Comment by gfodor
8 years ago
The idea of the singularity is based upon the idea of recursive self improvement. I'm not sure how your claims are relevant.
8 years ago
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 Look at criticisms of Europe’s Himan Brian project[1] (another example I had seems to be outdated), some believe we don’t understand too much to even begin to attempt modeling the brain.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.
Talking about human intelligence is necessary because a computer that can perform a task better than a human can perform the same task doesn't mean it's intelligent, e.g. my iphone is not intelligent because stockfish can destroy me at chess.
Intelligence is the ability to reason abstractly. Humans can do this. It's not clear that anything else can.
That's because surpassing human general intelligence in any non-negligible amount is dangerous to humans.
Because meaning is defined by humans; there is no other conceivable definition of "meaning". An AI that acts in some non-human fashion is no better than random noise.
It's a good benchmark if you are hoping the AI will succeed at a job currently done by humans. Such as,say, AI research.
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.
Even now it is hard to find a well-defined task that can't be performed better by a computer than a human.
I think these are well defined tasks:
1. Go to a bar and convince the best looking man or woman to come home with you for recreational sex.
2. Do this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ic7RNS4Dfo while being crushingly cute.
3. Negotiate Brexit.
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.
He’s also been wrong his entire life. There’s a reason Google hired him: to make AI look good, despite being a near meaningless term.
Edit: diction.
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