As regular readers of this blog know, I think the singularity idea is a load of crap. While we can create highly intelligent machines, they will never exhibit the emotions and irrationality that humans exhibit - Antonio Damasio's model of feelings and emotions (both of which require a body) is the best "proof" of this argument. That whole body thing is also why we will never upload consciousness into a machine - no body = no personal identity = no consciousness as we know it.
My own position is that consciousness is more than an individual "thing" but, rather, also integrates the physical environment, the cultural context, the temporal experience, and the immediate interpersonal web of connections - all of which is embodied in meat-space. No computer can replicate this in any real way.
David Chalmers is a proponent of extended mind theory - his vision is a variation of my argument above, although mine is a little more "embodiment based."
The whole video:The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis
I've put a new paper online: "The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis". This is a written version of the talk I gave at the Singularity Summit last October (Powerpoint, video, blog post). The main focus is the intelligence explosion that some think will happen when machines become more intelligent than humans. First, I try to clarify and analyze the argument for an intelligence explosion. Second, I discuss strategies for negotiating the singularity to maximize the chances of a good outcome. Third, I discuss issues regarding uploading human minds into computers, focusing on issues about consciousness and personal identity (I think this is the first time I've written at any length about personal identity, a topic I've largely avoided in the past as it confuses me too much). I'll be giving a talk based on this paper at the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference in Tucson the week after next, and also in upcoming events at NYU and Oxford. I'm still an amateur on these topics and any feedback would be appreciated.
David Chalmers at Singularity Summit 2009 -- Simulation and the Singularity from Singularity Institute on Vimeo.
Here is the beginning of Chalmer's presentation text/paper, for those who would rather read than watch:Read more.
1 Introduction
What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the “singularity”.
The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I.J. Good in his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”:Let an ultraintelligent 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 ultraintelligent 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 ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines.
This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards.
The argument for a speed explosion was set out by the artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomono in his 1985 article “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”. Eliezer Yudkowsky gives a succinct version of the argument in his 1996 article “Staring at the Singularity”:“Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work. Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months - three months - 1.5 months ... Singularity.”The intelligence explosion and the speed explosion are logically independent of each other. In principle there could be an intelligence explosion without a speed explosion and a speed explosion without an intelligence explosion. But the two ideas work particularly well together. Suppose that within two subjective years, a greater-than-human machine can produce another machine that is not only twice as fast but 10% more intelligent, and suppose that this principle is indefinitely extensible. Then within four objective years there will have been an infinite number of generations, with both speed and intelligence increasing beyond any finite level within a finite time. This process would truly deserve the name “singularity”.
Of course the laws of physics impose limitations here. If the currently accepted laws of relativity and quantum mechanics are correct—or even if energy is finite in a classical universe—then we cannot expect the principles above to be indefinitely extensible. But even with these physical limitations in place, the arguments give some reason to think that both speed and intelligence might be pushed to the limits of what is physically possible. And on the face of it, it is unlikely that human processing is even close to the limits of what is physically possible. So the arguments suggest that both speed and intelligence might be pushed far beyond human capacity in a relatively short time. This process might not qualify as a “singularity” in the strict sense from mathematics and physics, but it would be similar enough that the name is not altogether inappropriate.
The term “singularity” was introduced by the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in his 1993 article “The Coming Technological Singularity”, and has been popularized by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil in his 2005 book The Singularity is Near. In practice, the term is used in a number of di erent ways. A loose sense refers to phenomena whereby ever-more-rapid technological change leads to unpredictable consequences. A very strict sense refers to a point where speed and intelligence go to infinity, as in the hypothetical speed/intelligence explosion above. Perhaps the core sense of the term, though, is a moderate sense in which it refers to an intelligence explosion through the recursive mechanism set out by I.J. Good, whether or not this intelligence explosion goes along with a speed explosion or with divergence to infinity. I will always use the term “singularity” in this core sense in what follows.
One might think that the singularity would be of great interest to academic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. In practice, this has not been the case. Good was an eminent academic, but his article was largely unappreciated at the time. The subsequent discussion of the singularity has largely taken place in nonacademic circles, including Internet forums, popular media and books, and workshops organized by the independent Singularity Institute. Perhaps the highly speculative flavor of the singularity idea has been responsible for academic resistance to the idea.
I think this resistance is a shame, as the singularity idea is clearly an important one. The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously. And the questions surrounding the singularity are of enormous practical and philosophical concern.
Practically: If there is a singularity, it will be one of the most important events in the history of the planet. An intelligence explosion has enormous potential benefits: a cure for all known diseases, an end to poverty, extraordinary scientific advances, and much more. It also has enormous potential dangers: an end to the human race, an arms race of warring machines, the power to destroy the planet. So if there is even a small chance that there will be a singularity, we would do well to think about what forms it might take and whether there is anything we can do to influence the outcomes in a positive direction.
Philosophically: The singularity raises many important philosophical questions. The basic argument for an intelligence explosion is philosophically interesting in itself, and forces us to think hard about the nature of intelligence and about the mental capacities of artificial machines. The potential consequences of an intelligence explosion force us to think hard about values and morality and about consciousness and personal identity.
Tags:
No comments:
Post a Comment