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What If One Country Achieves the Singularity First ?
WRITTEN BY ZOLTAN ISTVAN
The concept of a technological singularity ( http://www.singularitysymposium.com/definition-of-singularity.html ) is tough to wrap your mind around. Even experts have differing definitions. Vernor Vinge, responsible for spreading the idea in the 1990s, believes it's a moment when growing superintelligence renders our human models of understanding obsolete. Google's Ray Kurzweil says it's "a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so rapid, its impact so deep, that human life will be irreversibly transformed." Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, says, "Singularity is the point at which all the change in the last million years will be superseded by the change in the next five minutes." Even Christian theologians have chimed in, sometimes referring to it as "the rapture of the nerds."
My own definition of the singularity is: the point where a fully functioning human mind radically and exponentially increases its intelligence and possibilities via physically merging with technology.
All these definitions share one basic premise—that technology will speed up the acceleration of intelligence to a point when biological human understanding simply isn’t enough to comprehend what’s happening anymore.
If an AI exclusively belonged to one nation (which is likely to happen), and the technology of merging human brains and machines grows sufficiently (which is also likely to happen), then you could possibly end up with one nation controlling the pathways into the singularity.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/what-if-one-country-achieves-the-singularity-first
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday April 26 2015, @01:48AM
Nobody was certain it was useless until they tried it. AI is hard, but nobody really knows just how hard, or whether the problem is just that we aren't looking at things the right way. To me it seemed obvious that Prolog was the wrong thing to try, but there were a very large number of people who disagreed with me. To me it *now* seems evident that logic isn't central to AI (it's a necessary ancillary function). This wasn't clear to me at the time, in fact at that time I would have disagreed with the assertion. To me it *now* seems clear that pattern matching, but not in the way Prolog does it, is the necessary approach. Unfortunately, there are a lot of ways that are "not in the way Prolog does it", so this doesn't help that much. Probably several of them will be needed, and some way of cross-indexing the results. Even so, I don't think that "unification" will have a large part in the successful result. It's notable that vision tends to split the image into a slew of different factors which are sent to different parts of the brain and only later combined into one mental image of an object. Probably the pattern matching is used to filter in one narrow area only stimulating matching things in that area, and that it takes a multitude of matched factors to cause a recognition. But perfect recognition can't be required, as you can recognize people from angles that you have never seen them in before, or under colored lights that you have never seen them under. But it sure helps if you are expecting to see them.
So, from current perspective there are good reasons to believe that the Japanese 4th generation computer would not succeed in producing an AI even without knowing that it didn't do so. Those data weren't available at the time, so calling it a broken window fallacy is invalid. Calling it an excessively risky venture *is* a valid point of view, but Sony, Toyota, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, etc. might well disagree with you. And so might the governmental economic planners who approved the venture. Most such ventures fail. Often they have useful results that would not have appeared if they had not been engaged in. Your claim that it wasn't worthwhile, based on knowing that it didn't work out, is unreasonable, as that knowledge was not available at the time. What was reasonably known was that it was a risky venture which would require a large investment.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 27 2015, @04:50AM
Nobody was certain it was useless until they tried it.
Nobody will be certain that it'll be useless every time it is tried in the future either. But you have to consider not only cost versus potential benefit, but whether the approach even is relatively effective at the goal. To put it bluntly, big R&D projects are notoriously bad at what they do. Fifth Generation is not at all unusual in its poor outcome.
We have a number of examples of large project failures, past and present to indicate that for this approach the potential reward isn't in line with the cost. So sure, we couldn't be certain that it was useless, but if we were betting, that's where the smart money would be.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday April 28 2015, @03:00PM
What you say is almost always correct, but some things can't be done any other way. You can argue that they shouldn't be done, then, but that is a very different argument than calling it a "broken window fallacy".
OTOH, I'm not even sure that it wasn't a net benefit to Japan. Saying that some of their companies are in trouble 25 years later doesn't imply to me that the investment wasn't worthwhile.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 28 2015, @04:23PM
But this shoveled a lot of R&D money at Japanese companies, and this did good things for the country's economy, even if it didn't produce the promised AI.
That's the argument I referred to when I invoked the Broken Window fallacy.
but some things can't be done any other way
AI research isn't one of those things, but research into what happens when one dumps mind-boggling sums of money into research without accomplishing much is.
OTOH, I'm not even sure that it wasn't a net benefit to Japan. Saying that some of their companies are in trouble 25 years later doesn't imply to me that the investment wasn't worthwhile.
Their entire society is at risk. They have poor demographic trends, powerful, aggressive neighbors (China and Russia), and an economy that hasn't done much since the 1990-1991 recession. My view on this is that the failure of the Fifth Generation project was a demonstration of the incompetence of the next generation of economic planners and a taste of what was to come. Now, they're not much further along than they were then and the Japanese government owes more than twice the country's GDP in publicly held debt.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday April 29 2015, @01:59AM
Agreeing that their entire society is at risk, this is not tied to an investment in AI that didn't work out.
Your assertion that AI doesn't need large investment has not been proven correct. IBM and HP seem to disagree with it, though they are betting on new hardware designs, believing that it can't be done economically in software. They may or may not be correct, but the point is that even now nobody knows whether a large investment is necessary. (Many people agree with you that it isn't. My theory is that a requirement is significant but not massive investment, and in particular multi-sensory processing and pattern recognition that is then integrated. I don't claim to know how to do this. Some hardware will obviously be needed, but it's not at all obvious that massive investment is needed. IBM and HP feel that the entire von Neumann architecture needs to be redesigned.
Now if you remember back to the days of the 5th generation project you will recall that microcomputers were toys. So Japan was trying to succeed by building super-fast computers and programming them with a logic engine. Today that seems silly, but at the time many people thought that was a reasonable way forwards.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday April 29 2015, @04:22AM
this is not tied to an investment in AI that didn't work out.
I agree. The malinvestment in AI was just a small part of the problem. There was a lot more short-sighted policies and attitudes where that came from.
Your assertion that AI doesn't need large investment has not been proven correct.
Where's your argument for that? I read everything that followed, but it wasn't relevant to this claim. So what if IBM and HP "disagree"? Especially when they don't actually show any signs of being particularly relevant in the field?
They may or may not be correct, but the point is that even now nobody knows whether a large investment is necessary.
Bingo. Here's proof that I'm right. If you don't know if a large investment is necessary, then you're too ignorant to dive in with a large investment.
Now if you remember back to the days of the 5th generation project you will recall that microcomputers were toys. So Japan was trying to succeed by building super-fast computers and programming them with a logic engine. Today that seems silly, but at the time many people thought that was a reasonable way forwards.
More proof that I'm right. What about building super-fast computers and logic engines requires the massive wealth dump that Japan did? It reminds me of the tens of billions dumped into renewable energy world-wide. What are you expect that money to do, that a minute fraction of the expenditure couldn't do?