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The Singularity is not coming

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Re: The Singularity is not coming

#71

Post by loup-vaillant »

tommorris wrote: post #60

Okay, here's the thing. It's certainly possible that strong AI could exist. Pretty much the only way of finding out is by attempting to build it. If it's possible, we'll be able to build it eventually. If not, we won't. If the magical singularity happens, it'll flow naturally from the strong AI. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. And, well, if we get strong AI but no singularity, great, we still get strong AI and we can…

> Given this, I'm not sure why singularity promoters give that much of a shit whether people believe it.

In my case that would be because the default scenario for a technological singularity is Eternal Doom. By default, if AI researchers do not pay extreme attention, the first smarter-than-human AI will have different goals than we do, and recognize us as a threat to those goals and eliminate us all. Or squash us like bugs without even paying much attention. Or use our constituent atoms to maximize its goals. Or keep us drugged and lobotomised in soft cages, so that we're safe and happy. Or something.

And of course, we won't be able to stop it, because it will outsmart us at every turn (we can do the same to chimps).

This is why this singularity thing is at least worth looking into. Being able to nuke away our civilization is bad enough, but this could be even worse. Or it could turn our world into a paradise.

And of course, with more believers, there will be more donors to the organizations working on this, more researchers working on it… So belief does count, to some extent. (On the other hand, becoming angry at non-believers like a crusader is unlikely to spur positive reactions. By cleaning up this image description, you actually helped our cause.)

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#72

Post by pubby »

I don't understand why people believe they will be immortal if the singularity ever occurs.

Humans came from microbes, yet we couldn't care less about them. A super intelligent being would see us the same way.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#73

Post by loup-vaillant »

TheComedian wrote: post #68
loup-vaillant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't even have to feed on itself. Imagine a human-level hardware designing AI. As long as Moore's law applies, it can double its computational power every 18 subjective months. From our point of view, that's 18 months, then 9, then 4.5… If Moore's law where unlimited, such an AI would have infinite computational power in 36 months, with absolutely no increase in actual intelligence. But of course Moor…

This assertion is groundless. Why would Moore's law accelerate? In fact, Moore's law is currently decelerating and gains are increasingly harder to find. Further, Moore's law says nothing about computational speed, but only the density of transistors. These two are related but not identical. Edit: also, from my understanding, the gains in transistor density largely depend on new discoveries in physics. Before a compu…

Transistor count and computational are so tightly correlated that's nitpick.

Now I did not assume "Moore's law" would accelerate. I assumed it would stay constant. The key point comes from the fact the AI (or AI hive) would trivially benefit from hardware speed-ups.

And yes, Moore's law won't really count, compared to the rest we will be able to do. I was just trying to be as conservative as possible. (Though Moore's law still holding until strong AI is quite wild).

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#74

Post by loup-vaillant »

wcarss wrote: post #66
loup-vaillant wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intelligence doesn't even have to feed on itself. Imagine a human-level hardware designing AI. As long as Moore's law applies, it can double its computational power every 18 subjective months. From our point of view, that's 18 months, then 9, then 4.5… If Moore's law where unlimited, such an AI would have infinite computational power in 36 months, with absolutely no increase in actual intelligence. But of course Moor…

I do not believe that that is what Moore's Law means or how it works. Perhaps I just mistook your meaning - what do 'subjective months' mean? Why do they mean that the doubling time starts halving?

I mean this: http://dragonball.wikia.com/wiki/Hyperbolic_Time_Chamber

When hardware is twice as fast, the AI works twice as fast. In 9 months, it will do 18 months worth of work. Now keep the doubling up, and it will have done infinite work after 36 months.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#75

Post by nileshtrivedi »

Rather use your imagination, the one thing that makes you a beautiful unique snowflake. Intelligence and hard work should be merely at the service of our imagination. Think outside of the box. Break out. Shake the axioms.

Honest question: can't this process of "thinking outside the box" be reduced to a logical process? Wouldn't a system which has ability to identify axioms, also have the ability to vary those axioms and try out alternatives?

In other words, why shouldn't better logical ability lead to better imagination?

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#76

Post by snowwrestler »

shaggyfrog wrote: post #3
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.

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…

Ha! It was so hard to resist a Rush reference when I wrote that date.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#77

Post by jpadkins »

rvkennedy wrote: post #49
bermanoid wrote: post #42

The author completely misses the point of these arguments. This is not about science increasing the rate of scientific progress. It's about computation improving the rate of computational progress. Particularly, the "Singularity" is about that happening in a world where strong AI exists. And I'm not even going to harp on the fact that the number of computations per second that we perform on this planet has been undou…

It's about computation improving the rate of computational progress But computation doesn't improve the rate of computational progress. That's achieved by improvements in manufacturing. Computation does help a little , giving us better tools for chip design. But mainly it's manufacturing. The only way for computational progress to exponentiate, past the limit of Moore's Law, is to use more physical resources - comput…

are you stating that computer manufactures don't rely on computers to design the next generation manufacturing techniques? Or that faster/better software isn't going to increase the rate of improvement in computer manufacturing?

Material scientists , physicists, chemists, chip designers are all using software for modeling and exploration. And bigger/faster/better computers are helping drive innovations back into computer manufacturing. The process is feeding itself, and it has been for awhile.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#78

Post by jpadkins »

gd1 wrote: post #54
fchollet wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is throwing more (truly intelligent) computers at the problem any different than throwing more human brains at it? It's not just computing power that had been exploding, it is also the number of people trying to crack the nut of AI (for instance).

Because the human brains can only communicate and acquire knowledge at a limited rate. This causes the "exponential decrease of discovery impact of each succeeding researcher" that the original post refers to, but he misses the point completely. We can't 'stand on the shoulders of giants' until we've climbed up there, slowly and painfully. An AI can just download the lot. And share any new discoveries with the hive m…

it's sci fi, but we haven't ruled out that human brains can't acquire knowledge at rates orders of magnitudes faster than current learning methods. Big advances in neuroscience and linguistics could make this possible.

Right now, the limits on our bandwidth is language and our sensory inputs. It's not completely ridiculous to think we could encode certain kinds of knowledge in more compact forms, and transmit them via an artificial sensory process that has higher higher bandwidth that audio/visual language based learning...

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#79

Post by jpadkins »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #71
tommorris wrote: post #60

Okay, here's the thing. It's certainly possible that strong AI could exist. Pretty much the only way of finding out is by attempting to build it. If it's possible, we'll be able to build it eventually. If not, we won't. If the magical singularity happens, it'll flow naturally from the strong AI. And if it doesn't, it doesn't. And, well, if we get strong AI but no singularity, great, we still get strong AI and we can…

> Given this, I'm not sure why singularity promoters give that much of a shit whether people believe it. In my case that would be because the default scenario for a technological singularity is Eternal Doom. By default, if AI researchers do not pay extreme attention, the first smarter-than-human AI will have different goals than we do, and recognize us as a threat to those goals and eliminate us all. Or squash us lik…

It's not the first smarter than human AI that is the threat. It's the first self-improving AI that people have to worry about. It can start out at a much lower than human intelligence (whatever that means) but as long it can keep improving it could turn into the nightmare scenario.

The safeguards need to be built into the self improving AI, no matter how 'dumb' it starts out as.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#80

Post by joe_the_user »

loup-vaillant wrote: post #65
Anderkent wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But computation doesn't improve the rate of computational progress. As long as it's people developing computing devices, that holds. But when you have a machine that is capable of improving its own software, you get a self reinforcing loop where computation improves the rate of computational progress.

Intelligence doesn't even have to feed on itself. Imagine a human-level hardware designing AI. As long as Moore's law applies, it can double its computational power every 18 subjective months. From our point of view, that's 18 months, then 9, then 4.5… If Moore's law where unlimited, such an AI would have infinite computational power in 36 months, with absolutely no increase in actual intelligence. But of course Moor…

Further, if we build a human-like intelligence on a chip, this would plausibly be a highly parallel algorithm. By that token, you wouldn't need more transistors-per-inch, you could use chips that snap-together with high bandwidth connections and perhaps some longer-distance traffic control connections.

The kind of design isn't an NP-complete problem but it certainly could be helped by a powerful AI.

Also, Moore's Law is breaking for speed but not for transistors-per-inch. That's why we're seeing multicode chip now.

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