Comment by dmreedy
8 years ago
I disagree. I think his rhetoric feeds the 'we already understand it' mythology around the nature of AI technologies, and worse the state of our own understanding of the system they claim to model, and directly contributes to the harmful and frustrating boom-and-bust cycles that AI goes through. I'd lump him in the same category as Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking in this space; sellers of fantasy.
I admire his optimism, but I think it's irresponsible to sell it like he does.
Marvin Minsky ("Father" of AI at MIT) made the bold claim in 70s that we will be marrying robots by 2000. After it didn't come to fruition, it led most AI researchers to take stock of the situation and realize these goals aren't that trivial.
Similarly, if we don't have bold predictions like these that we can actually measure within our lifetimes, we fall prey to fantasies that cannot be measured. Once this prediction fails miserably (I think) it helps many others to re-calibrate all their BS.
Perhaps something operational like, "We will marry robots" is measurable. But "outpace human intelligence"? We're arguably incapable of measuring human intelligence right now, much less artificial intelligence, much less comparing between the two. We don't even really have a good operational definition for what the word 'intelligence' means. The closest we have is the Turing Test, which, while pragmatic, does not answer the question, "is this computer smarter than a human", if it answers any question at all.
I'd argue that Kurzweil is selling precisely these kinds of fantasies that cannot be measured.
For a more recent working definition of intelligence, see the work of Marcus Hutter and Shane Legg on Universal Intelligence.
That we don't understand or can't define intelligence is a popular trope not grounded in reality. There are entire scientific and well-established fields that study digital and biological intelligence.
You don't think it will pass the bullshit test if someone claims this computer is more intelligent than humans, and vastly more so ? How is that not measurable or easily taken down?
If we can't do that, I would argue that the computer has indeed become very intelligent, even if we can't define it. Just like beauty: we don't have a good mathematical model for what makes certain humans beautiful, but we all sure know it when we see it.
"Marvin Minsky ("Father" of AI at MIT) made the bold claim in 70s that we will be marrying robots by 2000."
I admit, not the year 2000 and overly snarky, but people do marry computers nowadays. [0]
If we think it is what is(the computer controlled mask), we start to believe it really is what it is, a mind(controlling a mask).
Humans are capable of high degrees of auto-suggestion, up to a point where groups of people, and their dynamics, come into play, and some kind of group-thinking, a cult maybe for lack of a better term, takes over.
At this point all is believable, maybe not so far away. We may trick us into a false AI, not a GAI in any sense mind you, and get stuck with it, because most of us wanted it. And rest rest has been silenced already, that is very easy, as we all know already today.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvEkEhl999g