Comment by crimsonalucard

8 years ago

We humans are blackbox physical machines that processes physical inputs to produce physical outputs.

Whether that input goes through processing that is "spiritual" is besides the point. Reproducing "spirituality" is not the goal. The goal is to replicate what is "observable." To produce a machine that when given the same inputs as that given to a human will produce identical (or "better") outputs as the human.

This is definitely an achievable goal as for every set of inputs and output pairs in existence an infinite amount of different machines can be constructed to replicate that exact input/output functionality.

The "spirituality" that goes on within this blackbox machine or humans is irrelevant. It's not even a word that is clearly defined. We aren't trying to replicate "spirituality." We are trying to make a machine that only from an observational standpoint is clearly superior or indistinguishable to a human intelligence.

The understanding the theoretical possibility of singularity is purely within the grasp of a typical person.

Imagine a chat bot designed to be indistinguishable from a human chatter. The inputs are text queries and the outputs are text queries. The domain is every possible text query and the range is every possible text response.

For purposes of simplicity lets say the text input and output is limited to 500 chars. This makes the possible input and output pairs finite. To create a chat bot identical to a human you simply need to create a machine that maps all inputs to certain outputs. Think of it like a giant hash map of strings to strings. Given enough time and enough memory this can be done.

The goal of current AI is to solve this problem more efficiently. To produce logical cores that can dynamically generate outputs from inputs rather than following a gigantic mapping. It can be thought of as form of data compression. The data is the mapping; the compression of that data is the logical core.

The fact that a mapping can even be constructed at all is by logical induction, a proof that a singularity is possible and thus completely invalidating your initial statement of:

>I don't think anything like the singularity will ever be possible

3 comments

crimsonalucard

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laszlokorte  8 years ago

Only that the chat response is not just function of the 500 character query but also of all previous queries:

You could ask the bot things like "Did I ever tell you about [...]?" or "What was the last time we talked about X?"

  • crimsonalucard  8 years ago

    Yeah I left that out to simplify the explanation. In this case, the mapping would just be more complex. Lets say we limit the memory of the machine to just 10 million of the previous queries.

    Then the hash map could have keys equivalent to the concatenation of 10 million previous queries + current query. This increases the domain to 500^26 * 10 million possible keys. The underlying machine is still a hash map and you can build something equivalent or greater than human intelligence using this technique alone.

    If you feel 10 million queries aren't enough we can increase the space to 10 billion queries thereby covering every possible range of textual inputs that can be achieved in a human lifetime. I think this is more than adequate for the mapping to cover a chatbot that is equivalent to human intelligence.

    Again the goal of AI would not be to build such a machine but to compress the data. Essentially converting hard data into logic or in other words trading space at the cost of greater processing time. The theoretical exercise is just to show that intelligence and spirituality at a fundamental level is just a giant data mapping of inputs to outputs.

    Thereby even under this scenario, a singularity is still possible.