11 ms·

Technology predictions

182 points by dmnd 12y ago

minimaxir 12y ago
The original source linked at the end is more informative: https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm
- joncalhoun 12y ago
  My favorite from the source: If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. - Peter Ustinov
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
sidcool 12y ago
Looks like Sam's on for some moonshots.
vezzy-fnord 12y ago
I like how the second-last one stands out as a positive prediction that was wrong. Good show on that one.
spenczar5 12y ago
Sure, "That'll never catch on" is funny in retrospect. But don't forget all the cases of "This is gonna be huge" which flop, too. Popular Mechanics did a retrospective which is an absolute circus of hits and misses: http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that-never-was-next-gen-tech-concepts/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that-neve...
- joncalhoun 12y ago
  Sam covers this briefly with the prediction near the bottom about bitcoin.
  - lojack 12y ago
    Attributed to "Many otherwise smart people."
- dsugarman 12y ago
  > 1921: Mail delivery by Parachute that one seems particularly relevant
- jsankey 12y ago
  Exactly. The entire post is cherry-picking and proves nothing.
sz4kerto 12y ago
Predictions about something not being possible are difficult, because you can never be right. You are either proven wrong our 'we don't know yet'. Therefore these quotes are rather meaningless I believe. (I see SAs point of encouraging people to go for the moonshots, but still.)
- Sakes 12y ago
  His point is that many experts have been wrong when assuming the limitations of technology in the fields that they have mastered. He is simply trying to mute the argument that predictions from AI experts are sufficient in dismissing AI concerns. The Einstein/Wright Brothers quotes really hit this home for me. Maybe the quotes are meaningless to you because you already agree. But they might persuade others that would otherwise assume discussing AI impacts on humanity is a waste of time.
  - TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
    I have doubts about the Einstein quote. Atoms had been split at will for decades by then. Szilard hadn't yet proposed a theory of nuclear chain reactions, but according to some cites of the quote Einstein didn't say it until 1934 - which was after Szilard. I don't have a problem with the possibility that suprahuman intelligence may be possible. I do have a problem with the fact that currently we have no idea what the concept may even mean - and right now, more immediate cybersecurity issues are being neglected. Computers are already better than humans at many activities. From playing chess to landing planes to learning how to play a video game - a computer with the right software is much better at these than an average human, and is often at least good as the best humans. Take that to the black corner, and worms and botnets are already a serious problem. We don't need to wait for the Internet to become sentient and start talking to us in a deep echoey robot voice to worry about cyberthreats. There's more than enough to deal with already. And if you're going to try to regulate and contain a future AI, making current systems as secure as possible seems like a realistic place to start.
    - Animats 12y ago
zep15 12y ago
Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"? I'd like to see some citations :-). I think smart people tend to have much more nuanced views.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  See the reaction of tech industry after Musk donated 10M USD to AI research. It sort of divided into two groups, one saying that it's great choice and another claiming that he's an idiot and AI is a hoax (for the record, I'm in the former group).
- edmccard 12y ago
  >Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"? I don't know how "otherwise smart" I am, but I wonder how we would be able to tell that a machine intelligence was "superhuman" as opposed to "buggy". For example, suppose we build a super-AI and ask it, "Is Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture correct" [1]. What would we do if it said "yes"? (Of course, if "superhuman" just means "able to do things humans already know how to do and verify, but lots faster", then we're already there). [1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-anger-over-his-unread-500page-proof.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-a...
  - coderzach 12y ago
    We'd ask it to produce a simplified version.
    - edmccard 12y ago
      >We'd ask it to produce a simplified version. Yeah, that would work :) Maybe the question I should have asked, is: What if we ask a super-AI for a proof of the ABC conjecture, and the result is something too complicated for humans to verify? My point, if I have one, is that when I read about "superhuman machine intelligence", sometime people seem to mean "capable of knowledge that humans couldn't figure out on their own but that humans can understand once they see it"; and sometimes they seem to mean "capable of knowledge that is beyond human capacity to even verify". I think development machine intelligence of the first kind is extremely likely, but I'm more skeptical about the second kind.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
walterbell 12y ago
Genrich Altshuller worked as a clerk in Russia's patent office, later developing a theory (TRIZ) of structured innovation, based in 50,000 patents, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller & http://www.mazur.net/triz/ http://www.mazur.net/triz/ Some patents are classified each year. A clerk who has seen many classified patents would have a unique opinion on "blue oceans" for investment opportunities, especially if they knew how to prevent new patents from being classified, by avoiding certain areas of research, http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/ http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/ . In TRIZ terminology, they would have different psychological inertia. Is there a yearly list of declassified patents over the last few decades? This would be similar to lists of expired patents or books which enter the public domain in some countries.
NhanH 12y ago
"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning." - You-Know-Who, in 1950. It's a bit ironic that Sam missed this one quote that would have be very relevant to the post, both in term of the conclusion and the topic at hand (it's hard to predict stuffs) ;). It's interesting to note that the prediction was wrong on both counts: our machine is like a gazillion times more powerful than the quote, and we're doing nowhere near the capability of the prediction. From the last HN comments on the topic, while it's true that there are certain people who believe that strong AI is impossible, the stance I've got from AI/robotics researchers were that it's just silly to talk about general AI at this point: it's so far away. This post from Karpathy would be one, for example: http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visio... . Because of that, any talk and concern on the topic is a bit silly, especially about regulation of the subject. I mean, can you imagine people in the 1600 trying to figure out how to regulate the air traffic that we have right now? Or should we talk about space travel regulation now? Because seriously, chance are that will happen before we have singularity/ strong AI. If we're really concern about the danger of strong AI, then I'm more in favored dealing with it by the way of Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Singularity Institute (by making sure that whatever we're researching toward is "Friendly"). Even though I'm also thinking that they're too optimistic. I'm not against immortality in my lifetime though. Now, a talk about more sophisticated automated/ autonomous system that do funny things (in a good or bad way), or their risk, that's something worth discussing about. For a fun (philosophical) remark, if the robots are to become our overlords, it may be a bad idea trying to regulate them! Google "Roko's basilisk" for more details
- pjungwir 12y ago
  I'm glad someone is challenging this incredibly glib argument in support of taking away freedoms and smothering innovation under regulation, because of poorly-defined fears that experts mostly discount. Sam's proposal for regulation depends on a prediction too. It is no less a prediction than those who disagree with him. Not every technology we can dream up is destined to come true. Is strong, hostile AI the same kind of tech as warp drives and teleporters and flying cars? Who can say? So to me this post argues against Sam's goal of regulations, because why should we take away freedoms for the sake of such a dubious prediction?
Alex3917 12y ago
Though if instead of saying that X will never be invented, they had said that if X is invented then its inventors won't make a substantial sum of money from their invention, then they would have been right almost every time.
powera 12y ago
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."
- tlb 12y ago
  Bozo the Clown was a huge innovation: a franchised, national brand of kids entertainment, made possible by TV. The creators laughed all the way to the bank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown
- aaronbrethorst 12y ago
  To be fair, you can't reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.
  - sandstrom 12y ago
    I agree with your point. Though some ~420 years after Columbus tried you more or less can[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
    - jonathansizz 12y ago
      Interestingly, if you look on the map you'll see that you have to sail SE through the canal to go from Atlantic to Pacific.
  - wtbob 12y ago
    > To be fair, you can't reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic. Ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Passage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Passage Remember Magellan?
kordless 12y ago
I think he forgot "All this is a dream." by Michael Faraday
jsnk 12y ago
I will appreciate bold predictions about the future that may turn out to be wrong over today's writings where it's all about super safe post hoc analysis after the fact. Things like "Why X succeeded!" or "X failed because of these 5 reasons" don't impressive me one bit. I wish more writers wrote about bold predictions and explain why you predict that way.
fchollet 12y ago
Like every other technology, AI has risks and benefits. The main issue here, is that we are letting fear dominate the discussion, and that fear is not based on any supporting facts or evidence. Meanwhile, we are completely missing the discussion we need to have about the realistic, short and medium-term dangers associated with the development of AI. Intelligent automation is about to disrupt economic production and existing power balances, much like software has done not too long ago, with significant social consequences. This is what we need to be talking about, and preparing for. We need to plan for a smooth transition to a post-AI world. Regulating AI for fear that it may take over makes about as much sense as outlawing space travel for fear of aliens. Can we start having a sane discussion about AI now?
- deleted 12y ago
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- Geee 12y ago
  I'm not sure why it hasn't come up, but my biggest fear is that a powerful nation will use AI for their own advantage, mostly in the form of propaganda and mass manipulation through Internet. That's at least my fear, and I think that "AI taking over" is complete bullshit. Although, if let loose, AI could even accidentally manipulate humanity into any non-positive state. We know that being easily manipulable is probably the biggest vulnerability of humans (and there's lots of history to prove that). What comes to regulations, I think it should be required by law that AI identifies themselves as AI on the Internet discussion boards and social networks. I'm not sure how it's possible to enforce this requirement (without needing proof from everyone that you're human). Captchas are already too difficult (only bots get in these days). Popular captchas (such as Google's ReCaptcha) are also centralized, which is dangerous because it gives the captcha-owner a controlling position.
  - fchollet 12y ago
    > my biggest fear is that a powerful nation will use AI for their own advantage, mostly in the form of propaganda and mass manipulation through Internet. Chances are it is already happening. More advanced AI will give governments and corporations the ability to do the same in a much more effective way, and on a larger scale. Large-scale intelligent data mining will make it possible to use people's data to build actionable models of what they think, what they will do next, and how to affect what they think and do. Better than humans could. It doesn't even need to occur through sockpuppets, so the anti-sockpuppet regulation you propose would be not only highly intrusive but also ineffective. Here's an example: Facebook can manipulate your emotional state by selecting what goes into your newsfeed [1]. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-u...
state 12y ago
A thought on readability: It would be nice if there were either (a) two newlines between each quote or (b) only one newline between the quote and attribution.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
baby 12y ago
I found the bitcoin intruding on the others, it is pretty impressive how this "digital money" has grown. I remember a time where it was 20$ a bitcoin and no one would have believed it if I had tell them: in 6 months a bitcoin will be worth more than 1000$.
- cbhl 12y ago
  I remember a time when it was 20 bitcoins to a dollar.
- mcintyre1994 12y ago
  I think it felt really out of place because many "otherwise smart people" have been shouting it'll reach both zero and the sky soon and its future is still really unclear.
fixxer 12y ago
"Super machine intelligence is something that can be controlled with government regulation." - Delusional VC
- leot 12y ago
  No. A genuinely sympathetic paraphrase might be: "Machine superintelligence may or may not be controllable. If we do nothing to regulate it, or to prevent horrible outcomes, we will with X > [too big] probability find ourselves doomed. We need to find a way to reduce X. I propose regulation is at least not likely to be counter-productive, and may be strictly incrementally useful."
api 12y ago
Sure, predictions are hard. We often get them wrong on the upside (over-hype) and the downside. As a result, "AI isn't going to happen" really is not a good argument against discussing the potential risks of it. (... and I say that as someone who is an "AI is around the corner" skeptic.) Yet that doesn't change the basic risk calculus. In his previous post, Sam advocated imposing draconian licensing and observation requirements on what in practice would be the majority of non-trivial CS research. He advocated this on the basis of the potential risk that as-yet-to-be-developed hypothetical AIs might pose to human beings. I did a short post on it here: http://adamierymenko.com/did-sam-altman-of-y-combinator-just-start-a-campaign-to-license-and-regulate-all-cs-research/ http://adamierymenko.com/did-sam-altman-of-y-combinator-just... In addition to what I wrote there, I think that the risk of dramatically slowing progress in CS/AI also has to be taken into account. There is risk of doing and there is the risk of not doing. The problem is that we currently face a number of existential risks -- like catastrophic economic collapse due to fossil fuel depletion -- where the majority of the risk is in the "risk of not doing" category. We know with total certainty that if we continue business as usual with no change, our civilization will collapse. It's simple physics and high school math -- exponential growth in consumption of a finite resource without any substitution or path to replacement can only end in one way. Smart computers might help us crack tough problems like fusion, safe and scalable fission, better batteries to make renewable energy more practical, etc. That in turn might help us avoid an absolutely real, tangible, non-hypothetical, definite existential risk. I see no reason to hamstring that kind of progress to defend against extremely hypothetical low-probability risks. That's why I consider Sam's suggestions to regulate CS research more dangerous than any risk posed by speculative AI scenarios. I am not opposed to all regulation, but I am opposed to regulations based on extremely hypothetical hand-wavey risks. I'm also opposed to regulations that are virtually impossible to define accurately or enforce fairly. Regulations should be clear, objective, rationally justified by tangible problems or risks, and minimal. We should have regulations around, say, the use of nuclear materials, but that's because we know for an absolute fact that it is dangerous. We should have financial regulations because we know financial fraud has happened and will continue to happen without them. ... etc. But I positively cringe at the imposition of ill-defined broad regulations based on fear-mongering and "precautionary principle" thinking -- a.k.a. institutionalized paranoia and cowardice. Such regulations can do nothing other than halt progress in the name of vague paranoia. Make no mistake: Sam's proposal in his previous post would halt all non-trivial CS research, or at least would slow it to such a crawl that it would effectively stop. It would also cause a mass exodus from the field, since nobody wants to operate under that kind of nonsense. Given that CS is the primary driver now of progress in other fields, that would also likely halt major progress in energy, materials, propulsion, transportation, etc. If you read my blog post above, I take this in almost a conspiracy direction and speculate that this is some sort of political power play to lock down the field. The reason for this is that I find it hard to believe that someone of Sam's intellect and education would not realize the implications of what he's suggesting.
ryan_j_naughton 12y ago
http://imgur.com/gallery/5hiUM1e http://imgur.com/gallery/5hiUM1e More interesting failed technology predictions.
bbcbasic 12y ago
Just add 'prima facie' to your predication and you've covered your ass. I predict Bitcoin to $10k sometime in the next 5 years. Prima facie of course!
dxbydt 12y ago
I don't want to go all Clinton here, but, please, lets first define "prediction". Here are some predictions that have general consensus- 1. You will die someday ( so will I ) 2. The Bay Area will experience an earthquake in next decade 3. A few islands will go under due to sea level rise. I wouldn't like to call the above predictions - they are too sun-will-rise-in-the-east obvious. Its like looking at the dumbarton bridge & predicting - someday that bridge will fall. That's a biblical prediction - all standing things must fall, bridge is a standing thing, ergo, given enough wear and tear, it too will crumble and fall.The oldest standing bridge in the world is like 2800 years old & is in a much more geologically stable place than the Bay area, so what chance does dumbarton have ? Now here are what I call predictions - 1. qqq $200 by 2018 2. esn replaces fizzbuzz in 2019 :) 3. cnn,rnn,esn become middle school curriculum in 2020 I mean, here you have a reasonable level of confusion. Yet, if you plot the probability over time for each of those predictions, the slope is definitely positive. qqq has doubled in the past 3 years, give it another 3 years & it'll probably double again. Given this pervasive SMI fetish, it's only logical that startups replace their fizzbuzz with "in the next 20 minutes, code up an echo state network in haskell". And if sama's actually right, cnns & rnns are going to get so commonplace society is going to want middle schoolers to ace their exams with questions on "ten key differences between the recurrent neural net & the convolution neural net" instead of the pedestrian garbage we teach them now - "on a z3, if 1+2=3 and 1+1=2, how much is 3+3 ?" So the poor kids instead of sweating bullets & laboring through convoluted reasoning like "since 1 + 2 is 3, so 2 +1 is 3 per abelian, and 1 + 1 is 2, that means 3 + 1 per cayley unique column entries must be 1, which implies 3 is the identity, so 3 + 3 must be 3 as well. Ergo 3+3=3. Voila!" can actually make useful technological predictions about which esn based startup will cross a trillion dollar market cap by the time the kid hits puberty.
- Rmilb 12y ago
  What is esn?
  - jjoonathan 12y ago
    http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network
compbio 12y ago
The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. [...] Later Perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language. - The New York Times in 1958 after a press conference with Rosenblatt. ("New Navy Device Learns By Doing; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser") We now have walking, talking, object recognizing, writing, self-replicating, face-detecting, text-to-speech converting, and translating computers. All at a scale and accuracy surpassing us mere mortals. We do not know enough about "being conscious of our existence" to measure this in other animals and digital life forms. Perhaps "humans predicting future predictive capability of machines" is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the above article drew an unnecessary amount of ire and criticism. Probably a fuzzy combination of the two.
- nostromo 12y ago
  Self-replicating? > A self-replicating machine is a construct that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature.
  - compbio 12y ago
    I meant reproducing (like in the quote), but sure: http://www.apollon.uio.no/video/a_robot_e.mp4 http://www.apollon.uio.no/video/a_robot_e.mp4 And the press release: “In the future, robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic. These environments are so extreme that no human being can cope. Everything needs to be automatically controlled. Imagine that the robot is entering the wreckage of a nuclear power plant. It finds a staircase that no-one has thought of. The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs.” -2014 Kyrre Glette "Using 3D printers to print out self-learning robots"
guelo 12y ago
This post feels childish and passive aggressive. Just make your argument, if you have one.
- keithwhor 12y ago
  Exactly my thoughts. A hint of condescension and lack of self-awareness - the camp Sam Altman seems to be a part of ("regulate AI, it's an existential threat to humanity!") is just as much a prediction of the future as anything else. Yet, somehow, he seems to be subtly implying that he's "more" correct. Marc Andreessen has been relatively level-headed about the topic of AI recently on Twitter, and it would be nice to see other industry figureheads be less emotionally involved and more scientifically rigorous in their assessment of the industry. The debate is devolving into an ego battle (especially with a post like this!), and it's rather unfortunate. Edit: Additionally, Altman appears to be primarily attacking a strawman with this article. "Superhuman" intelligence already exists. The emergent intelligence (via technological amplification) of society is, by definition, super-human. What's less realistic is anticipating a human-like artificial intelligence that would, in any way, represent an existential threat to the human race. There are many, many problems with the latter argument. (From a technological, philosophical, economic, and evolutionary perspective.)
dustingetz 12y ago
What about flying cars and jetpacks?
sitkack 12y ago
Arthur C Clarke's, "Hazards of Prophecy" is required reading, http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/stored/futurists_hazards_of_prophecy.pdf http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/stored/futurists... and frankly should have been referenced in the post and here already. Cite!
- GrantS 12y ago
  Thank you for the link, that was a wonderful essay. And you've just reminded me that I've had an old used copy of Clarke's "Profiles of the Future" (the apparent source of this article) sitting on a shelf in the next room unread. Time to change that.
eldude 12y ago
Fun fact, some of those (obviously false) statements regarding nuclear energy may in fact be true depending on interpretation of their original meaning. We still have yet to harness mass-energy-equivalence for power. Modern nuclear energy, both fission and fusion, are more accurately nuclear potential energy (like a hydro electric plant and water). From Wikipedia[1]: E = mc2 has frequently been invoked as an explanation for the origin of energy in nuclear processes specifically, but such processes can be understood as converting nuclear potential energy in a manner precisely analogous to the way that chemical processes convert electrical potential energy. I don't know, but it seems reasonable to me to conclude that when Einstein stated the following, he may have been referring to mass-energy-equivalence rather than nuclear potential energy, which in fact continues to hold true for the foreseeable future: There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence
praptak 12y ago
"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." -- Niels Bohr
Animats 12y ago
"Space travel is utter bilge." - Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, British government, 1956 He was right. He did the math - it's not possible to get any significant payload to Earth orbit with a single-stage vehicle propelled by chemical fuels. With multi-stage rockets, it's possible to put a little mass in orbit with a huge booster. That's just low earth orbit. Going further out is even more expensive. Going to the moon required something the size of a 50-story building to move a payload the size of a SUV. Nobody has bothered for over 40 years now.
- baq 12y ago
  OTOH orbit is halfway to everywhere.
  - aaronem 12y ago
    As long as you don't mind a travel time measured in centuries.
  - Iftheshoefits 12y ago
    Orbit is precisely halfway to the boundary of a region of space for which double of the to-orbit energy is required to attain. It's barely "anywhere" much less "everywhere."
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      It's a saying, "If you get to LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System", and it reflects the amount of deltaV you need to spend to reach Earth orbit, which happens to be around the half of what you need to complete the trip to another body. (NOTE: you lose a lot of deltaV fighting air resistance)
csentropy 12y ago
How about if we already have created a superhuman AI, that is tricking us humans into believing that it does not exist? And thus preventing us from building something else that might be more friendly to the human race and counter it's bad intentions? What if @sama has somehow been coopted by that AI's plan to stop further development of AI? :) On a more serious note, no one can predict human behavior to the degree of accuracy needed to call it deterministic. So, it is unlikely that we can predict a superhuman AI's behavior with any degree of accuracy. In other words, we just do not know what we are talking about. Does risk calculus make any sense in the domain of true uncertainty?
- leot 12y ago
  Relevant, and very worth reading: http://www.simulation-argument.com/ http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Animats 12y ago
Prediction: in 5-15 years, there will be a corporation mostly run by an AI. Visualize Goldman Sachs run by an AI program. Corporations don't have "consciousness", nor do they need it. Maximizing shareholder value is the goal. Machine learning systems are good at optimizing for numerical goals.
- candeira 12y ago
  Corporations are already AIs, just as accounting departments before 1940 were already computers, only made of people processing marks on paper instead of being made of transistors processing electrons.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    Indeed. They are an interesting model of a completely alien mind, and fortunately this mind runs very, very slow for now.
- karmacondon 12y ago
  This concept has been around for awhile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organi... I think it lends itself well to fleets of driverless cabs
- compbio 12y ago
  AI at Google knows which document to show for your query and which advertisement you are likely to click on. Goldman Sachs uses machine learned algorithms already. Running a company requires vision, creativity, leadership, human interaction and usability. If we allow for a conscious AI to house in non-biological neurons, then we should also allow Turing-complete companies to have a consciousness. Visualize every Google employee with a two-way radio transmitting signals just like neurons would do. Would such a Google-brain be conscious and capable of new and unique mental states, or more familiar states like stress?
vilhelm_s 12y ago
> X-rays are a hoax. -Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900 Gwern Branwen did a bunch of research to track down this quote, concluding: > there there is no reliable primary source for any Kelvin quotation running "X-rays are a hoax"; and there's some reasonable doubt about what he actually believed in the short interval between reading newspaper articles (I think we've all had the experience of seeing newspaper articles on some new scientific proposal which bore scant resemblance to reality!) and getting Rontgen's paper & photos. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:William_Thomson#.22X-rays_will_prove_to_be_a_hoax.22 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:William_Thomson#.22X-rays...
Iftheshoefits 12y ago
"Space travel is utter bilge" is correct, in my opinion, from one viewpoint: specifically with respect to its cost effectiveness along any axis you care to measure save one: the emotionally-driven ego/pride/curiosity axis. I really wish the trillions "invested" in manned space travel over the decades had instead gone to basic research in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and some of the applied research disciplines that derive from these.
- chigiskob 12y ago
  Trillions? The total amount (2014 nominal) given to NASA since 1958 is less than 1.1 trillion. If you don't think there have been advancements in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics as a result of NASA's research then I'm at a loss.
  - wtbob 12y ago
    > Trillions? The total amount (2014 nominal) given to NASA since 1958 is less than 1.1 trillion. Thus it's likely that the sums involved across all nations in the world are 2 trillion or more. > If you don't think there have been advancements in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics as a result of NASA's research then I'm at a loss. Oh, they certainly were, but those advances were for the most part accidental and incidental.
vincetogo 12y ago
I suspect that the augmentation of human intelligence through tech is something we're more likely to get to before full-on AI. Assuming it's unaffordable for most of us, I'm much more concerned about a caste of super-intelligent, super-rich humans than computers that have no history of violence or hunger for power.
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
This post seems to be a response to some criticism of Sam's opinions in other blog posts. The relevant line is this one > Superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous. > - Many otherwise smart people, 2015 I was among those criticizing Sam's point of view, but not because I think the idea of superhuman machine intelligence is ridiculous. I don't know one way or the other whether we'll achieve it or not, but I don't consider it impossible. What I, and I believe many others as well, was criticizing was Sam's insistence that the current techniques have the potential to cause such great harm that they need to be regulated and that extreme measures need to be taken to address the possible harm of modern AI and ML techniques. This type of fear-driven reasoning is wildly out of proportion with the facts, as anyone who does research in the area of is familiar with the research in the area can attest to. Modern machine learning techniques are heuristic methods to find optima in functions over high dimensional spaces. Neural networks and support vector machines produce impressive results on image classification and other well defined problems, but are far from general purpose techniques that can be easily applied to any given problem. So, the bullet points: 1. Current ML techniques aren't anywhere near creating general intelligence, nor are there areas of research that appear likely to yield superhuman levels of intelligence in the near to moderate-term future. 2. This doesn't mean superhuman levels of machine intelligence are impossible, just that we don't have any current methods that are likely to lead to them. 3. Taking action against an ill-defined, likely phantasmic threat is neither cost effective nor helpful for the progress of AI and ML. 4. When the people who have real, expert knowledge of something all tell you one thing and the people who have something to gain from getting your attention by promoting sensational opinions and cherry-picked facts tell you something else you should rationally assess their motives and weight that when deciding who's views more closely approximate the truth.
- rndn 12y ago
  Regarding 1, 2 and 4: It certainly seems like a long way to create something like the human brain, but perhaps there are far simpler systems that yield general intelligence. We don't seem to be very good at predicting the invention of algorithms, so with all due respect I doubt experts can provide reliable predictions. Hardware as powerful as the simplest models of the human brain already exists and growing computational resources enable studies of neural networks at an increasing rate. I think, in that light, the claim that the breakthrough is far in the future seems to be about as strong as saying it could happen within the next ten years. I've asked this question in the discussion yesterday as well, but I didn't receive any response: What kind of breakthrough do you expect after which it would be justified to be concerned about general intelligence? And how do you justify that it's unlikely to expect that surpassing human intelligence is not just a matter of scaling it up at that point, i.e. that the invention can be regulated quickly enough once it exists?
martinesko36 12y ago
More of this: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis
ocdtrekkie 12y ago
Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking all agree AI research is dangerous. Google does not seem to feel there is a credible risk and is doing it anyways.
sudioStudio64 12y ago
My criticism of Sam's prediction is really centered around the extreme disparity between the concerns of the digerati wealthy elites and normal people.
thomasmarriott 12y ago
Survivor bias strikes again.
testingonprod 12y ago
Honestly, I think this whole hoopla about AI is overblown. I think when we reach the point where this discussion matters, we will know it, and know it quite obviously. Right now, we're at a point in AI where Amazon recommends me new types of deodorant immediately after I just placed an order for some. That tells you the state of AI and if we really need to be worried about some of the things that these pundits are, imo, dreaming about. Let progress happen, and we'll deal with it as it comes. No need for pre-mature fear to halt the speed of progress.

182 points by dmnd 12y ago

The original source linked at the end is more informative: https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/neverwrk.htm

joncalhoun 12y ago
My favorite from the source: If the world should blow itself up, the last audible voice would be that of an expert saying it can't be done. - Peter Ustinov
deleted 12y ago
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sidcool 12y ago

Looks like Sam's on for some moonshots.

vezzy-fnord 12y ago

I like how the second-last one stands out as a positive prediction that was wrong. Good show on that one.

spenczar5 12y ago

Sure, "That'll never catch on" is funny in retrospect. But don't forget all the cases of "This is gonna be huge" which flop, too. Popular Mechanics did a retrospective which is an absolute circus of hits and misses: http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that-never-was-next-gen-tech-concepts/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/g462/future-that-neve...

joncalhoun 12y ago
Sam covers this briefly with the prediction near the bottom about bitcoin.
- lojack 12y ago
  Attributed to "Many otherwise smart people."
dsugarman 12y ago
> 1921: Mail delivery by Parachute that one seems particularly relevant
jsankey 12y ago
Exactly. The entire post is cherry-picking and proves nothing.

sz4kerto 12y ago

Predictions about something not being possible are difficult, because you can never be right. You are either proven wrong our 'we don't know yet'. Therefore these quotes are rather meaningless I believe. (I see SAs point of encouraging people to go for the moonshots, but still.)

Sakes 12y ago
His point is that many experts have been wrong when assuming the limitations of technology in the fields that they have mastered. He is simply trying to mute the argument that predictions from AI experts are sufficient in dismissing AI concerns. The Einstein/Wright Brothers quotes really hit this home for me. Maybe the quotes are meaningless to you because you already agree. But they might persuade others that would otherwise assume discussing AI impacts on humanity is a waste of time.
- TheOtherHobbes 12y ago
  I have doubts about the Einstein quote. Atoms had been split at will for decades by then. Szilard hadn't yet proposed a theory of nuclear chain reactions, but according to some cites of the quote Einstein didn't say it until 1934 - which was after Szilard. I don't have a problem with the possibility that suprahuman intelligence may be possible. I do have a problem with the fact that currently we have no idea what the concept may even mean - and right now, more immediate cybersecurity issues are being neglected. Computers are already better than humans at many activities. From playing chess to landing planes to learning how to play a video game - a computer with the right software is much better at these than an average human, and is often at least good as the best humans. Take that to the black corner, and worms and botnets are already a serious problem. We don't need to wait for the Internet to become sentient and start talking to us in a deep echoey robot voice to worry about cyberthreats. There's more than enough to deal with already. And if you're going to try to regulate and contain a future AI, making current systems as secure as possible seems like a realistic place to start.
  - Animats 12y ago

zep15 12y ago

Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"? I'd like to see some citations :-). I think smart people tend to have much more nuanced views.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
See the reaction of tech industry after Musk donated 10M USD to AI research. It sort of divided into two groups, one saying that it's great choice and another claiming that he's an idiot and AI is a hoax (for the record, I'm in the former group).
edmccard 12y ago
>Do many "otherwise smart" people actually believe "superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous"? I don't know how "otherwise smart" I am, but I wonder how we would be able to tell that a machine intelligence was "superhuman" as opposed to "buggy". For example, suppose we build a super-AI and ask it, "Is Shinichi Mochizuki's proof of the ABC conjecture correct" [1]. What would we do if it said "yes"? (Of course, if "superhuman" just means "able to do things humans already know how to do and verify, but lots faster", then we're already there). [1] http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-anger-over-his-unread-500page-proof.html http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26753-mathematicians-a...
- coderzach 12y ago
  We'd ask it to produce a simplified version.
  - edmccard 12y ago
    >We'd ask it to produce a simplified version. Yeah, that would work :) Maybe the question I should have asked, is: What if we ask a super-AI for a proof of the ABC conjecture, and the result is something too complicated for humans to verify? My point, if I have one, is that when I read about "superhuman machine intelligence", sometime people seem to mean "capable of knowledge that humans couldn't figure out on their own but that humans can understand once they see it"; and sometimes they seem to mean "capable of knowledge that is beyond human capacity to even verify". I think development machine intelligence of the first kind is extremely likely, but I'm more skeptical about the second kind.

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walterbell 12y ago

Genrich Altshuller worked as a clerk in Russia's patent office, later developing a theory (TRIZ) of structured innovation, based in 50,000 patents, http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genrich_Altshuller & http://www.mazur.net/triz/ http://www.mazur.net/triz/ Some patents are classified each year. A clerk who has seen many classified patents would have a unique opinion on "blue oceans" for investment opportunities, especially if they knew how to prevent new patents from being classified, by avoiding certain areas of research, http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/ http://fas.org/sgp/othergov/invention/ . In TRIZ terminology, they would have different psychological inertia. Is there a yearly list of declassified patents over the last few decades? This would be similar to lists of expired patents or books which enter the public domain in some countries.

NhanH 12y ago

"I believe that in about fifty years' time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10^9, to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning." - You-Know-Who, in 1950. It's a bit ironic that Sam missed this one quote that would have be very relevant to the post, both in term of the conclusion and the topic at hand (it's hard to predict stuffs) ;). It's interesting to note that the prediction was wrong on both counts: our machine is like a gazillion times more powerful than the quote, and we're doing nowhere near the capability of the prediction. From the last HN comments on the topic, while it's true that there are certain people who believe that strong AI is impossible, the stance I've got from AI/robotics researchers were that it's just silly to talk about general AI at this point: it's so far away. This post from Karpathy would be one, for example: http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-vision/ http://karpathy.github.io/2012/10/22/state-of-computer-visio... . Because of that, any talk and concern on the topic is a bit silly, especially about regulation of the subject. I mean, can you imagine people in the 1600 trying to figure out how to regulate the air traffic that we have right now? Or should we talk about space travel regulation now? Because seriously, chance are that will happen before we have singularity/ strong AI. If we're really concern about the danger of strong AI, then I'm more in favored dealing with it by the way of Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Singularity Institute (by making sure that whatever we're researching toward is "Friendly"). Even though I'm also thinking that they're too optimistic. I'm not against immortality in my lifetime though. Now, a talk about more sophisticated automated/ autonomous system that do funny things (in a good or bad way), or their risk, that's something worth discussing about. For a fun (philosophical) remark, if the robots are to become our overlords, it may be a bad idea trying to regulate them! Google "Roko's basilisk" for more details

pjungwir 12y ago
I'm glad someone is challenging this incredibly glib argument in support of taking away freedoms and smothering innovation under regulation, because of poorly-defined fears that experts mostly discount. Sam's proposal for regulation depends on a prediction too. It is no less a prediction than those who disagree with him. Not every technology we can dream up is destined to come true. Is strong, hostile AI the same kind of tech as warp drives and teleporters and flying cars? Who can say? So to me this post argues against Sam's goal of regulations, because why should we take away freedoms for the sake of such a dubious prediction?

Alex3917 12y ago

Though if instead of saying that X will never be invented, they had said that if X is invented then its inventors won't make a substantial sum of money from their invention, then they would have been right almost every time.

powera 12y ago

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

tlb 12y ago
Bozo the Clown was a huge innovation: a franchised, national brand of kids entertainment, made possible by TV. The creators laughed all the way to the bank. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bozo_the_Clown
aaronbrethorst 12y ago
To be fair, you can't reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic.
- sandstrom 12y ago
  I agree with your point. Though some ~420 years after Columbus tried you more or less can[1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Canal
  - jonathansizz 12y ago
    Interestingly, if you look on the map you'll see that you have to sail SE through the canal to go from Atlantic to Pacific.
- wtbob 12y ago
  > To be fair, you can't reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic. Ahem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Passage http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Passage Remember Magellan?

kordless 12y ago

I think he forgot "All this is a dream." by Michael Faraday

jsnk 12y ago

I will appreciate bold predictions about the future that may turn out to be wrong over today's writings where it's all about super safe post hoc analysis after the fact. Things like "Why X succeeded!" or "X failed because of these 5 reasons" don't impressive me one bit. I wish more writers wrote about bold predictions and explain why you predict that way.

fchollet 12y ago

Like every other technology, AI has risks and benefits. The main issue here, is that we are letting fear dominate the discussion, and that fear is not based on any supporting facts or evidence. Meanwhile, we are completely missing the discussion we need to have about the realistic, short and medium-term dangers associated with the development of AI. Intelligent automation is about to disrupt economic production and existing power balances, much like software has done not too long ago, with significant social consequences. This is what we need to be talking about, and preparing for. We need to plan for a smooth transition to a post-AI world. Regulating AI for fear that it may take over makes about as much sense as outlawing space travel for fear of aliens. Can we start having a sane discussion about AI now?

deleted 12y ago
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Geee 12y ago
I'm not sure why it hasn't come up, but my biggest fear is that a powerful nation will use AI for their own advantage, mostly in the form of propaganda and mass manipulation through Internet. That's at least my fear, and I think that "AI taking over" is complete bullshit. Although, if let loose, AI could even accidentally manipulate humanity into any non-positive state. We know that being easily manipulable is probably the biggest vulnerability of humans (and there's lots of history to prove that). What comes to regulations, I think it should be required by law that AI identifies themselves as AI on the Internet discussion boards and social networks. I'm not sure how it's possible to enforce this requirement (without needing proof from everyone that you're human). Captchas are already too difficult (only bots get in these days). Popular captchas (such as Google's ReCaptcha) are also centralized, which is dangerous because it gives the captcha-owner a controlling position.
- fchollet 12y ago
  > my biggest fear is that a powerful nation will use AI for their own advantage, mostly in the form of propaganda and mass manipulation through Internet. Chances are it is already happening. More advanced AI will give governments and corporations the ability to do the same in a much more effective way, and on a larger scale. Large-scale intelligent data mining will make it possible to use people's data to build actionable models of what they think, what they will do next, and how to affect what they think and do. Better than humans could. It doesn't even need to occur through sockpuppets, so the anti-sockpuppet regulation you propose would be not only highly intrusive but also ineffective. Here's an example: Facebook can manipulate your emotional state by selecting what goes into your newsfeed [1]. [1] http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-users-emotions-news-feeds http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jun/29/facebook-u...

state 12y ago

A thought on readability: It would be nice if there were either (a) two newlines between each quote or (b) only one newline between the quote and attribution.

deleted 12y ago

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baby 12y ago

I found the bitcoin intruding on the others, it is pretty impressive how this "digital money" has grown. I remember a time where it was 20$ a bitcoin and no one would have believed it if I had tell them: in 6 months a bitcoin will be worth more than 1000$.

cbhl 12y ago
I remember a time when it was 20 bitcoins to a dollar.
mcintyre1994 12y ago
I think it felt really out of place because many "otherwise smart people" have been shouting it'll reach both zero and the sky soon and its future is still really unclear.

fixxer 12y ago

"Super machine intelligence is something that can be controlled with government regulation." - Delusional VC

leot 12y ago
No. A genuinely sympathetic paraphrase might be: "Machine superintelligence may or may not be controllable. If we do nothing to regulate it, or to prevent horrible outcomes, we will with X > [too big] probability find ourselves doomed. We need to find a way to reduce X. I propose regulation is at least not likely to be counter-productive, and may be strictly incrementally useful."

api 12y ago

Sure, predictions are hard. We often get them wrong on the upside (over-hype) and the downside. As a result, "AI isn't going to happen" really is not a good argument against discussing the potential risks of it. (... and I say that as someone who is an "AI is around the corner" skeptic.) Yet that doesn't change the basic risk calculus. In his previous post, Sam advocated imposing draconian licensing and observation requirements on what in practice would be the majority of non-trivial CS research. He advocated this on the basis of the potential risk that as-yet-to-be-developed hypothetical AIs might pose to human beings. I did a short post on it here: http://adamierymenko.com/did-sam-altman-of-y-combinator-just-start-a-campaign-to-license-and-regulate-all-cs-research/ http://adamierymenko.com/did-sam-altman-of-y-combinator-just... In addition to what I wrote there, I think that the risk of dramatically slowing progress in CS/AI also has to be taken into account. There is risk of doing and there is the risk of not doing. The problem is that we currently face a number of existential risks -- like catastrophic economic collapse due to fossil fuel depletion -- where the majority of the risk is in the "risk of not doing" category. We know with total certainty that if we continue business as usual with no change, our civilization will collapse. It's simple physics and high school math -- exponential growth in consumption of a finite resource without any substitution or path to replacement can only end in one way. Smart computers might help us crack tough problems like fusion, safe and scalable fission, better batteries to make renewable energy more practical, etc. That in turn might help us avoid an absolutely real, tangible, non-hypothetical, definite existential risk. I see no reason to hamstring that kind of progress to defend against extremely hypothetical low-probability risks. That's why I consider Sam's suggestions to regulate CS research more dangerous than any risk posed by speculative AI scenarios. I am not opposed to all regulation, but I am opposed to regulations based on extremely hypothetical hand-wavey risks. I'm also opposed to regulations that are virtually impossible to define accurately or enforce fairly. Regulations should be clear, objective, rationally justified by tangible problems or risks, and minimal. We should have regulations around, say, the use of nuclear materials, but that's because we know for an absolute fact that it is dangerous. We should have financial regulations because we know financial fraud has happened and will continue to happen without them. ... etc. But I positively cringe at the imposition of ill-defined broad regulations based on fear-mongering and "precautionary principle" thinking -- a.k.a. institutionalized paranoia and cowardice. Such regulations can do nothing other than halt progress in the name of vague paranoia. Make no mistake: Sam's proposal in his previous post would halt all non-trivial CS research, or at least would slow it to such a crawl that it would effectively stop. It would also cause a mass exodus from the field, since nobody wants to operate under that kind of nonsense. Given that CS is the primary driver now of progress in other fields, that would also likely halt major progress in energy, materials, propulsion, transportation, etc. If you read my blog post above, I take this in almost a conspiracy direction and speculate that this is some sort of political power play to lock down the field. The reason for this is that I find it hard to believe that someone of Sam's intellect and education would not realize the implications of what he's suggesting.

ryan_j_naughton 12y ago

http://imgur.com/gallery/5hiUM1e http://imgur.com/gallery/5hiUM1e More interesting failed technology predictions.

bbcbasic 12y ago

Just add 'prima facie' to your predication and you've covered your ass. I predict Bitcoin to $10k sometime in the next 5 years. Prima facie of course!

dxbydt 12y ago

I don't want to go all Clinton here, but, please, lets first define "prediction". Here are some predictions that have general consensus- 1. You will die someday ( so will I ) 2. The Bay Area will experience an earthquake in next decade 3. A few islands will go under due to sea level rise. I wouldn't like to call the above predictions - they are too sun-will-rise-in-the-east obvious. Its like looking at the dumbarton bridge & predicting - someday that bridge will fall. That's a biblical prediction - all standing things must fall, bridge is a standing thing, ergo, given enough wear and tear, it too will crumble and fall.The oldest standing bridge in the world is like 2800 years old & is in a much more geologically stable place than the Bay area, so what chance does dumbarton have ? Now here are what I call predictions - 1. qqq $200 by 2018 2. esn replaces fizzbuzz in 2019 :) 3. cnn,rnn,esn become middle school curriculum in 2020 I mean, here you have a reasonable level of confusion. Yet, if you plot the probability over time for each of those predictions, the slope is definitely positive. qqq has doubled in the past 3 years, give it another 3 years & it'll probably double again. Given this pervasive SMI fetish, it's only logical that startups replace their fizzbuzz with "in the next 20 minutes, code up an echo state network in haskell". And if sama's actually right, cnns & rnns are going to get so commonplace society is going to want middle schoolers to ace their exams with questions on "ten key differences between the recurrent neural net & the convolution neural net" instead of the pedestrian garbage we teach them now - "on a z3, if 1+2=3 and 1+1=2, how much is 3+3 ?" So the poor kids instead of sweating bullets & laboring through convoluted reasoning like "since 1 + 2 is 3, so 2 +1 is 3 per abelian, and 1 + 1 is 2, that means 3 + 1 per cayley unique column entries must be 1, which implies 3 is the identity, so 3 + 3 must be 3 as well. Ergo 3+3=3. Voila!" can actually make useful technological predictions about which esn based startup will cross a trillion dollar market cap by the time the kid hits puberty.

Rmilb 12y ago
What is esn?
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Echo_state_network

compbio 12y ago

The Navy revealed the embryo of an electronic computer today that it expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself and be conscious of its existence. [...] Later Perceptrons will be able to recognize people and call out their names and instantly translate speech in one language to speech and writing in another language. - The New York Times in 1958 after a press conference with Rosenblatt. ("New Navy Device Learns By Doing; Psychologist Shows Embryo of Computer Designed to Read and Grow Wiser") We now have walking, talking, object recognizing, writing, self-replicating, face-detecting, text-to-speech converting, and translating computers. All at a scale and accuracy surpassing us mere mortals. We do not know enough about "being conscious of our existence" to measure this in other animals and digital life forms. Perhaps "humans predicting future predictive capability of machines" is fundamentally flawed. Perhaps the above article drew an unnecessary amount of ire and criticism. Probably a fuzzy combination of the two.

nostromo 12y ago
Self-replicating? > A self-replicating machine is a construct that is capable of reproducing itself autonomously using raw materials found in the environment, thus exhibiting self-replication in a way analogous to that found in nature.
- compbio 12y ago
  I meant reproducing (like in the quote), but sure: http://www.apollon.uio.no/video/a_robot_e.mp4 http://www.apollon.uio.no/video/a_robot_e.mp4 And the press release: “In the future, robots must be able to solve tasks in deep mines on distant planets, in radioactive disaster areas, in hazardous landslip areas and on the sea bed beneath the Antarctic. These environments are so extreme that no human being can cope. Everything needs to be automatically controlled. Imagine that the robot is entering the wreckage of a nuclear power plant. It finds a staircase that no-one has thought of. The robot takes a picture. The picture is analysed. The arms of one of the robots is fitted with a printer. This produces a new robot, or a new part for the existing robot, which enables it to negotiate the stairs.” -2014 Kyrre Glette "Using 3D printers to print out self-learning robots"

guelo 12y ago

This post feels childish and passive aggressive. Just make your argument, if you have one.

keithwhor 12y ago
Exactly my thoughts. A hint of condescension and lack of self-awareness - the camp Sam Altman seems to be a part of ("regulate AI, it's an existential threat to humanity!") is just as much a prediction of the future as anything else. Yet, somehow, he seems to be subtly implying that he's "more" correct. Marc Andreessen has been relatively level-headed about the topic of AI recently on Twitter, and it would be nice to see other industry figureheads be less emotionally involved and more scientifically rigorous in their assessment of the industry. The debate is devolving into an ego battle (especially with a post like this!), and it's rather unfortunate. Edit: Additionally, Altman appears to be primarily attacking a strawman with this article. "Superhuman" intelligence already exists. The emergent intelligence (via technological amplification) of society is, by definition, super-human. What's less realistic is anticipating a human-like artificial intelligence that would, in any way, represent an existential threat to the human race. There are many, many problems with the latter argument. (From a technological, philosophical, economic, and evolutionary perspective.)

dustingetz 12y ago

What about flying cars and jetpacks?

sitkack 12y ago

Arthur C Clarke's, "Hazards of Prophecy" is required reading, http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/stored/futurists_hazards_of_prophecy.pdf http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/Sci-Tech-Society/stored/futurists... and frankly should have been referenced in the post and here already. Cite!

GrantS 12y ago
Thank you for the link, that was a wonderful essay. And you've just reminded me that I've had an old used copy of Clarke's "Profiles of the Future" (the apparent source of this article) sitting on a shelf in the next room unread. Time to change that.

eldude 12y ago

Fun fact, some of those (obviously false) statements regarding nuclear energy may in fact be true depending on interpretation of their original meaning. We still have yet to harness mass-energy-equivalence for power. Modern nuclear energy, both fission and fusion, are more accurately nuclear potential energy (like a hydro electric plant and water). From Wikipedia[1]: E = mc2 has frequently been invoked as an explanation for the origin of energy in nuclear processes specifically, but such processes can be understood as converting nuclear potential energy in a manner precisely analogous to the way that chemical processes convert electrical potential energy. I don't know, but it seems reasonable to me to conclude that when Einstein stated the following, he may have been referring to mass-energy-equivalence rather than nuclear potential energy, which in fact continues to hold true for the foreseeable future: There is not the slightest indication that [nuclear energy] will ever be obtainable. It would mean that the atom would have to be shattered at will. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass–energy_equivalence

praptak 12y ago

"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future." -- Niels Bohr

Animats 12y ago

"Space travel is utter bilge." - Dr. Richard van der Reit Wooley, Astronomer Royal, British government, 1956 He was right. He did the math - it's not possible to get any significant payload to Earth orbit with a single-stage vehicle propelled by chemical fuels. With multi-stage rockets, it's possible to put a little mass in orbit with a huge booster. That's just low earth orbit. Going further out is even more expensive. Going to the moon required something the size of a 50-story building to move a payload the size of a SUV. Nobody has bothered for over 40 years now.

baq 12y ago
OTOH orbit is halfway to everywhere.
- aaronem 12y ago
  As long as you don't mind a travel time measured in centuries.
- Iftheshoefits 12y ago
  Orbit is precisely halfway to the boundary of a region of space for which double of the to-orbit energy is required to attain. It's barely "anywhere" much less "everywhere."
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    It's a saying, "If you get to LEO, you're halfway to anywhere in the Solar System", and it reflects the amount of deltaV you need to spend to reach Earth orbit, which happens to be around the half of what you need to complete the trip to another body. (NOTE: you lose a lot of deltaV fighting air resistance)

csentropy 12y ago

How about if we already have created a superhuman AI, that is tricking us humans into believing that it does not exist? And thus preventing us from building something else that might be more friendly to the human race and counter it's bad intentions? What if @sama has somehow been coopted by that AI's plan to stop further development of AI? :) On a more serious note, no one can predict human behavior to the degree of accuracy needed to call it deterministic. So, it is unlikely that we can predict a superhuman AI's behavior with any degree of accuracy. In other words, we just do not know what we are talking about. Does risk calculus make any sense in the domain of true uncertainty?

leot 12y ago
Relevant, and very worth reading: http://www.simulation-argument.com/ http://www.simulation-argument.com/

Animats 12y ago

Prediction: in 5-15 years, there will be a corporation mostly run by an AI. Visualize Goldman Sachs run by an AI program. Corporations don't have "consciousness", nor do they need it. Maximizing shareholder value is the goal. Machine learning systems are good at optimizing for numerical goals.

candeira 12y ago
Corporations are already AIs, just as accounting departments before 1940 were already computers, only made of people processing marks on paper instead of being made of transistors processing electrons.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Indeed. They are an interesting model of a completely alien mind, and fortunately this mind runs very, very slow for now.
karmacondon 12y ago
This concept has been around for awhile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organization http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decentralized_Autonomous_Organi... I think it lends itself well to fleets of driverless cabs
compbio 12y ago
AI at Google knows which document to show for your query and which advertisement you are likely to click on. Goldman Sachs uses machine learned algorithms already. Running a company requires vision, creativity, leadership, human interaction and usability. If we allow for a conscious AI to house in non-biological neurons, then we should also allow Turing-complete companies to have a consciousness. Visualize every Google employee with a two-way radio transmitting signals just like neurons would do. Would such a Google-brain be conscious and capable of new and unique mental states, or more familiar states like stress?

vilhelm_s 12y ago

> X-rays are a hoax. -Lord Kelvin, ca. 1900 Gwern Branwen did a bunch of research to track down this quote, concluding: > there there is no reliable primary source for any Kelvin quotation running "X-rays are a hoax"; and there's some reasonable doubt about what he actually believed in the short interval between reading newspaper articles (I think we've all had the experience of seeing newspaper articles on some new scientific proposal which bore scant resemblance to reality!) and getting Rontgen's paper & photos. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:William_Thomson#.22X-rays_will_prove_to_be_a_hoax.22 https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:William_Thomson#.22X-rays...

Iftheshoefits 12y ago

"Space travel is utter bilge" is correct, in my opinion, from one viewpoint: specifically with respect to its cost effectiveness along any axis you care to measure save one: the emotionally-driven ego/pride/curiosity axis. I really wish the trillions "invested" in manned space travel over the decades had instead gone to basic research in biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and some of the applied research disciplines that derive from these.

chigiskob 12y ago
Trillions? The total amount (2014 nominal) given to NASA since 1958 is less than 1.1 trillion. If you don't think there have been advancements in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics as a result of NASA's research then I'm at a loss.
- wtbob 12y ago
  > Trillions? The total amount (2014 nominal) given to NASA since 1958 is less than 1.1 trillion. Thus it's likely that the sums involved across all nations in the world are 2 trillion or more. > If you don't think there have been advancements in biology, chemistry, physics, and mathematics as a result of NASA's research then I'm at a loss. Oh, they certainly were, but those advances were for the most part accidental and incidental.

vincetogo 12y ago

I suspect that the augmentation of human intelligence through tech is something we're more likely to get to before full-on AI. Assuming it's unaffordable for most of us, I'm much more concerned about a caste of super-intelligent, super-rich humans than computers that have no history of violence or hunger for power.

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

This post seems to be a response to some criticism of Sam's opinions in other blog posts. The relevant line is this one > Superhuman machine intelligence is prima facie ridiculous. > - Many otherwise smart people, 2015 I was among those criticizing Sam's point of view, but not because I think the idea of superhuman machine intelligence is ridiculous. I don't know one way or the other whether we'll achieve it or not, but I don't consider it impossible. What I, and I believe many others as well, was criticizing was Sam's insistence that the current techniques have the potential to cause such great harm that they need to be regulated and that extreme measures need to be taken to address the possible harm of modern AI and ML techniques. This type of fear-driven reasoning is wildly out of proportion with the facts, as anyone who does research in the area of is familiar with the research in the area can attest to. Modern machine learning techniques are heuristic methods to find optima in functions over high dimensional spaces. Neural networks and support vector machines produce impressive results on image classification and other well defined problems, but are far from general purpose techniques that can be easily applied to any given problem. So, the bullet points: 1. Current ML techniques aren't anywhere near creating general intelligence, nor are there areas of research that appear likely to yield superhuman levels of intelligence in the near to moderate-term future. 2. This doesn't mean superhuman levels of machine intelligence are impossible, just that we don't have any current methods that are likely to lead to them. 3. Taking action against an ill-defined, likely phantasmic threat is neither cost effective nor helpful for the progress of AI and ML. 4. When the people who have real, expert knowledge of something all tell you one thing and the people who have something to gain from getting your attention by promoting sensational opinions and cherry-picked facts tell you something else you should rationally assess their motives and weight that when deciding who's views more closely approximate the truth.

rndn 12y ago
Regarding 1, 2 and 4: It certainly seems like a long way to create something like the human brain, but perhaps there are far simpler systems that yield general intelligence. We don't seem to be very good at predicting the invention of algorithms, so with all due respect I doubt experts can provide reliable predictions. Hardware as powerful as the simplest models of the human brain already exists and growing computational resources enable studies of neural networks at an increasing rate. I think, in that light, the claim that the breakthrough is far in the future seems to be about as strong as saying it could happen within the next ten years. I've asked this question in the discussion yesterday as well, but I didn't receive any response: What kind of breakthrough do you expect after which it would be justified to be concerned about general intelligence? And how do you justify that it's unlikely to expect that surpassing human intelligence is not just a matter of scaling it up at that point, i.e. that the invention can be regulated quickly enough once it exists?

martinesko36 12y ago

More of this: http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~fringwal/stoopid.lis

ocdtrekkie 12y ago

Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking all agree AI research is dangerous. Google does not seem to feel there is a credible risk and is doing it anyways.

sudioStudio64 12y ago

My criticism of Sam's prediction is really centered around the extreme disparity between the concerns of the digerati wealthy elites and normal people.

thomasmarriott 12y ago

Survivor bias strikes again.

testingonprod 12y ago

Honestly, I think this whole hoopla about AI is overblown. I think when we reach the point where this discussion matters, we will know it, and know it quite obviously. Right now, we're at a point in AI where Amazon recommends me new types of deodorant immediately after I just placed an order for some. That tells you the state of AI and if we really need to be worried about some of the things that these pundits are, imo, dreaming about. Let progress happen, and we'll deal with it as it comes. No need for pre-mature fear to halt the speed of progress.