The impossibility of intelligence explosion
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Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#2This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective:
- Intelligence greater than human is possible
- Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered
- Intelligence can be built
- Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences
Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you can emulate a human brain, coupled with a continued increase in processing power per unit cost. Massive parallelism to start with, followed by some process to produce smarter intelligences.
All arguments against this sound somewhat silly, as they have to refute one of the hard to refute points above. Do we live in a universe in which, somehow, we can't emulate humans in silico, or we can't advance any further towards the limits of computation, or N intelligences of capacity X when it comes to building better intelligences cannot reverse engineer and tinker themselves to build an intelligence of capacity X+1 at building better intelligences? All of these seem pretty unlikely on the face of it.
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#3> Our environment, which determines how our intelligence manifests itself, puts a hard limit on what we can do with our brains — on how intelligent we can grow up to be, on how effectively we can leverage the intelligence that we develop, on what problems we can solve.
Consider internet to be the "new" environment, full of highly complex social networks, millions of applications to interact with etc. Our brains are way too limited to be able to deal with it. There's an opportunity for a much more powerful intelligence to arise that CAN effectively process that volume of data and appear to be a lot more intelligent in that particular context.
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#4This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective: - Intelligence greater than human is possible - Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered - Intelligence can be built - Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you c…
Why isn't it possible (or likely, even) that the difficulty of constructing capacity X+1 grows faster than the +1 capacity? Self-improvement would slow exponentially when it takes three times the resources/computation/whatever to construct something that's twice as good at self-improving, for example.
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#5This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective: - Intelligence greater than human is possible - Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered - Intelligence can be built - Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you c…
I think the point he is trying to make is that there are boundaries to intelligence. I think of it this way - no matter how smart an AI is, it still would take 4.3 years to reach Alpha Centauri going at the speed of light. An AI still needs to run experiments, collect evidence, conjure hypothesis, reach consensus, etc.. Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#6It's also interesting to consider the fact that we humans are not the pinnacle of intellect in all the history of space and time.
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#7This is a stupid article, and reading it will only make you stupider.
First, it is undoubtably true that human brains are better suited to being human than AIs would be. That is irrelevant to the question of whether AIs will be better at the task of creating better technologies.
Second, it is absolutely false that improvement is incremental. Consider the game of Go. For a long time, computers sucked at Go. Then we came up with Monte Carlo search about a decade ago and suddenly we were at strong amateur. Then deep learning was applied, and Alpha-Go jumped to able to beat any human in the world, and has continued to improve.
Third, linear progress is not the history of technology. The history of technology is exponential progress over and over again on everything from how far a steam ship could travel without refueling to the number of operations per second a CPU can carry out.
Fourth it is wrong that intelligent things can't be part of creating greater intelligence. As a trivial example, good teachers can turn out students who are in a position to be better than their teachers are. Or look at the history of science.
But on a more relevant level, the task itself is clearly possible. If we have a computer program that is able to design better hardware, it can be improved by simply moving it to better hardware. But it is capable of designing that hardware. This creates a feedback loop which should shorten the cycles in Moore's law, resulting in very few years in a truly superior AI capability.
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#8This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective: - Intelligence greater than human is possible - Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered - Intelligence can be built - Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you c…
I think the point he is trying to make is that there are boundaries to intelligence. I think of it this way - no matter how smart an AI is, it still would take 4.3 years to reach Alpha Centauri going at the speed of light . An AI still needs to run experiments, collect evidence, conjure hypothesis, reach consensus, etc.. Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?
Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?
A major managerial problem with humans is sorting out our irrational emotional biases and keeping everyone working on something resembling the appointed task. Can you imagine the productivity gain if that problem suddenly went away?
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#9This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective: - Intelligence greater than human is possible - Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered - Intelligence can be built - Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you c…
Also, something that is very overlooked IMO is that the engineering process does not need to happen in silico, even though I am not a defendant of using it, bioengineering is a possibility.
Re: The impossibility of intelligence explosion
#10This manages to get lost in its own trees. From a reductionist perspective: - Intelligence greater than human is possible - Intelligence is the operation of a machine; it can be reverse engineered - Intelligence can be built - Better intelligences will be better at improving the state of the art in building better, more cost-effective intelligences Intelligence explosion on some timescale will result the moment you c…
I think the point he is trying to make is that there are boundaries to intelligence. I think of it this way - no matter how smart an AI is, it still would take 4.3 years to reach Alpha Centauri going at the speed of light . An AI still needs to run experiments, collect evidence, conjure hypothesis, reach consensus, etc.. Is this really that far more efficient than what humans do today?
But we, humans, aren't going at anything like the speed of light. What if we tweaked our DNA to produce human beings with the working memory capacity of 50 items instead of the normal 7-ish [1]? One such researcher would be able to work faster, on more problems at once, and to consider more evidence and facts. The next bottleneck for that person, of course, would be the input/output capacity (reading, writing, typing, communicating), but even with those limitations, I bet they would be a lot more efficient than the average "normal" human. The question is - would you call such a person more "intelligent"?