May 11, 2011
two quotes from The Singularity Is Near
Halfway through The Singularity Is Near, you get:
Advancing computer performance is like water slowly flooding the landscape. A half century ago it began to drown the lowlands, driving out human calculators and record clerks, but leaving most of us dry. Now the flood has reached the foothills, and our outposts there are contemplating retreat. We feel safe on our peaks, but, at the present rate, those too will be submerged within another half century. I propose that we build Arks as that day nears, and adopt a seafaring life! For now, though, we must rely on our representatives in the lowlands to tell us what water is really like.
– Hans Moravec
and:
The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it’s comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once the principles of operation of human intelligence are understood, expanding its abilities will be conducted by human scientists and engineers whose own biological intelligence will have been greatly amplified through an intimate merger with nonbiological intelligence. Over time, the nonbiological portion will predominate.
Kurzweil spends hundreds of pages establishing dozens of examples that support his ideas, but now you have a better idea of his underlying assumptions.
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We used to take it for granted that once we built a machine with human-level intelligence, sentience would just come naturally.
Now, it’s not looking like a certainty at all.
I have worked my entire adult life as a software engineer to make machines do things, and I can assure you that they are still very very, very, very, very, very dumb.
Even those chess playing ones are super dumb despite what may be said, bearing an “intelligence” of a character far off the charts in the direction that the autistic savant points.
I had a friend in college who argued that computers will never learn human language in a meaningful way because they don’t interact with the world in a way that is even remotely human, and the more I think about this idea, the more I think that machine intelligence and human intelligence are just qualitatively different – to a point that using the same word is kind of strange.
I’m not even sold on human intelligence working as a concept that works all that well along a single linear order, let alone something that you directly compare between a human and a machine as if its a kind of stuff that one has more of.