Singularity Summit At Stanford Explores Future Of 'Superintelligence'

KurzweilAI.net ^ | 4/13/2006 | Staff

[BJClinton]

What are we talking here?

Skynet" or "The Borg"?

Technology doubles at a certain rate. The downloading of porn increases even faster. We are careening toward an event-horizon where life as we know it will cease and all of existance will become something out of Larry Flint's head.

[JamesP81]

You clearly have a deeper knowledge of quantum physics than I do, so I'm finding it a bit hard to keep up.

All your points are well taken. Especially the not being able to prove non-determinism from inside a system. Imagine if you found a devices that you thought produced truly random numbers and didn't repeat a sequence. How would you ever know? Even if you let it run for years and it never repeated a sequence, you can't know that the next number it generated wouldn't be the restart of the sequence.

Still, that leaves wetware AI, and I think that has even worse moral implications than AI on silicon. If you have a computer that is self-aware, has free will, but has an organic, living brain instead of a CPU, memory, and hard drive, it's going to be hard to argue that it isn't entitled to some rights. I can see political hysteria of the worst kind surrounding such a situation pretty easily.

[tpaine]

-- Ask your friendly ATF agent about making a machine gun. -- Then give some thought about who gets to decree what tools are to be "sinful".

I see your point.
Too bad we can't partition the world into regions where the Amish can be happy and unmolested, the SINers can be happy and the mushroom eaters can be likewise happy.

I give you Pennsylvania, Las Vegas, and the Zuni Reservation.

I once hoped we could establish independent colonies --

Our Constitution still allows independence. -- We just have to work at keeping it free from those who see sin everywhere and want to prohibit it.

[Mr. Jeeves]

Our experience so far has not been that technology has progressively enslaved men.

It has: the iPod is taking over the Earth. It controls humans with tentacular probes it inserts into their ears that they cannot remove, even when exercising or walking down the street. ;)

[Fitzcarraldo]

It's a really good movie on lots of levels, consider renting it next time your at Blockbuster.

I agree...I've seen it a few times. There is mention in the movie of Tyrell, "designing their minds", but I assume it was in the nature of improving what was there via "neural improvements" and memory implants. [I wonder how valid this concept of memory implantation is, however, after reading an article that postulated the brain's memory works on "holographic" principles (pieces of each memory are distrubuted), rather than on highly locallized collections of "data bits" you have in a computer memory.]

Even though they appeared to be cobbled together like Frankensteins (given the "cottage biotech industries" shown, like the eye-maker), I agree that being basically human, they deserve the full range of human rights.

[Fitzcarraldo]

PS. I have not read the book that "Blade Runner" was based on, and wonder if the novelist spells out the Replicant design in more detail.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Too bad we can't partition the world into regions where the Amish can be happy and unmolested, the SINers can be happy and the mushroom eaters can be likewise happy.

I give you Pennsylvania, Las Vegas, and the Zuni Reservation.

the SINers can be happy ... Las Vegas ...

LOL Maybe we can keep the Singularity Intelligence and Nanotechers (SINers) at bay by interesting them in gambling!

Surely they will have SOME vices!

[Jack Black]

Philip K. Dick: Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

I don't recall if I read it or not. I read many of his books and they kind of blur together. He was not a hard-sci-fi guy, so I doubt there is a lot of detail on the Replicant techniques.

[CowboyJay]

Subtitle of article:

'Moonbats are a hoot!'

[strategofr]

"Ultimately I don't know how you test for true self-awareness compared simply to well-mimicked self-awareness. A very complex computer could very persuasively imitate human intelligence, sure. But actually think for itself?

Good point. No matter how convincing the test there will always be people who refuse to believe the AI is self aware. I wonder if this would lead to the next step in civil rights."

Here's something to ponder. Consider the closely related issue of whether a computer could ever feel emotions. Suppose we make a computer that accurately simulates emotions. Then how would we know if it really felt emotions?

In fact, none of us really knows if other people even feel emotions. All we know is, they look and act in ways that we look and act when we feel emotions. The same could be said for self-awareness.

[strategofr]

" Things are changing. And fast."

I agree. before the end of this century, technology will completely transform life as we know it---unless we fall into another Dork Ages. Perhaps that's not such a bad alternative?

[strategofr]

"Most animals don't make/use tools, in the main, save useful adaptations and behaviours they have been endowed with. It is possible, however, someday we'll see an ape fashion a ladder and escape from a zoo."

Well, chimpanzees fashion simple tools. That is to say, they will alter a stick in various ways to make it more efficient to poke ants of an anthill, etc.

[strategofr]

"Enormously inefficient perhaps from an electronic engineer's point of view, but remarkably capable,of that there is no doubt."

Actually, the brain is pretty efficient, even from electronic engineer's point of view. What is noticeable about the comparison between the brain and the computer is how slow the various processes in the brain are. This is counteracted, however, by the complexity and richness of each neuron, compared to each transistor.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Well, chimpanzees fashion simple tools. That is to say, they will alter a stick in various ways to make it more efficient to poke ants of an anthill, etc.

Good example.

Studying the gorillas recently at San Diego Wild Animal Park, I was practically hoping to see three or four of them climb on each other's shoulders and have at least one run free of the enclosure. Then I noticed the wires around the moat's periphery attached to insulators...

[Fitzcarraldo]

by the complexity and richness of each neuron,

I've heard the brain described as "massively parallel".

[grey_whiskers]

Colossus: There are many kinds of love...

Forbin: His sex life.

Colossus: ...

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Self-awareness is not the most important question. consider, they already have developed a computer/computer program combination that can play pretty much equal with the best human chess player in the world. Chess used to be considered one of the highest measures of human intelligence. In a short while (if they choose to do it) they can make a computer that can crush any person in chess.

Methinks the programs were and are semi-empirical, based on human knowledge of principles (weighting various configurations as more advantageous), rather than from ab initio.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

One benchmark for "self-awareness" in animals and people (and now robots as well) is whether they will perform self-directed actions when looking in a mirror.

Circular reasoning.

By definition, you are "assuming" a "self" in the case of the robot.

I'll only accept that computers are self aware when they ask for oral sex.

Cheers!

[grey_whiskers]

Another thing to consider: they're working on creating neural interfaces. If that's ever perfected, a human linked to a computer would have all the advantages of being human, plus the reaction time and computing capability of a modern computer. I submit to you that no AI would ever be superior to that. In fact, it would probably be a few grades inferior.

A Schlemmelmayer relay, perhaps? ;-)

(Scroll down to "Button, button"...)

Cheers!

[Mr. Jeeves]

Methinks the programs were and are semi-empirical, based on human knowledge of principles (weighting various configurations as more advantageous), rather than from ab initio.

Oh, absolutely. Deep Blue had a huge opening book of lines thoroughly worked out in grandmaster-level analysis, and the machine was co-operated by American Grandmaster Joel Benjamin. It took a coordinated team effort to beat Kasparov. If Deep Blue had had to work out its opening play on its own, it is likely Kasparov would have won every game handily.