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Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu

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Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#21

Post by blooalien »

dwoldrich wrote: post #5
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

> Well, that didn't happen. The military had stealth aircraft in the 70's. I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

> I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

They didn't have LLMs but they did have "AI" already (for a fair while by then). It wasn't much anything like what we have now really, but it did exist and by the current standards of that time period it was pretty much straight out of science fiction. (Imagine how shocked they'd be seeing what all we have now. "Supercomputers" in nearly every pocket, widespread broadband Internet, LLMs, etc, etc.) You're definitely right though in thinking that they had technologies far beyond what they told the public about. That's been the case since before my own lifetime at least, and absolutely certainly still true today.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#22

Post by wasabi991011 »

Nevermark wrote: post #7
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

>> It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.” > Well, that didn't happen. Predictions are not false because their claims are not in the past yet. That bar would make all predictions wrong. The faster things happen, the higher the speed-of-progres…

The twentieth century is in the past.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#23

Post by dwoldrich »

convolvatron wrote: post #17
dwoldrich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, that didn't happen. The military had stealth aircraft in the 70's. I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

that's really unlikely. in the 80s the US military had several AI labs and was working with academia...I worked with some. the focus was nearly exlucsively on logic programming and 'expert systems', a path which failed miserably leading to an 'AI winter'. somewhere around 1990, working at a Dod lab, I picked up on the 'neural network' craze and did a little work. it seemed interesting, but not that much different tha…

> so unless the military ran a giant expensive program just to hide the fact that they actually had machines 10000x faster than the $50M (in 80s money) supercomputers of the day, and had trained them on a corpus they whipped up out of nowhere (the amount of information on the internet at the time could probably have fit on a few of todays phones), it probably didn't happen.

Well, did they? They do fritter away a lot of money. Maybe there's a long-running black budget somewhere that could account for it.

You are framing your argument in technologies and technological progressions that you are familiar with. Reality isn't so neat though and there are surely many technological paths to artificial intelligence they could have exploited.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#24

Post by zulux »

nialse wrote: post #13
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

> > The required high degree of connectivity might be attained with the help of microminiature radio transmitters and receivers. > Hahaha, this is straight out of 60s-70s sci-fi, where their best futuristic interfaces were smaller CRT screens / flashy keys, etc. Actually that is not far off from how high bandwidth interconnects work, but through other media.

Agreed. It's basically RF guided by wires, or light guided by glass/plastic.

And... I hate to say it, but I've been interacting with computers connected to WiFi about 90% of the time over the last week. Rarely used a physical Ethernet link.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#25

Post by dwoldrich »

blooalien wrote: post #21
dwoldrich wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, that didn't happen. The military had stealth aircraft in the 70's. I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's.

> I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's. They didn't have LLMs but they did have "AI" already (for a fair while by then). It wasn't much anything like what we have now really, but it did exist and by the current standards of that time period it was pretty much straight out of science fiction. (Imagine how shocked they…

I should think so! I wonder what those original AI were used for.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#26

Post by bigmadshoe »

Nevermark wrote: post #7
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

>> It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.” > Well, that didn't happen. Predictions are not false because their claims are not in the past yet. That bar would make all predictions wrong. The faster things happen, the higher the speed-of-progres…

Are you confusing 20th century with 2000s?

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#27

Post by sethev »

Nevermark wrote: post #7
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #3

> Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. That's a pretty early definition of what we now call ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence). In the next paragraph the author goes to describe what we today call the "singularity" (ASI designing better ASI). But that term seems to be associated to some very weird communities, so the c…

>> It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century, an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be the last invention that man need make, since it will lead to an “intelligence explosion.” > Well, that didn't happen. Predictions are not false because their claims are not in the past yet. That bar would make all predictions wrong. The faster things happen, the higher the speed-of-progres…

I don't think it's a knock on the original prediction to say it didn't turn out to be true. In fact, at the time it probably felt like a pretty conservative prediction. That being said, if you think back to the year 2000, we were pretty far from building such a machine at that time.

To me it's an interesting lesson in how hard it is to predict technology advances which still applies to our own predictions of the future.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#28

Post by moron4hire »

dwoldrich wrote: post #19
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 0 chance of that. You can maybe say that for things like material science, nuclear stuff, weird physics, and so on (basically anything relating to making big booms, delivering big booms, or ensuring others can't make big booms). But having LLMs as we understand them now in the 80s would be impossible. They simply didn't have the compute necessary. The entire world combined didn't have it. For reference, a sin…

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's? NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it. You have to b…

"Military grade" means overpriced and 5-10 years late.

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#29

Post by CamperBob2 »

dwoldrich wrote: post #19
NitpickLawyer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's 0 chance of that. You can maybe say that for things like material science, nuclear stuff, weird physics, and so on (basically anything relating to making big booms, delivering big booms, or ensuring others can't make big booms). But having LLMs as we understand them now in the 80s would be impossible. They simply didn't have the compute necessary. The entire world combined didn't have it. For reference, a sin…

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's? NASA used Commodore 64's as part of the constellation of computers needed to launch the space shuttle. That whole program was pretty hokey. That silliness doesn't preclude some radically advanced compute tech from existing elsewhere at the same time. Of course something like that would be ultra secret and you and I wouldn't be told about it. You have to b…

I just try to keep an open mind to these sorts of things.

An open mind doesn't mean "a mind full of open circuits."

Why are you so certain you know what tech existed in the 80's?

Useful LLMs could not have been built without deep-UV semiconductor fabrication at scale, which in turn can't exist without a massive, complex supply chain that envelops the globe like a spiderweb.

Such technology could not have been built speculatively, or without people noticing, or with the physics and material science of the day. We didn't even know how to make blue LEDs then!

Re: Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine (1965) [pdf]

#30

Post by blooalien »

dwoldrich wrote: post #25
blooalien wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll bet they had LLM or better in the 80's and the tech we have now is the consumer-grade version they seeded into industry in the 2020's. They didn't have LLMs but they did have "AI" already (for a fair while by then). It wasn't much anything like what we have now really, but it did exist and by the current standards of that time period it was pretty much straight out of science fiction. (Imagine how shocked they…

I should think so! I wonder what those original AI were used for.

> I wonder what those original AI were used for.

Inventing, learning about, and exploring new technology and ideas, just as many experiments we do today are. :)

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