A machine that could think half as well as a human (say, as well as a penguin) would be immensely valuable in many areas, not least the military.

soru

I absolutely don’t wish suggest that we’ll never get human-level AIs (that really would be like ID). However, I just don’t buy this idea that merely having more computing power will solve anything. Has anyone even a suggestion of what software you’d put on this super-powerful computer? Software still has to written by humans, and we need to have an idea before we can write that software.

As a mathematician, your point about the 4-colour problem is off the mark: the level of computation required was tiny by today’s standards, and would at least in principle be human checkable (but over many years). The proof is interesting because it did require a computer, and that the mathematicians learnt a lot by programming the computer and playing around with it (to a working mathematician this is more interesting: it suggests the ability to use a computer as an experimental tool). To suggest it had anything to do with AI is incorrect though.

Absolutely, I thought I made that distinction, I guess it was not clear. Also, I am only claiming this is in some sense possible, if there was a nuclear war tomorrow then obviously it wouldn’t take place.

How about complexity, or lack of the right kind of theory/technology?

Mere complexity can, by definition, be tackled by sufficient computation, as provided by generation N 1 of the technology. Look at the recent computerassisted proofs of things like the 4-colour problem.

Assuming insight, a new theory, is necessary, as opposed to helpful, something that would reduce the amount of computation required, really is equivalent to the Intelligent Design position on evolution. At the very least, it would imply the mechanism for evolution was not random discrete changes to DNA, as that is just another way of saying ‘computation’.

The standard scientific model of evolution is computation, if computation can’t design a brain, then evolution can’t, and so something very like Intelligent Design theory would become accepted as true. Presumably evolution of the brain, at least, would turn out to involve the same kind of meso-scale wierd quantum stuff that allowed non-Turing computation, i.e. ‘thought’.

soru

http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/GreatInvention.pdf

This is only true for old books. The intellectual property régime that underpins the creation of new works like Kurzweil’s has until now made it impossible to take advantage of the opportunities offered by technology for their rapid dissemination. Jared Diamond’s Collapse, a very different long-range take on the human condition, suggests thet human societies do not necessarily solve such contradictions.
For a not imposible example, the victory of the IP fundamentalists would bring technical progress to a crawl, as innovators would spend nearly all their time fighting claims to prior rights in ideas. Another scenario is the collapse of IP, and the transfer of innovation to socialist structures like universities and NASA, or communitarian networks. I can’t see either scenario doing as well as Intel in moving along Moore’s curve.
Oh, and great-grandad’s telegraph network was global and near-instantaneous if low bandwidth. Contrary to Kipling’s prediction in his poem The Deep-Sea Cables, the world hasn’t become one yet.

But it also seems like as the technology advances society is capable of processing and absorbing more information and the two tend to reinforce each other.

We aren’t talking a “real” singularity, like a black hole, because the exponential trend continues, rather than reaching a singular point. (I really do mean exponential, not just loosely.) However from the human perspective, if everything becomes incomprehensible because it is moving so fast, it might as well have passed through an event horizon.

And knowing what is happening doesn’t help all that much. We’ve consistently found that we can’t grasp exponential trends. Working in the computer industry for twenty-five years, I and others around me kept underestimating the trends we were part of. The only way to get them right is to do the math, and then believe the numbers rather than your lying intuition.

That’s sort of the effect a singularity produces on physics. If we had a real singularity in human affairs it wouldn’t be characterised by exponential growth but by something that went beyond anything easy to cope with. You might want to try renormalising the infinities or something, but even that might not work.

Anyhow, the point is that it’s not the exponential stuff that gives you singularities, not as such anyway. There’s a blurring of concepts going on here, which doesn’t matter for purposes of gee-whiz illustration but does if you’re getting serious.

The elasticity discussion is useful, this is very important to get right. The classical example is lighting—the efficiency of lighting improved exponentially, but just reduced the amount of money spent on lighting. We know it can go either way; what are the key factors that will decide the outcome?

Various comments about AI and “things in life that aren’t speeding up dramatically” are salient, but not necessarily correct (as I hope my previous comment shows).

But they don’t seem to move on to the interesting question: what limits the impact of the exponential trends? In AI we have logistics planning, check; voice recognition, check (see TellMe Networks); spam recognition, check; etc. But are these just special cases, or the camel’s (exponential) nose under the tent of general AI? We need good arguments about this, not just snark.

I think we do know, empirically, that “good old fashioned” AI and more generally computer programming has fatal flaws when we try to scale it exponentially (in size, parallelism, complexity, etc.). There are alternatives like bayesian techniques that seem to scale better—but what will it take to fully ride the underlying exponential trends? It is issues like this that will ultimately decide whether we get a singularity or not.

Well, open source development does represent a radical change in project management—i.e. what we can accomplish, how fast, with what $$

And it is only possible due to exponential trends.

Similar transitions may occur in music and movies.
—
Graham Heffern: “I would think that we would at least need to have the computational power to simulate the brain to start creating things that could be considered human like AI.”

Depending on what you mean by simulate. We don’t have to know how to grow feathers to build things that fly.

More generally I think we need conceptual breakthroughs as well as computational power to do some things. Happily cheap computing and bandwidth permits even crazy experiments. That is how we get things like Wikipedia and Spambayes.

We need to separate two kinds of computationlism-is-not-enough argument. One is that there are indeed material phenomena at the heart of minds, but they are not captured by the traditional Turing computation account. Something like this is Penrose’s proposal. Searle also thinks that the brain phenomena are completely materialistic, but the computational story is not enough. The second is the mystical version—that something beyond the properties of matter are involved in making brains (and minds).

The non-mystical, i.e., materialist, anti-computationalist would laugh off Kurtzweil’s prediction based on great breakthroughs in computing, not because he is against materialism, but against poor materialist accounts of the brain.

Soru:
then what is the justification for thinking that engineering cannot reproduce what evolution did?

How about complexity, or lack of the right kind of theory/technology? This is not a proof that engineering cannot reproduce minds, but simply an argument against the idea that just because nature made something, we will be able to successfully copy it.

“Time to go to work, work all night
search for singularity hey!
We won’t stop until we transcend humanity
Yum tum yummy tum tay!”

I meant that surely the viewpoint that the singularity (in the sense of ‘dramatic perceived change’, not so much ‘everyone resurrected in the Eschaton’ or whatever) cannot occur can only plausibly be based on religiously-founded assumptions rather like Intelligent Design.

It’s like you look at engines getting better in the 19C, and say ‘in a few years, flying machines will be practical’.

One person says flight is physically impossible, you say ‘look, a seagull’.

Another person says noone has yet build a flying machine, and you say, ‘no, it needs a certain power/weight ratio, that should be attainable in 10 to 20 years’.

A third person says that power/weight ratio will be unnattainable due to physical limits, and you say ‘I previously pointed at the seagull, which by now has flown off. Stop rephrasing the same question’.

A fourth person say ‘but seagulls only fly by God’s will, and it is not God’s will that a machine fly’, and you say ‘well, there’s no arguing with that’.

soru