Thanks for this article. I've always been fascinated by singularity, and even though I don't know too much about it, I'm excited to see the people who fully support your position to create some great conversation on this topic.
The Singularity is not coming
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Re: The Singularity is not coming
#12This is a reasonably plausible argument for progress within fields and paradigm shifts; but consider between fields, and the rate of new field creation. To use the given examples, Newtonian physics, quantum physics and Information Theory began in 1687, 1930 and 1948. That seems quite accelerating (of course you'd need more complete stats to demonstrate this properly). BTW: I disagree that intelligence and imagination…
> Perhaps a mathematical model of computation might help, of computable functions and Kolomogorov/Solomonoff program length to compute them. Using this model, the search space of functions increases exponentially with program length - but at what rate would the number of "interesting" computable functions increase? And with what density (with respect to the search space, i.e. how hard they are to find)?
Like AIXI?
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#13Also, Ray Kurzweil is not known just for his imagination. Some of his research has enabled groundbreaking technologies. For example, he is one of the creators of speech recognition technology (Nuance, which spun out of Kurzweil's company, allegedly powers Siri). I had heard of Kurzweil long before I knew anything about the singularity.
Indeed. However, a number of researchers have had arguably more impact that he did on NN research (such as LeCun), and these people are completely unheard of outside of the NN community. I can't imagine Kurzweil becoming the media star that he is without his singularity books.
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#14This is a reasonably plausible argument for progress within fields and paradigm shifts; but consider between fields, and the rate of new field creation. To use the given examples, Newtonian physics, quantum physics and Information Theory began in 1687, 1930 and 1948. That seems quite accelerating (of course you'd need more complete stats to demonstrate this properly). BTW: I disagree that intelligence and imagination…
While I agree with you that the rate of paradigm shift increases over time, I argue that their average impact/scope decreases. Newtonian physics opened more room for technological progress than quantum mechanics, etc. Earliest inventions have the most impact (the invention of the scientific method having the most impact of all?). So my point is that if you look at paradigm shift rate not in volume but in impact, you'…
Transistors couldn't have been designed without understanding Quantum Mechanics. Bye, bye modern computers.
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#15This is a reasonably plausible argument for progress within fields and paradigm shifts; but consider between fields, and the rate of new field creation. To use the given examples, Newtonian physics, quantum physics and Information Theory began in 1687, 1930 and 1948. That seems quite accelerating (of course you'd need more complete stats to demonstrate this properly). BTW: I disagree that intelligence and imagination…
Intelligence and Imagination could not be more separate. I'm defining intelligence as sheer IQ, analogous to a computers' ability to process information. Imagination is so essentially human in nature that there is no way to describe current AI as "imaginative". For example, the person with the highest IQ in the world is not more creative than the best musician. Some of the smartest minds in the world cannot "think ou…
You started off defining intelligence as something limited and not independently useful, and then you concluded that its presence was limited and not independently useful.
The answer is that it's not actually obvious that "intelligence and imagination could not be more separate" or that "imagination is...essentially human in nature," so when most people talk about AI, they are not excluding those abilities.
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#16I think a good model for "the singularity" is a long straight highway. Stand in the middle and look down its length, and it appears to converge to a singularity in the distance. But when you actually drive there, you see it's just more highway. Basically I believe it's an issue of cultural time perspective. We can't imagine the tools that will be in use in 2112. But, they won't seem so strange to the people of 2111.
I like your highway analogy. Mainly I think the singularity argument suffers from an acute case of perception bias in favour of recent advancements; just as picking any arbitrary point in time and asking a scientist of that era what they thought the most important scientific advancements were. > We can't imagine the tools that will be in use in 2112. Pretty much just the hall-filling computers of the Priests of the T…
I think it's an example of ruthless extrapolation.
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-06-27/ruthless-ex...
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#17I think a good model for "the singularity" is a long straight highway. Stand in the middle and look down its length, and it appears to converge to a singularity in the distance. But when you actually drive there, you see it's just more highway. Basically I believe it's an issue of cultural time perspective. We can't imagine the tools that will be in use in 2112. But, they won't seem so strange to the people of 2111.
Well, I mean when you look at some of the incredibly broken tools that we use today, it is a bit ridiculous:
1). Emacs/Vim are the popular hardcore/moddable editors, despite the severe clunkiness/outdated architecture
2). C/C++ has a huge mindshare despite the fact that it severely reduces the impact of the individual programmer
3). Proprietary tools are falling away, but their entrenched closed gardens are remaining for us to take care of
4). OS design has almost stalled
I think big paradigm shifts are coming at much faster rates than anyone wants to admit. If you are looking at the past to predict what comes tomorrow, you are an idiot, at least in the field of computing. I feel like we are standing on the precipice of a hole so scary no one really wants to look down at it.
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#18This is a reasonably plausible argument for progress within fields and paradigm shifts; but consider between fields, and the rate of new field creation. To use the given examples, Newtonian physics, quantum physics and Information Theory began in 1687, 1930 and 1948. That seems quite accelerating (of course you'd need more complete stats to demonstrate this properly). BTW: I disagree that intelligence and imagination…
Intelligence and Imagination could not be more separate. I'm defining intelligence as sheer IQ, analogous to a computers' ability to process information. Imagination is so essentially human in nature that there is no way to describe current AI as "imaginative". For example, the person with the highest IQ in the world is not more creative than the best musician. Some of the smartest minds in the world cannot "think ou…
Imagination isn't any more human specific, than inteligence, or walking upright. That we can't do machines that are imaginative now, doesn't meant it's impossible to do.
Besides - what if imagination is just heuristic to search solution space quicker? Maybe machine with orders of magnitude more processing power can give better solutions without using this heuristic? That would mean it's us who thinks inside the box (because we use this heuristic), and computers can search solution space exhautively, so they will come up with solutions that escape our heuristic - we wouldn't even consider such solutions.
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#19Just another naysayer. At least he's not one of those "but H+ is unethical/against god's will" guys.
Re: The Singularity is not coming
#20This is a reasonably plausible argument for progress within fields and paradigm shifts; but consider between fields, and the rate of new field creation. To use the given examples, Newtonian physics, quantum physics and Information Theory began in 1687, 1930 and 1948. That seems quite accelerating (of course you'd need more complete stats to demonstrate this properly). BTW: I disagree that intelligence and imagination…
"To use the given examples, Newtonian physics, quantum physics and Information Theory began in 1687, 1930 and 1948."
Some things that we consider significant today won't seem significant from the perspective of centuries. Similarly, someone in 1750 would be able to list significant new fields developed recently that we would omit. For example, Newton also did work in optics, which we pretty much forget about today.