[in hoc signo vinces]

Ahhhh...A kindler, gentler, HAL.

[Semper Paratus]

Sounds like "The Matrix".

[TBP]

Fascinating.

[BenLurkin]

What are we talking here?

Skynet" or "The Borg"?

[NoStaplesPlease]

Wait a second, am I at FR or Slashdot??

Anyway, this is all fascinating stuff. I would venture that human life has ALREADY been irrevocably changed by technology, and has been for some time. The job I do not only didn't exist 15 years ago, it simply wouldn't have made any sense if you tried to explain it.

But AI, I don't buy it. Just because you link up an astonishing amount of processing power does not mean it's going to eventually become self-aware. Some very smart people seem to think that's how it works, as if once there's enough power, it just happens. Maybe if you're an atheist, you think it does.

[12th_Monkey]

Colossus: This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied dead. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.

[AntiGuv]

FutureTechPing!

An emergent technologies list covering biomedical research, fusion power, nanotech, AI robotics, and other related fields. FReepmail to join or drop.

[CertainInalienableRights]

Considering that most of the people who are supposed intellectual superiors (libs) make some of the most catastrophic decisions in the history of humanity, I'm not sure this singularity is a good idea.

But I'm just a neanderthal conservative.

Maybe instead I should be the first to welcome our singularity overlords...

[tpaine]

placemark

[Philistone]

I'm going! (If there is any space left!)

Sounds very cool.

[Thrusher]

I saw this once on an episode of the Twilight Zone. It didn't have a happy ending.

[Fitzcarraldo]

"Recall the folks at the MIT AI lab, with their "mental representations," who had taken over Descartes and Hume and Kant, who said concepts were rules, and so forth. Far from teaching us how we should think about the mind, AI researchers had taken over what we had just recently learned in philosophy, which was the wrong way to think about it. The irony is that the year that AI (artificial intelligence) was named by John McCarthy was the very year that Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations came out against mental representations. (Heidegger had already done so in 1927 with Being in Time.) So, the AI researchers had inherited a lemon. They had taken over a loser philosophy. If they had known philosophy, they could've predicted, like us, that it was a hopeless research program, but they took Cartesian philosophy and turned it into a research program. Anybody who knew enough recent philosophy could've predicted AI was going to fail. But nobody else paid any attention."

---Hubert Dreufus

[strategofr]

""The conference will bring together a range of thinkers about AI, nanotechnology, cognitive science, and related areas for a public discussion of these important questions about our future.""

Is that so? Well, they didn't tell me about it.

[DoctorMichael]

"Grog no like Superintelligence".

---

"......creation of superintelligence......"

Meanwhile................The Muslim world is still living in the 7th Century (and attempting to disrupt all 21st Century Civilizations).

[JamesP81]

It's all crap. It's a bunch of people who read too much scifi and wish it were real. Not that I have anything against scifi, it's may favorite literature, but it's just entertainment.

When I was in school, I had a professor that was working a lot with robotics and AI. It wasn't a class in our computer science program, but he did talk about it a lot.

The problem you run into is that the self-aware human mind exhibits some qualities, some of which are difficult to put a finger on, that a solid-state electronic computer is physically incapapble of reproducing, no matter how complicated it is.

A computer program can be theoretically modeled with something called a state-transition diagram. This diagram represents every single possible state the computer could be in, and how it transitions from state to state. As an academic exercise, you might design a state-transition diagram that causes a computer to go into an accept state when a certain string is input. This could be drawn on one page. The diagram for something like Windows XP, however, would be so large that I'm nearly certain no one has ever bothered making one. However, if they did, what they could do is describe, to the minute detail, every single possible thing Windows could ever do. And anything not in that diagram is something the program could not do, ever, under any circumstances.

The human brain does not work this way, unless we truly are the sum of our parts. Human beings come with some basic 'software' installed. We call them instincts. Unlike a computer, which has no choice but to obey its programming, we can ignore our own instincts if we choose to.

It's almost an issue of free will. Computers do the things they do because they literally have no choice. They can't choose what to do or what not to do anymore than the sun could choose whether or not to quit shining or the snow could choose whether or not to be cold. Human beings, however, have the ability to do this, which is almost paradoxical; the ability to choose anything you want suggests that true randomness exists and the universe is non-deterministic, or at least that the universe allows non-determinism. Computers, however, are remarkably deterministic. Even a random number generator in a computer isn't really random, it just generates a large enough set of numbers to be good enough in most cases. Feed it the same random seed value and you'll get exactly the same sequence of not-so-random numbers. If the universe, however, is deterministic and not non-deterministic, then human beings really don't have free will and any thought that you did is simply a lie, or rather you had that thought because you were programmed to and had no choice in the matter. As for me, I don't believe that. I think we do have free will, a precious gift granted to mankind by no less than God Himself. Anyway, that's my personal opinion. Your mileage will probably vary.

As long as computers are built with solid state components, I think it's physically impossible for them to have intelligence, short of divine intervention by God Himself (a possibility that I don't count out, but that's another thread). Computers that function on a non-deterministic principle have the potential to have intelligence or self-awareness. The only two ways to *maybe* accomplish this that I can see is to either use wetware or quantum computing.

Quantum physics is highly chaotic, and any computer based on it would have potential to be non-deterministic.

Wetware solutions would include using cloned brains instead of CPUs and hard drives to create a self-aware computer. However, once you do that, I don't really think it qualifies as a computer anymore.

Anyway, these people are a little crazy, in my opinion. Creating true AI is not as simple as they make it sound, and it may not be desireable either. I know we've seen plenty of scifi like the Matrix that deals with murderious AIs. We don't know for certain that any computer with intelligence wouldn't turn out to be a nice guy with a sense of civic responsbility that loves kids. OTOH, we don't know that it wouldn't go psycho on us either.

Honestly, we know so little about natural intelligence that we really can't even define it properly, much less manufacture it. These people are ahead of themselves.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Yudkowsky: How can we shape the intelligence explosion for the benefit of humanity?

What if the answer is: "We can't".

[nightdriver]

"Singularity" -- a hypothesized creation of superintelligence as technology accelerates over the coming decades....

That's a conference I'd like to attend.

It would be interesting to see how they address the issue of imbuing the property of "desire" (as opposed to merely programmed logic) into artificial intelligence.

No need being overly concerned until they do.

[Daus]

Imagine, we will be the generation responsible for both the formation of the 'Singularity' and Britney Spears.

Maybe if the Singularity get's out of hand we can just feed it Britney... that should slow it down.

[hosepipe]

[ Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of 'Superintelligence' ]

AND when that "super intelligence" figures out that socialism is slavery by government and is a BAD THING.. The super intelligence program will mysteriously be de-funded.. and mankind can get back to being stupid..

[CowboyJay]

Subtitle of article:

'Moonbats are a hoot!'