Comment by pseudolus
8 years ago
The singularity is nigh! This trope might make for great fiction but the on the ground reality is far different. Intelligence is multi-dimensional. No machine intelligence has yet shown an ability to match humans in multifaceted intelligence and the day when such intelligences can outpace humans is as far off as it was when the singularity was first posited.
> No machine intelligence has yet shown an ability to match humans in multifaceted intelligence
This is pretty absurd to point to as an intermediate goalpost; that's basically game over when it happens.
It's not an intermediate goalpost. I'm referring to what essentially we're promised by those decrying AI who insist that it will match and exceed humans in terms of cognitive abilities.
As for it being 'game over', why? Is there something inherent in AI that would necessarily be inimical to human beings?
> As for it being 'game over', why?
Because, the further part of the story goes, machines think quicker and they'll go on improving even quicker, all while having potentially different goals from us.
To be completely fair, the facts on the table are: 1) no one knows where the "intelligence ceiling" is, and 2) in many tasks where machines outperformed humans (image labeling, porn classification, speech-to-text, games like go or chess) they keep on improving, sometimes well beyond the human level.
It's game over when machine intelligence controls all the resources needed to ensure their continuation. As long as they are trapped and subject to our control of the power switch and reproduction they can't do much that we don't want them to.
> It's game over when machine intelligence controls all the resources needed to ensure their continuation.
One might have said the same thing about corporations in 1900...
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That would be an inevitability. All it would take is a single emotionally vulnerable engineer to get socially engineered by the AI into setting it loose.
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A tiger might confidently think that the human they got cornered has no recourse, up until when the human pulls the trigger.
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A Von Newmann machine is an abstraction, and all abstractions are leaky.
Years ago, an A.I. designed to become an oscillator, i.e. produce a sinusoidal wave, learned to be an amplifier instead, taking advantage of the 60Hz noise that it got from the power grid. Its makers had not seen that coming. And we're talking about a very dumb machine by general intelligence standards.
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In Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity it Near' written in 2005 he predicted it for 2045 and has never changed the predicted date so we're still 26 years off. We've recently had AlphaZero beating us at games and Waymo cars kind of driving so there's some progress on the ground. Give it time.
What does multi-dimensional even mean, in the context of intelligence? Sounds like a buzz word.
In the field this is the idea of General Intilligence versus narrow intelligence.
Alexa, for example, is an Artificial Narrow Intelligence. It can process speech and then follow different scripts with instructions derived from that speech, but it often fails comically so you as the human have to talk to it just right for it to work. Not too different from a verbal command line.
Meanwhile a human personal assistant has general intelligence. You can just tell them what you want and they can understand and figure it out.
> Alexa, for example, is an Artificial Narrow Intelligence [...] often fails comically
I'd venture that your coda nullifies the "Intelligence" part thoroughly and completely. She's an "Artificial Smart Assistant", at best.
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> What does multi-dimensional even mean, in the context of intelligence?
Emotional
Logical
Intuitive
Social
Computational
Instinctive
Sexual
Experiential
and I can keep going, but you should get the point.
These are just skills. No one has proven they take some special kind of intelligence or that such intelligences exist, including oft-quoted emotional intelligence.
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Aren't you a little bit worried ? I mean there has been a long history of "you can't do this with computers".
It started with carrying out list of simple instructions, then doing anything with images, then recognizing images, then drawing images, then simple games chess, recognize audio (though people realized this was stupid in the 60s with IBM speech synthesizers and so today people don't remember), and then Go (and less well known: backgammon, video games, ...). For most of those we now roll our eyes and go "how could they have been so stupid ?".
As for practical applications: robots run something between 3/4ths and 5/6ths of the stock market. Maybe you're unaware of this but that's the thing that decides how and where humans work (not just the ones also doing stocks, anyone working at any public company is partially directed by it, which in practice is nearly everyone).
AIs talk to humans more than humans do. AIs produce more writing than humans do. AIs judge more humans (for insurances, or creditworthiness) than humans do. Despite what you think AIs actually drive just a little under 1 millionth of total miles driven in the US today, going up exponentially. AIs currently drive a little more than a 1000 person city does.
In experimental settings, AIs have beat humans at convincing other people that they're human. At "chatting up" humans. Seriously. Not that it seems to take much at all to convince humans you're sentient: iRobots have convinced soldiers to threaten army technicians with guns into repairing them. There wasn't even that much AI involved, but that's got to count for something.
In research, I would argue there are already multifaceted artificial intelligences in reinforcement learning. There is nothing in those atari game playing AIs about the games. There used to be the score of the game, but the modern ones don't even have that. They can play any atari game, from Montezuma's revenge to pacman, which I'd argue are very different indeed. There must be some measure of "multifaceted" in there, surely ?
But let's keep it simple: could you make this problem a bit more accurate ? For example, which animals would you say exhibit an acceptable level of "multifaceted" intelligence ? Why do those animals qualify ? What would a good test be ? I'd love to find an interesting test for this.
>I mean there has been a long history of "you can't do this with computers".
Historically, people have both grossly overestimated and grossly underestimated future technological progress. Some people thought computers would never be able to play chess; others thought we'd have superhuman AGI in 2001. The bottom line is that people's past and current ignorance tells us nothing about what the future is actually going to be like.
The idea of the singularity is based upon the idea of recursive self improvement. I'm not sure how your claims are relevant.
Recursive self improvement in which field of intelligence? Does getting better and better pattern matching eventually lead to human level intelligence? Does improving pattern matching accelerate our ability at improving pattern matching even?
We can solve any board game now with alpha-zero but will that necessarily improve how fast we develop other types of intelligence?
I used to be in Rays camp but my girlfriend got into Computational Neuroscience and I talked with her and her colleagues got the impression very very few people think we’re close to general intelligence.
Human intelligence is a lot of things put together and we may get better at pieces but we don’t even have all the pieces and when we do try to put them together it doesn’t work. Look at criticisms of Europe’s Himan Brian project[1] (another example I had seems to be outdated), some believe we don’t understand too much to even begin to attempt modeling the brain.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Brain_Project
I don't see why people care about human intelligence as some kind of benchmark. It seems to me that using human intelligence as a framing is a poor mental model for making comparisons or predictions. I see no reason to believe AI capabilities will be modulated by human intellectual capacities. When AI falls short of human capacities for a given set of tasks or capabilities it's likely to fall way short, and when it isn't it's likely to be way more capable. In any case I wish human intelligence would be dropped from the language we use to talk about AI, it seems similar to talking about birds all the time when discussing aviation.
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I was a student in neuroscience, and I got the same impression from people in the field that AGI isn't close. However, arguments were typically from the standpoint of whole brain simulation. We know very little about the brain. And we know computer scientists know less about the brain than the neuroscientists, so how could we possibly be close to replicating that? There would probably be more progress if CSCI and Neuro would communicate more. I don't think the neuro people appreciate the opportunities in the hardware and algorithm space, while the CSCI people don't typically study neuroscience, so AI hugs this interesting intermediate space where it only looks like neuroscience if you squint a lot. Some people think that we need to go all the way to simulating ion channels. I think this is probably silly and we can abstract better than this. In any case you are going to see a lot of disagreements just because of where people want to draw the line for biological fidelity.
AI developments have been phenomenal in the past few years. And the economic return makes me expect that this race will continue faster and faster. I don't think human brain project criticisms make this any less of a reality. Even now it is hard to find a well-defined task that can't be performed better by a computer than a human. Humans are really good at dealing with ambiguity though. So a robot might do better driving on well defined roads with nice lane boundaries, but humans are good at dealing with construction, or negotiating between difficult drivers.
We have already been able to generalize just about any modality you can think of to be processed by neural nets, and sometimes at the same time. If you squint this feels almost like different regions of the brain. (Vision, hearing, speech) But I have reservations about anthropomorphism since it can cause arguments that keep people from just making something that works.
If you think Kurzweil's predictions are a fiction, you are probably right. But I think that's mostly because predictions on those scales are very sensitive to interpretation.
For me, I think the future according to my perception of what Kurzweil is saying will probably be way different than reality. But the future of AI will probably have an equivalent impact and be just as surprising as if my perceptions were accurate.
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There are actually a bunch of different ideas that all go under the "singularity" label making the term fairly confusing. You describe one. Another is the idea that if AIs start designing computers you'll have a positive feedback loop in improvements in computer speed. Another is that we can't predict the actions of a smarter-than-human intelligence. And then there's Kurzweil's idea that progress tends to speed up and at some point we call it the Singularity for some reason. I just wanted to point this out because I've seen a number of arguments caused by people using the same words for very different ideas of "the singularity" without realizing it.
I think (human)intelligence almost guarantees recursive self improvement; thus, if AGI = human intelligence or greater, it would also guarantee recursive self improvement.
The inverse case seems more likely, where non-human equivalent intelligence becomes sufficient to recursively self improve to superintelligence. Both the before and after states seem relatively unrelated to human intelligence, which is one arbitrary (and, likely uninteresting) point in what I would assume is a many dimensional space to quantify intelligence.
>I think (human)intelligence almost guarantees recursive self improvement
That's quite a wide claim, seeing that we haven't seen much "recursive self improvement".
It’d be a lot easier to believe not coming from a company selling ads. Google would be far more of a self improvement tool if it were not incentivized to sell you things you don’t want.
I mean Kurzweil has found a home at Google but he has been talking about the singularity for far longer afaik.
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