention? It seems to me that even a century beforehand, the conversation would have been productive. If anything, we got very lucky with nukes. Physics could have easily turned out differently and allowed people to create bombs from substances more common than a few transuranic isotopes. AI is, potentially, more dangerous than nuclear weapons. If you poll experts, they estimate a 50% chance of human-level AI by 2040-2050.[1] That's 25-35 years away. They also estimate that superintelligence will arrive less than 30 years after that. Lastly, one in three of these AI experts predict that superintelligence will be bad or extremely bad for humanity. It seems like now is a great time to have this discussion. 1. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Experts have been predicting human level intelligence 30-50 years out for a while now. I don't see anything in the current line of research that will change that situation. My measure of intelligence is creative problem solving in a mathematical discipline like theoretical physics, algebraic topology, combinatorics, etc. All the current AI research is doing is building better and better pattern matching engines. That's all very good but talking about sophisticated pattern matching pieces of code as if they were anything more seems very silly to me. But I don't think looking at things this way is valuable in either case. Hamming has a great set of lectures on what it would mean for machines to think and in the grand scheme of things I think the question is meaningless. The real question is what can people and thinking machines accomplish together.

frabcus 12y ago

I think it's because Nick Bostrom's book Superintelligence is the first general reader overview of the subject, and it came out middle of last year. Musk definitely read it, and I assume it's doing the rounds of the tech elite. It is a good book, worth reading with plenty of references. It amusingly makes its own point - it tries to analyse what AIs might be and do and how to control them. The analysis is such a mess, and shows our collective knowledge of this is such a mess, you can't help but agree with the author we need to put more attention to it.

ProAm 12y ago

It's not. Sam Altman has a blog that gets a lot of readers that why it seems more important than it really is currently.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Good point.

ggreer 12y ago

> We're nowhere near anything resembling general intelligence even at the level of a toddler. Barring any kind of hardware innovations we will not get there any time soon either with just software. Should people have discussed the control and proliferation of nuclear weapons decades before their invention? It seems to me that even a century beforehand, the conversation would have been productive. If anything, we got very lucky with nukes. Physics could have easily turned out differently and allowed people to create bombs from substances more common than a few transuranic isotopes. AI is, potentially, more dangerous than nuclear weapons. If you poll experts, they estimate a 50% chance of human-level AI by 2040-2050.[1] That's 25-35 years away. They also estimate that superintelligence will arrive less than 30 years after that. Lastly, one in three of these AI experts predict that superintelligence will be bad or extremely bad for humanity. It seems like now is a great time to have this discussion. 1. http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf http://www.nickbostrom.com/papers/survey.pdf

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Experts have been predicting human level intelligence 30-50 years out for a while now. I don't see anything in the current line of research that will change that situation. My measure of intelligence is creative problem solving in a mathematical discipline like theoretical physics, algebraic topology, combinatorics, etc. All the current AI research is doing is building better and better pattern matching engines. That's all very good but talking about sophisticated pattern matching pieces of code as if they were anything more seems very silly to me. But I don't think looking at things this way is valuable in either case. Hamming has a great set of lectures on what it would mean for machines to think and in the grand scheme of things I think the question is meaningless. The real question is what can people and thinking machines accomplish together.