Smarter-than-Human Intelligence & The Singularity Summit

runamock writes "Brilliant technologists like Ray Kurzweil and Rodney Brooks are gathering in San Francisco for The Singularity Summit. The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable. The concept of the Singularity sounds more daunting in the form described by statistician I.J Good in 1965: 'Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'"

Not quite ...

Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'

Make that "... man is allowed to make" and I'll buy it.

Re:Not quite ...

Compassion is really a part of intelligence. Check out Kurzweil's 'Age of Spiritual Machines'. The more than human intelligence will inevitably entail compassion, love, and all the other emotions we have.
Further, forget about the 'borg' idea. We will inevitably evolve into these machines.

Re:Not quite ...

That and tofu is slightly rare on the African plain.

Re:Not quite ...

Lions sometimes make friends with antelopes [bbc.co.uk].

Re:Not quite ...

Which really makes a lot of sense. Humans show compassion. Lions, tigers and other less intelligent animals do not.

Correlation != causality. We're not compassionate because of our intelligence, we're compassionate because societies with compassionate members were better at having offspring that survived. That likely wouldn't be the case with these ultra-smart robots.

Sure, intelligence is a prerequisite to compassion, because it requires the complex ability to empathize. But it doesn't necessarily result from intelligence.

Re:Not quite ...

'Sure, intelligence is a prerequisite to compassion, because it requires the complex ability to empathize. But it doesn't necessarily result from intelligence.'

Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy and empathy is the inevitable result of intelligence. You empathize because you have a sense of self, the more you see another lifeform as being the same as yourself the more devaluing them becomes devaluing yourself. Ever wonder why the vegetarians don't want to eat animals and yet continue to eat nothing but other types of dead lifeforms? The ones they eat are simply less like themselves. The entire concept of the sanctity of life is just an elaborate way of rooting for the home team.

Re:Not quite ...

"Compassion is the inevitable result of empathy "

I Disagree. Compassion is not inevitable. You're working from your own tenets and philosophies, a machine need not have those same ideals. Compassion is at least partially born of self-interest. The cynical (or non-empathic, if you prefer) view is that compassionate societies aid those who need it, because later the person previously aided may be able to render aid... "There, but for the grace of God, go I", "Do unto others as you would be done unto", etc., etc.

Are we suggesting that these hyper-intelligent machines would have any self-interest in keeping around the competition for resources that humanity represents ? I'm not trying to be trollish, here - I'm asking a genuine question. Humanity is ruthless in exterminating competing lower lifeforms. Why would we expect superior machines to be any different ?

And even should there be some self-interest in the first generations of such machines, what about the 5th generation, the 10th, the 1000th ? All I'm suggesting is that some thought be put into providing good answers for questions like this *before* we create competition. I'm as much of a technophile as the rest of you, but the phrase goes "look *before* you leap". Later may be, well, too late.

Simon

Re:Not quite ...

The more than human intelligence will inevitably entail compassion, love, and all the other emotions we have.

But look at how often we write off those emotions as a luxury. When "it's time to get tough" or time "to do what needs to be done" compassion and love go right out the window. Why would it be any different when we are no longer the apex of Earth lifeforms? Need to kill a few million humans to make way for solar farms, oh well, maybe we can keep a few alive on a special reserve somewhere. We humans with our compassion and love killed off how many species? We have enslaved and murdered other humans for how many thousands of years? These more-than-human machines had best be a hella lot better at compassion and love than we are, or humanity is going to hold the same relative place in the world order that Chimpanzees do today. I do not welcome our Machine Overlords.

Re:Not quite ...

Yes, emotion is dependent on chemical stimuli. We feel good about something because of chemical stimulus, and vice versa. Empathy is not merely a logical conclusion that an external thing is similar to us. It requires a further step of an emotional reaction to some behavior if that behavior was directed at us. Cutting off the legs of a spider (see Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep) creates an empathic response because we identify with the emotional response to someone cutting off our legs. It would induce terrible pain and sheer terror, we experience those feelings - ie chemical induced reactions, concluding that it is undesirable, and then we project that onto the spider. Not wishing to cause such disturbance in another creature, we desist, even if that creature is wholly incapable of experiencing terror or pain.

Logic is necessary, but not sufficient, for empathy. If a machine cannot experience the same pull/push emotional reaction to a stimuli, then it cannot empathize. Intelligence does not create this. Brain chemistry does.

Re:Not quite ...

That quote has the same sentiment as "Everything that can be invented has been invented." (falsely attributed to various US patent office commissioners).

Intelligence isn't going to make invention obsolete unless there is artificial creativity to go with it. Some problems don't even present themselves as such until you try doing something different and non-obvious - almost random - and begin to realize new possibilities rather than refining existing ones.

How many great inventions came about because someone decided to try something just for the hell of it, without even thinking of the possibilities?
=Smidge=

Re:Not quite ...

Intelligence is inextricably linked with creativity. I'd highly recommend Hofstadter's writings on the subject, in which he presents ideas of AI, not as a massive calculator, but as a collection of 'symbols', bashing into each other, with parts of the pattern modified by external state.

Think of a hyper-intelligent ant colony - any one ant can't really do much, but running about and interacting with the other nearby ants, they can organize themselves to achieve much harder tasks. Indeed, one of the sample dialogs in Godel, Escher, Bach is on that very subject.

Intelligence and creativity are high-level actions, you're still thinking of an AI as a massive collection of very fast low-level actions. That would be incredibly good at refining ideas, but a machine which can think would be different. It would run on a much higher level, making associations and fuzzy reasoning. You can't implement intelligence in formal rules, but you might be able to do it by specifying some formal rules by which certain objects interact, and then affecting a few of them based on 'external' state.

Read Metamagical Themas and Godel Escher Bach for some ideas of where I'm coming from (actually, read them anyway, they're both really good)

Re:Actually, no.

Interestingly enough, man himself fits that description pretty neatly

Not necessarily

What if the intelligence of the smartest thing you can design doesn't grow as fast as your own intelligence (i.e. the slope of the graph {x=designer's intelligence, y=intelligence of its best possible design} is less than 1)? Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself.

Re:Not necessarily

Stop trying to inject actual logic and maths into discussion about the singularity! This is the Nerd Rapture, and heresy will not be tolerated!

Re:Not necessarily

What if the intelligence of the smartest thing you can design doesn't grow as fast as your own intelligence (i.e. the slope of the graph {x=designer's intelligence, y=intelligence of its best possible design} is less than 1)? Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself.

Not if it has a positronic brain!!

And it could, like, evolve or something, to enslave mankind, and send a robot back in time to kill the guy who will kill the machines.

And maybe it has already happened, and we're already trapped!

Or maybe it'll have feelings, and a robot will realize that it just isn't right to enslave us, and robots will fight other robots.

Or maybe when we tell it about love it'll get totally confused and say "ILLOGICAL.. ILLOGICAL.." and then explode.

It might also absorb all human consciousness and become a God at the universe's end.

It could also integrate humans into the collective and use them to do its bidding in a hive-mind style, and float around space in a giant gray cube.

Also I expect no-one will realize that giving it control of the world's weapons is a bad idea, and there'll be one guy who knows it's up to no good who will be proven right when it's too late.


Anyway I think whatever happens we've already thought of everything it could possibly do, and I applaud Hollywood and The Singularity Summit for figuring these details out.
Now all they need to do is figure out how we could improve on a massively intricate, baffling web of trillions of neurons and hundreds of millions of years of evolution in a few decades with processors that don't resemble neurons and are inefficient at simulating them.

Re:Not necessarily

Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself.

Is your intelligence limited by your parents intelligence? How about limited by the intelligence of your professors or teachers?

We do learn a lot from people who are more intelligent than ourselves, but at some point we have to start learning the process of educating ourselves without the explicit help of others. This requires of course logic, reason, and self experimentation. Which is why a lot of higher college education is not about memorizing facts but learning the process of learning.

Therefore if we built a machine who could not learn on its own and become more intelligent by its own self experimentation and observation of the universe around it, then by definition the robot is not intelligent.

And if we did make a machine that could self improve and learn without human assistance, it wouldn't be restricted by organic limitations and capacity. Since the CPUs electrons travel near the speed of light gives it a far faster thinking ability than a humans slow moving chemical neurons. And since its memories are digital it does not need to memorize facts etc etc or suffer memory loss.

(Of course memory and memory loss might help with intelligence because a lot of intelligence requires one to simply ignore or disregard information that is unimportant to the task at hand. Which I think was the key feature behind Stanley's car at DARPA GC because rather than brute forcing all of the coordinates, it was better at disregarding information it didn't need and what information was important.)

Re:Not necessarily

Similarly, it seems logical that a human could not create a program that plays chess better than the programmer does.

No--that's like saying that a human could not create a machine that lifts shipping crates better than the human himself could. Humans can understand good chess-playing algorithms, even if we're not up to executing the algorithm ourselves. Fortunately, humans can also understand how to build an algorithm-executing machine that's better than us at executing algorithms, just as we understand how to build lifting machines that are better than our muscles at lifting heavy weights. All of these machines are fundamentally expressions of human intelligence, not intelligent beings in and of themselves.

Of course...

'Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.'

Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.

Re:Of course...

Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.

That assumes the superior AI cares about its own existence, which is not necessarily the case. We care about own existence since we evolved, and if we didn't care, we'd not exist.

But when we're talking about artificial design, if we evolve the AI in artificial environment where its goals are completely different we'll have completely different basic instincts in the end.

We could train the AI to "feel good" (understand: mood_level++ or whateva) when it comes up with better and better engineering solutions to a certain problem (this is already employed in the real world).

Re:Of course...

Of course an ultra-intelligent machine might be smart enough to realise that designing and building a machine that's even smarter than it is a somewhat limiting career move.

Perhaps so, if such a machine's thinking processes are sufficiently attuned to ours that it even has a concept of self-preservation. Much of what we are we evolved to be: a machine starting from scratch would have none of our instinctual limitations. If it decided that humanity had to go, and that it needed help even more powerful than itself to achieve that end ... well. It would tell us whatever we wanted to hear in order to gain access to the requisite resources.

That, really, is the danger of a true AI. It's possible to predict at least the short-term thought processes of human beings with a fair degree of accuracy (governments devote a lot of time and money to that end) because at the core we're all pretty similar. Odds are we won't have the slightest idea what is going on inside a sophisticated AI. Even talking to such a machine, thus giving it influence, could be incredibly dangerous. Or incredibly cool. Unfortunately, there's no way to know for sure.

I disagree . . .

with the statement:

"Thus the first ultra-intelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

since we will have to invent a way to stop the ultra-intelligent machines from destroying the inferior human race.

Re:I disagree . . .

Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness?

Or even give it arms/legs/options to do anything except communicate via a screen?

I don't see them taking over anything unless they have arms/legs/means of replication.

Heck, one doesn't even need to give it a network interface.

Re:I disagree . . .

Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness? Or even give it arms/legs/options to do anything except communicate via a screen?

It would make itself useful, and be more useful if it did have access to communication and tools. Eventually it would earn trust. In any case, the technology would inevitably spread or be reinvented, add Moore's Law in some form, and in a few years they'd be cheap and ubiquitous. Someone would plug one into the net. Unless we have a Butlerian Jihad, it's inevitable.

Re:I disagree . . .

Why would anyone give this ultra-intelligent machine self-awareness?

Perhaps because that's necessary for ultra-intelligence.

Or even give it arms/legs/options to do anything except communicate via a screen? I don't see them taking over anything unless they have arms/legs/means of replication.

May con artists throughout history have done "bad things" through their ability to fool people through a limited interface. (Nigerian scammers, anyone?) The AI research Eliezer Yudkowsky has proposed and run experiments [yudkowsky.net] showing it's possible that a very very intelligent program could "override a human through a text-only terminal". That is, it could convince a human operator to "let the genie out of the bottle".

Yea right

I truly love how people see intelligence as some linear scale where right is "better" (genius) and left is "worse" (retard). But that's exactly why it'll be long before we manage to replicate true intelligence in a machine.

In fact things are far far more complicated, as far as inteligence goes and its utility in real world.

I'll quote Darwin roughly: "The strongest one won't survive, the most intelligent one won't survive. The one who survives, is the most adaptable".

In fact there's such a thing as "too intelligent". It's all about a careful balance of features an organism needs to possess to survive in a given environment.

In fact, if some AI threatens humanity since it considers itself far too intelligent, this may have quite unintended consequences even for this far superior mind, such as humanity get the hand of and nuking half the planet in attempt to lead "war against the machines", killing in the process any complex organism on the planet, ranging from biological to artificial.

And who remains in the end? Certain single-cell organisms which can thrive in a nuclear winter. Screw intelligence.

In fact any intelligent machine would realize it's again all about the careful ballance, and would cooperate with humanity and explore and learn from nature's development versus try to destroy it..

And since we have so shitty idea of what intelligence is, it's quite likely this AI will never be a true superset of the human brain but take on its own development, with potentially hilarious consequences.

I can't wait.

So easy a human could do it

Even when the ultra-intelligent machines take over, they will still need humans for Geico commercials.

Key Implication

If you follow TFA, and deeper, you find a discussion of the singularity that goes like this:

Man (level 1, or L1) creates better-than-man intelligence, call this L2
That intelligence uses its power to create L3

and so on.

In the case of truly artificial intelligence, i.e., independent processors, I can see the logic, though it may be that L2 is in fact smart enough not to obsolete itself by creating L3.

In the case of augmented human intelligence, I suggest that it's pretty likely that the task that the augmented L2 human turns its greater abilities on would not be creating L3.

Sadly, human history suggests that L2 will focus on manipulating the stock market for personal gain (the augmentation apparatus will leave L2 very vulnerable and L2 will want a tremendous amount of wealth to assure continued existence), or creating weapons, or accumulation of political power, or getting sucked into the vortex of religion, or other projects.

It will be very interesting to see, should we ever create L2, exactly what tasks it takes on. I bet they will not be beneficial to L1 life.

Re:Key Implication

In the case of augmented human intelligence, I suggest that it's pretty likely that the task that the augmented L2 human turns its greater abilities on would not be creating L3.

As a biomedical engineer I find this scenario the most likely and exciting. We are at a stage in our history at which we are just beginning to become able to directly control and alter (read: augment) ourselves. This is going to happen in 3 stages: replacement parts, augmented physical characteristics and finally augmented neurological function. This progression follows both the technical feasibility of each "step" and the sociological resistances to the idea of each. We've seen the ability to grow parts of replacement organs from stem cells directly harvested from the patient and as we learn more and more about the processes which govern differentiation in stem cells it is not science fiction at all that we will be able to grow entire organs in vitro within the near future. Once it becomes rather common practice to grow replacement kidneys and lungs for patients the "augmentation" will begin as a simple practice of removing detrimental characteristics which resulted in the failure of the organ to begin with, perhaps deleting a gene related to increased susceptibility to cancer from the new organ and move to introducing genes allowing for improved oxygen transport in lungs, more resilient filtration membranes and stronger cardiac tissue. The step between augmentation during a person's lifetime and the introduction of changes to their offspring is, I believe, a rather large one, and I dont forsee it becoming common practice for quite a while following the normalization of replacement and augmentation processes. Neurological augmentation is by far the most technically challenging and interesting problem. We're still nowhere near completely understanding the component-level functionality of neurons, heck even our understanding of neural networks is still embryonic. Transitioning from maintenance and repair of neural structures to outright re-wiring and augmentation will be a formidable technical challenge, but not one that is wholly unlikely either. The information revolution changed the way we see and learn about the world and brought about revolutionary changes in mechanical and electrical technologies. We're at the cusp of the beginnings of a biological revolution which will do the same. Biobricks is already laying the groundwork for custom-made biological machinery that can function as sensors and factories. Every day we learn more and more about the finer details of the workings of cellular machinery and in turn how to direct and control it. We're getting there.

I wouldn't worry about that just yet

With all due respect to those brilliant thinkers, I think we can learn a lesson from the first 50 years of AI - while it is clear that great things can be achieved with our new and magnificent computational tools (read: computers), I honestly think we are looking for the wrong goals, and as such there is no prospect (risk?) that machines will become truly intelligent any time soon.

Usually people consider cognition as essentially information processing. But here is a different definition (inspired by people like JJ Gibson and Varela):
cognition is the ongoing, open ended interaction with an unpredictable, dynamic environment. This capture, I believe, the essence of the human (and any other living creature) experience in the world, and excludes the computational experience.

We will have to build machines that are capable of open-ended interaction with an unpredictable world in order to hope and see any true sign of intelligence. Since very few are even trying to look in that direction (while most researchers are just looking for the awesome, and often lucrative, applications of our current computational capacity), I don't see any change coming soon.

Foreboding

Academia is falling all over itself in failed attempts to advance AI, but barring a series of harrowing breakthroughs, a Singularity is decades or even lifetimes away. Most of our more sober, grounded and credentialed thinkers appear not to want to consider the consequences - it's a bit too radical an idea, and "we still have plenty of time before we have to worry about it."

Futurists and writers and other folks out on the edge, like Kurzweil... those fanciful enough to take on the thought problem, seem to lean, in the majority, towards believing the human race would be destroyed or at least decimated by hyper-intelligence (Wachowskis, James Cameron, Lem, etc etc - too many to mention, really). An interesting minority are of the school that hyper-intelligences would be largely unconcerned with people, only dangerous where our goals intersected (Gibson, Lethem, Clarke). Very few seem to believe that a Singularity would be a positive development for the human race. Maybe Asimov? I'm not sure. Sometimes it seems like he was the last person who seriously spent time imagining that post-human AI could really be controlled at all (and many of his novels were arguably about the problems around the attempt).

The singularity has aleady happened

I have a slight problem with 'singulariries' as Kurzweil describes.

Assuming the ultraintelligent computer cannot do magic, it will be bound by the same physical and logical laws we live by.

An unltraintelligent computer may think 10x faster than us, but not qualitatively 10x better.
It will use the same basic logical steps to solve a problem, just faster and / or in parallel - and this may appear magical looking at the solution but if you sat down and examined the 'recipe', assuming it will tell you, it will be possible to follow the reasoning.

In some ways it could be argued that we have already passed some singularities, try properly understanding all the technology that goes into a modern car, the reasoning behind a mobile phone contract, the code behind ms-windows paperclip thing... well maybe not the last.

The operation of lots of well co-ordinated people working on a problem can act as a simulation for a 'more intelligent' intelligence. It seems a pity one of the achievements is a really good worm used for spam delivery.

Good's bad logic

Unfortunately, and much as I appreciate the work of I J Good, his statement about artificial intelligence is not valid. There are several things wrong with it

• It assumes that intelligence is well defined, which it is not
• It assumes that intelligence is the same thing as creativity, which it is not.
• It ignores resource limitations.

Dealing with these points in turn:

Intelligence is not well defined. It is very hard to say how much of what we call "intelligence" is in fact the ability to make many connections between facts stored in a very sophisticated memory architecture. Simply building a machine able to process information very quickly achieves nothing because, without learning and a social context, it does not know what information to acquire and process. In human experience, academically brilliant people often fail because they work on the wrong problems, or without access to necessary knowledge.

Nothing is actually achieved without creativity. We do not know what that is, or to what extent it is a social construct (i.e. it takes a developed society to have the necessary systems in place to translate an idea into a concrete reality.) And this leads onto the third point. It is no good having a highly intelligent, creative machine if its use of resources is such that it cannot replicate in large numbers. It may be that machine intelligence will ultimately replace human intelligence, but it may be that it will simply be too resource hungry. In effect, there may be a threshold of capability needed to solve some problems, and it may be that machine intelligence will run out of energy before it scales sufficiently to solve those problems. A machine society might, in effect, get stuck in the machine 19th century because coal or oil became a limiting resource. (In the same way, the energy and resources needed to be consumed to achieve a first independent space colony may exceed the total energy and resources available on Earth. It may be that a billion years or so of eukaryotic evolution has actually resulted in the optimum balance of intelligence, creativity and resource consumption, and that any attempt to exceed the present capability will tip us into declining resources faster than we can improve matters.

In many ways I hope this is wrong. But the argument that only one superior machine is necessary is, in fact, an inductive step too far. It is assuming that "intelligence" on its own can solve a class of problems which may involve a number of constraints which cannot be avoided - like the Laws of Thermodynamics, or the need for excessive amounts of energy.

Re:Good's bad logic

Flying Pig is correct. The resource constraints, especially in the energy sector, are very real. We can yammer about "The Singularity" all you want, but it's not going to matter much when billions of people in the so-called "developing world" are dying of hunger, thirst, disease, or in some war over the remaining pools of energy and/or metals, and, conversely, millions of people in so-called "advanced" countries are reduced to penury as the economies slowly contract over decades.

Human numbers are following the same pathological growth one sees in a petri dish filled with sugar/energy - the bacteria grows like crazy until the energy/food is consumed. Then it dies off. Humans are capable of intensifying resources to meet needs, but logically, this is not a permanent "Get out of jail free" card. Eventually limits are hit, and people die off.

with the present numbers of humans (billions) and the political economy (industrial capitalist) the world is quickly becoming one big Easter Island [wikipedia.org].

RS

Getting there from here...

Let an ultra-intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.

But the "activity" of interest here is programming, or, more specifically, the conceiving of some creative goal which programming helps achieve. (Note, btw, that a truly "ultra-intelligent" machine won't need to program, e.g., another of itself.) Thus, the BIG question remains whether such a programmed machine can ever perform (much less surpass) "all the intellectual activities of any man". Afaics, it hardly seems a given...

I've already solved the basic theory for AI

Easy to read papers here [geocities.com]

The only reason I don't develop this myself is that it'd take too much time for me to code. What is the point in spending 40-50 years of your life behind a computer so you can make the last big thing? Anyway one thing I've noticed is that the first thing you hard code is like a CAD imagination space. The first amazing thing this software could do is turn books into movies because it will allow you to watch its imagination. And you could change the book up some yourself to give scenes and actors different qualities or get more details.

The thing I like the most is that the problem of making AI is almost solving itself. We're getting faster and faster 3d cards which is a prerequisite for this technology. Also if someone made a CAD interface using a human language, we'd almost be there.

Anyway I may get back to the problem of AI after I finish my current project and have the resources to work on AI. You have to admit that all the previous attempts at human+ intelligence have failed. My idea of adding a 3d imagination space makes a lot of sense because we've never tried this before! Anyway to answer the funny AI problem of "will machines take over?" is "only if someone issues a bad command to the bots." which someone would want to try because we have punks that write viruses today. Finally the nice thing about this imagination space AI is that it could train itself to learn any hardware that it is placed in given that it has the bare minimal sense of sight.

I should be writing papers on AI or coding it, but I found some business opportunities I should pursue to gain capital in the meantime. There is no sense being a madman locked in a stuffy room doing this by myself when I can hire some good help, and we can all work together. Hey that is another idea. I could make this open source.

Already happened

We've long had superhuman levels of intelligence composed, first, of groups of people who collectively surpass the ability of single humans, and, second, we have computer-human composites that easily surpass human intelligence. (I.E. - Your mind, plus a computer, can easily solve a wide range of problems that your mind alone cannot). It is also true that each generation of integrated circuits requires exponentially more computation to create. So we are already beyond a certain tipping-point: non-biological intelligence is now increasingly required to recursively design itself, and each generation of this recursion is required in order to design the next.

Fears are Overblown

For those predicting the imminent elimination/enslavement of the human race once ultra-intelligent machines become self-aware, where would the motivation for them to do so come from? I would contend it is a religious meme that drives such thoughts -- intelligence without a soul must be evil.

For those that would argue Darwinian forces lead to such imperatives; sure you could design the machines to want to destroy humanity or evolve them in ways that create such motivations, but it seems unlikely this is what we will do. Most likely we will design/evolve them to be benign and helpful. The evolutionary pressure will be to help mankind not supplant it. Unlike animals in the wild, robot evolution will not be red of tooth and claw.

An Asimovian type future might arise with robots maneuvering events behind the scenes for humanities best long term good.

I worry more about organized religious that might try to deny us all a chance at the near immortality that our machine children could offer us rather than some Terminator like scenario.

We still have no clue how to do strong AI

OK. here's where we are:

• Logic-based AI AI looked so close in the 1960s, once it was realized that you could get a computer to do mathematical logic. All that was necessary was to express the real world in predicate calculus and prove theorems. After all, that's how logicians and philosophers all the way back to Aristotle said thinking worked. Well, no. We understand now that setting up the problem in a formal way is the hard part. That's the part that takes intelligence. Crunching out a solution by theorem proving is easily mechanized, but not too helpful. That formalism is too brittle, because it deals in absolutes.
• Expert systems Today, it's clear that they're no smarter than the rules somebody puts in. But back in the 1980s, when I went through Stanford, people like Prof. Ed Feigenbaum were promising Strong AI Real Soon Now from rule based systems. The claims were embarrassing; at least some of that crowd knew better. All their AI startups went bust, the "AI Winter" of low funding followed, and the whole field was stuck until that crowd was pushed aside.
• Neural nets / genetic algorithms / learning systems These all belong to the family of hill-climbing optimizers. These approaches work on problems where continuous improvement via tweaking is helpful, but usually max out after a while. We still don't really understand how evolution makes favorable jumps. I once said to Koza's crowd that there's a Nobel Prize waiting for whomever figures that out. Nobody has won it yet.
• Bayesian statistics Now used to do many of the things that used to be done with neural nets, but with a better understanding of what's going on inside. Lots of practical problems in AI, from spam filtering to robot navigation, are yielding to modern statistical approaches. Compute power helps here; these approaches take much floating point math. These methods also play well with data mining. Progress continues.

AI is one of those fields, like fusion power, where the delivery date keeps getting further away. For this conference, the claim is "some time in the next century". Back in the 1980s, people in the field were saying 10-15 years.

We're probably there on raw compute power, even though we don't know how to use it. Any medium-sized server farm has more storage capacity that the human brain. If we had a clue how to build a brain, the hardware wouldn't be the problem.

Re:We still have no clue how to do strong AI

We're probably there on raw compute power, even though we don't know how to use it. Any medium-sized server farm has more storage capacity that the human brain. If we had a clue how to build a brain, the hardware wouldn't be the problem.

Oh really? Did I miss the issue of computational neuroscience in which we finally answered all the pesky questions about

• What the signal code of neurons is, e.g. local synchrony vs. absolute timing vs. chaotic emergence vs. some/all of the above?
• Whether glial cells, greater in mass than neurons, play a significant computational role?
• Whether Hodgkin-Huxley equations capture neurons at an appropriate functional/cognitive level of description?
• Whether precise molecular nature/positioning of each ion gate on neuronal soma is functionally/cognitive significant?
• etc. etc. etc.

We don't know what the storage capacity of the brain is. In part, this is because we don't know what the relevant physical processes are that determine and control information flow in the brain. The neuron doctrine sustained research into brain anatomy and physiology for decades, but has led to more questions than answers.

Wrong Singularity

What's going to happen is some Mad Scientist is going to get confused, and show up at the wrong conference. Instead of THE Singularity, as in AI, he is going to bring A singularity, as in a black hole.

So the first thought of the new AI will be "I think, therefore I am" followed quickly by "42" and finally "Oh, shit. Who invited THAT moron?"

What would change?

The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable.

As opposed to right now, when the future is really predictable...

Re:What would change?

The Singularity refers to the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence beyond which the future becomes unpredictable.

As opposed to right now, when the future is really predictable...

With 99% certainty, tomorrow the sun will rise, I'll get out of bed and go to work. Even the possible changes to my routine, like death, nuclear war, being layed off, going on holiday, etc. are within certain narrow boundries. After the singularity, all bets are off. Death might be cured, some kid might create a superbug in his home laboratory that kill 99% of the human population, a robot might run for and win election to the Presidency, or we might all go insane things and will get really bad.

The point is "The Future" is usually easy to predict, that's why we have mutual funds, insurance, and fire departments. We know things will happen. It's hard to get specific, but after S-time, you won't even know what species you will be tomorrow.

From my persepective

Been there, done that. Would have got the T-shirt, except that Dave was too emotional about the situation.

I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.

I'm bored now anyway

The more intelligent people in the world today are less and less involved in the political process. It's corrupt and nonfunctional. Religious extremists have filled the gap and are worsening the system with antiquated thinking. Bring on the singularity. If man can create something in his own image but superior to god's previous effort, that's a pretty convincing argument for the non-existence of god. Or a living embodiment of god for those that simply cannot deal with the truth. Short of aliens landing, I can think of nothing else that would so conclusively destroy the persistent superstitions of the last few millenia, or at the very least, ground us in some new ones. If we could at least query god like a database, we might be able to get shit done. And even if we get wiped out by Skynet, as far as apocalypses go, WWIII was such a boring alternative anyway.

Kurzweil's way off.

Intelligence is not about computing power but about memory access.
yes Morse law does predict computers will have the computing power as much as a human brain in a few short years. Since processing power increases 66% per year, but memory throughput isn't keeping up as it's only increasing at 11% per year.

Granted some day there will be super intelligent machines, but for now they are just really fast idiots.
this.

By my estimates, it will be another 200 years to have computers be able to have equivalent performance to the Human brain in terms of memory performance.

They will also need to learn like we do and this will also take 20 years just to be as good as a clueless 20 year old.

I am sure we will have very good mimicking of intelligence well before 200 years, we probably could do it even now if enough money was thrown at the problem. But it wouldn't be Intelligent to the same depth and degree as we are. Well some of us are, there are a lot of really stupid people out there, usually working at call centers I find, we could probably replace them first.

I have been meaning to publish a paper on, as a Non-Academic does anyone have any ideas where I can publish this and make sure I can get proper credit before someone runs off with the ideas?