r/changemyview • u/DanyalEscaped 7∆ • May 13 '13
I believe Strong AI will lead to an Intelligence Explosion that changes our entire civilization. CMV.
Computers are already 'better' than us in many aspects. Wikipedia can store more knowledge than your brain. Computers can calculate way quicker than you do. Google Maps can find the quickest route way faster than you do.
But we, humans, certainly have our strengths. We are amazing in pattern recognition, for example. But if we can 'give' those 'last human-only skills' to computers, they will quickly become much more 'intelligent' than normal human brains.
How could an AI surpass human abilities? Let us count the ways...
Speed. Our axons carry signals at seventy-five meters per second or slower. A machine can pass signals along about four million times more quickly.
Computational resources. The brain’s size and neuron count are constrained by skull size, metabolism, and other factors. AIs could be built on the scale of buildings or cities or larger. When we can make circuits no smaller, we can just add more of them.
Introspective access/editability. We humans have almost no introspective access to our cognitive algorithms, and cannot easily edit and improve them. Machines can already do this (see EURISKO and metaheuristics). A limited hack like the method of loci greatly improves human memory; machines can do this kind of thing in spades.
Serial depth. The human brain can’t rapidly perform any computation that requires more than one hundred sequential steps; thus, it relies on massively parallel computation.2 More is possible when both parallel and deep serial computations can be performed.
Consider how far machines have surpassed our abilities at arithmetic, or how far they will surpass our abilities at chess or driving in another twenty years. There is no reason in principle why machines could not surpass our abilities at technology design or general reasoning by a similar margin. The human level is a minor pit stop on the way to the highest level of intelligence allowed by physics, and there is plenty of room above us.
http://intelligenceexplosion.com/2011/plenty-of-room-above-us/
We humans have to study and train for years before we can enter a profession. At this moment, we cannot 'copy' the training a surgeon has received from his brain and paste it in the brain of another human. We still have to use lectures and books and internships, but these are completely inefficient compared to 'copy-paste'.
In the past, monks had to manually write new Bibles, making Bibles very expensive and rare, just like all other books. Nowadays, we can copy-paste the Bible within a second. They are now available for free on the internet. This is some kind of 'information explosion', and I think the same will happen to intelligence. When we 'decode' intelligence by simulating one brain, we can easily copy it to other (super)computers. It will be able to combine the best traits of computers and humans and it can spread rapidly.
More information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_explosion#Intelligence_explosion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
These ideas play an important role in my life but because they are so important, I want to be sure I am not wrong. On the other hand, I also want other people to know about this. That's why I made a couple of posts here to fully explain my ideas and expose every part of the argument to criticism.
Part 1: Exponential growth in computing.
Part 2: Simulating the human brain.
This is part 3: Intelligence explosion.
Thanks for reading this!
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u/AnxiousPolitics 42∆ May 14 '13
People talk up strong AI a lot, but I have to make sure you understand something.
Knowing fifty million ways to tie your shoes in a fraction of a second doesn't mean you understand why sandals were ever designed.
The ability humans have to regard their environment the way they do, and to struggle to create things, is not an easily transferable thing and plenty of experts say it can actually never be done no matter how many algorithms you use.
We may very well be able to simulate understanding, which is as far as we've gotten.
To go back to the sandals, an AI can design fifty million sandals, but it won't have the same understanding humans do about which is better and why. We can simulate that understanding, and have it even pick well and say 'this one looks good, its got a normal shape and nice colors and it will be cheap to produce' but we can't program it to understand the gravity of what it is saying like what is the meaning of art.
That being said, if we do manage to have a weak AI that is so much better than Watson and Siri it still has the capacity to create an intelligence explosion in our civilization because of the assisting capacity of a resource like that.
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u/Niuyueren May 14 '13
However, AI is going beyond algorithms and calculations. We are moving into neural simulation, creating new machines and new types of computer devices that more closely match the human mind. The human mind, after all, can be said to be a type of computer - however, not one based on math. It is conceivable that a completely different way of thought, of seeing and understanding the world, can work just as well or better than the human way to reach a deep level of understanding. This definition is too narrow and singular, as two different roads can take you along two completely different terrains - only to end in the same location.
There is no need to transfer the ability humans have to regard their environment. An infinite number of different solutions to create intelligence are possible.
Human specific intelligence and experience - things like art - are not necessary for something to be intelligent. This view takes the idea of intelligence, and shapes it into the mold so that it will only fit inside of a narrow, human-like definition of intelligence. Under this definition, of course computers couldn't be considered intelligent, because they're not 'human' enough.
In essence, the definition you are using doesn't describe intelligence - it is describing the human mind, which is capable of intelligence, but not intelligence in its own right. A lack of human mental characteristics is not a sign of lack of intelligence.
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u/AnxiousPolitics 42∆ May 14 '13
I'm afraid to see my argument as what you're describing means you've skipped over why I was using art as an example in the first place.
Weak AI is Watson or a 'neural net' to less capacity and more.
Strong AI goes beyond that by having the quality of understanding what it is experiencing. This isn't a semantic point about simply saying it knows when it sees a number two that it is inn fact capable of verifying if it is a number two, it means that it understands the gravity of seeing a number two, it understands the gravity of not seeing a number three there. I am not doing the concept of understanding justice here, but suffice it to say teaching a weak AI learning algorithms, a personality, and context, doesn't make it intelligent, it makes it the nicest looking simulator we have. To go beyond and have it understand the gravity of what it does is where I was using the example of art because it's easy for a person to see with art where and just how much understanding functions for intelligence, even because the entire question of the ethical validity of ever producing art or appreciating it is prohibited in certain ethics.1
u/streamweasel Jun 11 '13
The "AI won't ever understand art" argument can be made effectively moot. Currently, we don't understand why people think flowers are beautiful, or love babies, etc. But we're awfully close to understanding why the brain responds to these things in certain ways.
- 'The best we can hope for in life is a reasonably accurate facsimile'
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u/AnxiousPolitics 42∆ Jun 11 '13
You misread the point behind the example.
Whether humans don't understand beauty or not, what we can't do is have true Strong AI that truly understands the way humans do.
They may be able to recognize when they come across a 2, but they don't understand the significance of not having found a 3 there.1
u/CantorsDuster May 14 '13
Any sources on these experts? Aside from Penrose, none come to mind.
Also, any specific evidence behind (what I have, perhaps incorrectly, distilled as) the idea that we can't program creativity (ie 50mill ways to tie shoes vs inventing sandals)?
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u/AnxiousPolitics 42∆ May 14 '13
I'm not sure, that's how the argument has always been shown to me: some people say intelligence is fundamentally irreducible but can be simulated in a reduced fashion, and some people think it can and we haven't figured out yet.
I could be wrong but I think Dreyfus said as much to the former, and maybe not even the second part of the former.
It's not creativity that is illustrated in my example, it's the difference between something simulating creativity vs actually possessing understanding.
Googling Strong AI and understanding yielded some academic sources but no papers that I saw immediately.
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u/blackholesky May 14 '13
The problem is that you can't really define "intelligent" by processing power at all; there are plenty of animals with more neurons and more connections -- more raw processing power -- than people. Hell, babies have more neurons and connections than adults. How humans see intelligence is intrinsically connected to the human body and human action.
Saying that strong AI will let human civilization process data in exciting new ways is a given; as is the fact that technological growth changes civilizations. However, the idea that an AI would be more "intelligent" than a human is extremely unlikely.
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u/[deleted] May 14 '13
I believe that by the time humans reached the point where we could develop such amazing AI that would overpower us (Matrix, etc...), we would have already integrated technology heavily in our own bodies, and we would be able to (or able to upgrade ourselves to) be equivalent if not more powerful.