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Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

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Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#11

Post by loup-vaillant »

politician wrote: post #5

The Singularity concept strikes me as a sort of wishful thinking. Technology advancing so fast that we no longer can control or understand it? Yeah, that already happened to my parent's generation with AOL, yet here I am texting this on my iPhone. New generations understand intuitively what the previous generation understood theoretically. Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI.

Remember there is 3 main schools of thought regarding the "Singularity" concept, which are more or less compatible.

Accelerating change. Basically Kurzweil's view. Exponential improvement of machines, which will eventually reach then exceed human intelligence in every single domain, or something like that.

Even horizon. If we ever build something that achieve greater-than-human intelligence, we cannot predict whatever it will do to the world, because we're just not as smart as that thing.

Intelligence explosion. If we ever build an AI (or something similar) that is more effective at doing AI research than we are, then that AI would be even more effective… and foom you have something that would leave Skynet in the dust, so it'd better be our friend[1]. Note that the first iteration of that thing may not need to be smarter than us: it just have to be able to build something smarter than itself[2] (and of course, the self-improvement cycle must not hit a ceiling too soon).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_AI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_AI

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#12

Post by ambler0 »

jerf wrote: post #7
DanielStraight wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling out someone for not doing their homework seems somewhere in the DH1-2 range: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html There are some good points in Kurzweil's response, but the ones about Paul Allen are definitely not them. I think his best point was about extrapolating function from individual cells or structures, without needing to understand every single cell or structure individually.

I disagree. When one "addresses" a long-standing, well-thought out argument with off-the-cuff snap statement or something only slightly more thought-out, it is perfectly permissible to call them out as not being serious. It's like going into a serious religion debate with "Evil exists, therefore God does not. Ah-ha, you are defeated!", or "God must exist because something must have started it all, so there!" as if in…

I think your comparison to arguments about religion is apt. Many of the opponents to Kurzweil's ideas remind me of those whose opposition to the possibility of a godless universe amounts to, "I can't imagine it, so I don't believe it."

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#13

Post by loup-vaillant »

0x12 wrote: post #10
politician wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Memristors are the silicon equivalent of neurons -- a time-dependent function with state. In mammals, the connectivity of millions of neurons enable the emergence of intelligence. I don't see any reason why a silicon-based neuron network of sufficient size isn't capable of the same. Now, that's entirely different from purposeful design of an AI such that it speaks English and knows what I like for breakfast. I don't…

A memristor can be simulated by a couple of formulas and a few variables. (just like neural networks can be simulated). In spite of our ability to simulate this sort of process for decades we have not succeeded in building a strong AI, the difference in having a hardware version is one of performance (just like Neural Network chips are typically a lot faster than their software simulated counterparts). There is no re…

Note that even hardware speedup need insights to be successfully implemented. Seeing that hardware does improve at a regular pace, it looks like insights do pop up regularly.

Therefore, it isn't such a stretch to think that (i) insights may continue to pop up reliably for "a while", and (ii) not just in the domain of hardware speed-ups.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#15

Post by loup-vaillant »

shin_lao wrote: post #4

Science progress is not just a question of intelligence. Therefore, even if computers become more intelligent than humans, it is doubtful a "singularity" will occur.

If not, then what?

Even while I agree with Alan Kay when he says that IQ Imagine we manage to build a machine that produce more insights than Newton. That particular form of intelligence would be quite likely to trigger a singularity, don't you think?

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#16

Post by modeless »

0x12 wrote: post #6
politician wrote: post #5

The Singularity concept strikes me as a sort of wishful thinking. Technology advancing so fast that we no longer can control or understand it? Yeah, that already happened to my parent's generation with AOL, yet here I am texting this on my iPhone. New generations understand intuitively what the previous generation understood theoretically. Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI.

> Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI. Why would they? Is strong AI a function of storage capacity or speed? An AI running at 1/100th of what a future AI may be capable of is still an AI and I can't see how a mere improvement of a couple of orders of magnitude would do what decades of Moore's law have failed to do so far. If strong AI was just a matter of speed then we could theoretically take any…

Is strong AI a function of storage capacity or speed?

Yes, absolutely! I actually think the most appropriate benchmark is memory bandwidth, which hasn't been improving as fast as FLOPS or storage capacity. It's not a matter of running a strong AI at 1/100 speed on today's fastest supercomputer. It would be more like 1 billionth or trillionth speed.

The reason for our disappointingly slow progress in AI over the years is that our hardware is still nowhere near powerful enough to usefully implement the same algorithms as the brain, and we likely won't even develop the right algorithms until we have hardware closer to the requirements, so we can test and iterate.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#18

Post by danilocampos »

politician wrote: post #5

The Singularity concept strikes me as a sort of wishful thinking. Technology advancing so fast that we no longer can control or understand it? Yeah, that already happened to my parent's generation with AOL, yet here I am texting this on my iPhone. New generations understand intuitively what the previous generation understood theoretically. Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI.

> Technology advancing so fast that we no longer can control or understand it? ... Yeah, that already happened to my parent's generation with AOL

That's not the singularity, else we'd have had several singularities across several generations as certain groups of people fail to grasp the utility or value of printing presses, steam engines or atomic bombs.

The notion of the singularity suggests a point past which it is impossible to predict the future.

Global networking, in its basic form, was entirely predictable to certain technologists for decades before its existence. In fact, the original Spaceship Earth ride at Epcot nailed many peaces of later commonplace technologies – even multiplayer gaming. Hell, I read of a B'ahai priest who predicted the world wide web in the 30's.

Meanwhile, a singularity posits a confluence of technologies, connectedness and social change that renders all events past its arrival entirely impossible to predict.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#19

Post by losvedir »

Ugh, not this again.

That would mean that the design of the brain would require hundreds of trillions of bytes of information. Yet the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome.

I believe it was on HN that this discussion came up before, but that's a short sighted way of looking at it. Basically, it doesn't take into account all the interactions of the environment required to turn that "source code" into a person. Sure, the DNA would be sufficient if you were able to accurately simulate cellular actions, protein folding, and physics in general, but we just can't do that yet, and it doesn't look like we'll be able to any time soon.

Re: Kurzweil's rebuttal to Paul Allen

#20

Post by paganel »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #11
politician wrote: post #5

The Singularity concept strikes me as a sort of wishful thinking. Technology advancing so fast that we no longer can control or understand it? Yeah, that already happened to my parent's generation with AOL, yet here I am texting this on my iPhone. New generations understand intuitively what the previous generation understood theoretically. Even so, I fully expect memristors to deliver strong AI.

Remember there is 3 main schools of thought regarding the "Singularity" concept, which are more or less compatible. Accelerating change . Basically Kurzweil's view. Exponential improvement of machines, which will eventually reach then exceed human intelligence in every single domain, or something like that. Even horizon . If we ever build something that achieve greater-than-human intelligence, we cannot predict whate…

Also, we should remind ourselves that we live on a planet with limited physical resources. So, assuming that we build something that could exponentially out-smart us, that thing would still need to have access to physical resources for which what is available on this planet might not just be enough. I see it 2 ways: the thing/it/whatever we want to call it either manages to expand from this planet/solar system before it auto-destroys itself, or it just dies off for lack of available resources.
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