The Singularity is not coming • Hacker News Board

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#31

Post by 6ren » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 8:42 AM UTC

ajuc wrote: post #18

BlaineLight wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

Yes, it doesn't really matter how intelligence is defined, just that in aiming at creating an artificial mind, we'd try to include whatever was useful, including imagination. My reasoning is, if one machine can do it (us), it's possible for another machine to do it. (Though there's a question of whether we are smart enough to create that machine.)

Exponential search space is a killer. Some form of heuristic seems necessary. Perhaps we will one day be able to simulate the heuristics we ourselves use - and then improve on them (e.g. apply them to more data than we can; use more complex heuristics; etc along the lines you say). Given variation between intellectual abilities of human beings, it is does not have an obvious fixed limit, and we may be able to extend the range of that variability. Though I expect increasing the associations an "imagination" can find suffers from exponential explosion.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#32

Post by saint-loup » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 8:43 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #2

I 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.

This is akin to the so-called AI effect: "AI is whatever hasn't been done yet". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#33

Post by harshreality » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 8:44 AM UTC

shin_lao wrote: post #30

harshreality wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, what are ants to us? Limits of an AI may be incomprehensible to us, and the point of singularity is not that intelligence might increase without bound, but that it will reach our level and appear be increasing at an exponentially beyond us. (Any increase in intelligence beyond our level may be obvious but unquantifiable, so the question of exponential vs simply "beyond us" may be unanswerable.) Logistics cur…

Sorry, I think my point wasn't properly explained. My point is that intelligence isn't everything. An AI may become more "intelligent" than a human being, but it doesn't mean any singularity will happen. It does not mean it can self-improve. It does not mean it can find solutions we did not think of. It's a bit hyperbolic to say "we don't know what greater intelligence can do" and conclude "it will therefore do incre…

An AI would be able to self-improve its software (unless artificially limited, and it's not clear to me whether that would be effective), and with enough initial robotic and sensory capabilities it would be able to self-improve its hardware, both computational aspects and robotic aspects.

The only reasons it wouldn't are if it didn't put effort into it (too busy watching Lost), or if intelligence cannot really be improved.

Humans might do the equivalent of rewriting software through thinking. But it's a more limited and slow process than could be accomplished with full read/write access to software running an AI that's completely malleable and rewritable in moments.

There's plenty of evidence that intelligence can be improved. Working memory is important. We have very limited working memory. We are frequently distracted by emotions. If an AI can operate at roughly equivalent speeds with greater working memory, and if it's not distracted by emotions, it may miss some of the "finer" points of life, but I can't imagine it not leapfrogging ahead of meager human progress.

Maybe it's not possible. Like the thing at the beginning of Fire Upon the Deep, if it is possible, we won't really know if it is until it exists. If it's got the temperment of a class 2 perversion or the Blight, we're toast. If it's a Power that finds us amusing or irrelevant, we might be okay.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#34

Post by heja2009 » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 8:48 AM UTC

kevinpet wrote: post #20

6ren wrote: post #4

This 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.

While I would consider Newtionian physics to be much more fundamental, I would challenge the notion that it had the most impact. Compare the ~1900 feeling that almost everything had already been invended. Newtonian physics impact to technology was mainly mechanics. Then came thermodynamics which gave us (steam &) combustion engines and more. Nuclear & quantum physics lead to bombs, reactors and finally seminconductors and so on. I would say todays thnological relevance of thermodynamics and quantum physics is at least as high as that of Newtonian physics. Also: most of todays physicists do not look for Bosons, they do things like advancing semiconductor masking technology, liquid crystal physics and the like - i.e. they are not "fundamental" but "applied" physicists. Also - with respect to the original article - isn't the much faster exponential growth of the resources invested in science since around 1900 mostly an indicator of expected technological returns by society at large? Science is a huge economy success story since about a century ;-) The question then would be how long can we afford to sustain the current exponent?

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#35

Post by Devilboy » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 9:02 AM UTC

fchollet wrote: post #8

JacksonGariety wrote: post #7

What does that mean "it's not coming". Isn't pretty much everything "coming" eventually?

If the Singularity is defined as intelligence explosion following the creation of strong AI, and if intelligence explosion is impossible, then the Singularity is not coming, even in the far future. Progress will just carry on linearly.

Have you actually read Kurzweil because it doesn't seem like you have...

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#36

Post by thinkingisfun » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 9:06 AM UTC

The singularity may not be coming, however, there are still huge questions and challenges looming ahead. Individual humans don't seem to be able to resist the thirst for power, and society as a whole seems too passive to stop them... We just watch as it unfolds, hoping we'll get cool gimmicks in the process. That's insane.

"Whenever a man chooses his purpose and his commitment in all clearness and in all sincerity, whatever that purpose may be, it is impossible for him to prefer another. It is true in the sense that we do not believe in progress. Progress implies amelioration; but man is always the same, facing a situation which is always changing, and choice remains always a choice in the situation. The moral problem has not changed since the time when it was a choice between slavery and anti-slavery."

-- Jean Paul Sartre

It's all just a bunch of tools! We could use them to be good to each other, or to just keep doing what we did; moving from scarcity of resources and horsepower and intellect, to artificial scarcity based on greed and control. Technology just amplifies the impact of our choices on us, others and our environment; but it doesn't make them for us.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#37

Post by m00natic » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 9:24 AM UTC

batgaijin wrote: post #17

snowwrestler wrote: post #2

I 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…

OT Emacs clunkiness/outdated architecture...give me a break, minimal core with lisp interpreter on top giving programmable and extensible platform next to none is still what...30 years ahead of anything called "modern".

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#38

Post by joe_the_user » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 9:30 AM UTC

I think the advocates of the singularity see it as coming from an explosion of the possibilities of technology rather than an explosion of science in general. Kurzweil himself mentions how to the average research scientist, science appears slow and linear (with jumps most coming when a scientist gets a different set of tools to work with).

> Let’s have a hypothetical AI that researches artificial intelligence, and that constantly rewrites its own code to incorporate its finding into its own intelligence.

No,

A hypothetical General AI would double the amount of circuits involved in it's processes to double its intelligence and go from Monkey-brain-sized to human brain sized. Repeat as necessary. The intelligence algorithm running on those circuits doesn't have to improve (though we'd hope it would at least a little).

Of course, you would need an initial intelligent parallel algorithm. That might indeed be hard or impossible. But his argument in itself doesn't proving anything about this.

Sure, even with flexible general AI, some problems would remain hard but a lot of things aren't the Knap-sack problem. In fact there's no evidence the massive success of human intelligence has had much to do with tackling NP-complete problems. Instead, flexibility and pattern finding set human apart from both other animals and the most powerful artifact we can so-far create.

Just consider, Moore's Law continued at least for a fair period driven by humans whose innate intelligence didn't increase at all.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#39

Post by ars » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 9:36 AM UTC

joe_the_user wrote: post #38

I think the advocates of the singularity see it as coming from an explosion of the possibilities of technology rather than an explosion of science in general. Kurzweil himself mentions how to the average research scientist, science appears slow and linear (with jumps most coming when a scientist gets a different set of tools to work with). > Let’s have a hypothetical AI that researches artificial intelligence, and th…

You don't understand intelligence. Doubling the circuits doubles the speed of the intelligence, but it has no effect on it's quality.

You are assuming the existence of not just an intelligent parallel algorithm but an infinitely scalable one (i.e. one that could actually take advantage of more circuits)! Because without that, you don't need to double the circuits - you could just give them more time.

Concepts that are beyond a particular intelligence will still be beyond it, even if the speed is increased.

People have a really hard time admitting that some people are truly fundamentally smarter than others. It's not just that they can think faster - they can think things that other people simply can not, even if they worked really hard at it.

I'm sure you've heard the saying "I didn't think of that". That's exactly it, even if it thinks faster, it will still never "think of that".

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#40

Post by coldarchon » Fri, Aug 10, 2012, 9:38 AM UTC

fchollet wrote: post #25

franzus wrote: post #19

Just another naysayer. At least he's not one of those "but H+ is unethical/against god's will" guys.

I am in fact refusing to argue in the realm of opinion, and that is why I am proposing a valid mathematical model to support my hypothesis. But I suppose you did not read past the title? Sorry for hurting your faith in the Singularity...

You are not using a valid mathematical method because paradigm shifts include emotions and social behavior. What you obviously left out or just don't understand is that AI is not bound to pain or instincts of self-preservation. When the time has come for an AI to supersede the human intelligence the singularity will happen faster than the writing of your non-scientific patchwork article.

Arrogance is unjustified because your arguments are without any solid background and only show someone in research at the beginning of his career. If you are young you should better listen than speak out loud.

Saying scientific progress is linear is a pathetic explanation of someone who obviously compares scaling to a paradigm shift. Of course being able to write 10GB on 1cm² of a hard-disk was done by researchers, but they took a hard-disk with 10MB on 1cm² and tried to make it smaller. That's scaling and not scientific progress which could result in a paradigm shift or even a singularity.

My only advice for you, as I am myself am too arrogant to write more, is that you take the works of John von Neumann about AI. Then you compare the maximum different states of the human brain to the actual capabilities of super computers, find the break-even-point with Moore's law, then add 10 years of progress to improve the software and you have 2040.