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I am a machine. So are you. Of all the hypotheses I've held during my 30-year career, this one in particular has been central to my research in robotics and artificial intelligence. I, you, our family, friends and dogs – we all are machines.
We are really sophisticated machines made up of billions and billions of biomolecules that interact according to well-defined (though not completely known) rules, deriving from physics and chemistry. The biomolecular interactions taking place inside our heads give rise to our intellect, our feelings, our sense of self.
Accepting this hypothesis opens up a remarkable possibility. If we really are machines and if – this is a big if – we learn the rules governing our brains, then in principle there's no reason why we shouldn't be able to replicate those rules in, say, silicon and steel. I believe such a creation would exhibit genuine human-level intelligence, emotions and even consciousness.
I'm far from alone in my conviction that one day we will create a human-level artificial intelligence, often called an artificial general intelligence (AGI).
But how and when we will get there, and what will happen after we do, are now the subjects of fierce debate among experts. Some researchers believe that AGIs will undergo a positive-feedback loop of self-enhancement until their comprehension of the universe far surpasses our own.
Our world, those individuals say, will change in unfathomable ways after such superhuman intelligence comes into existence, an event they refer to as 'the singularity' (see "Tipping point?", Cosmos Online).
Perhaps the best known of the people proselytising for this singularity – let's call them singularitarians – are acolytes of Raymond Kurzweil, author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (Viking, 2005) and board member of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, in Palo Alto, California.
Kurzweil and his colleagues believe that this super AGI will be created either through ever-faster advances in artificial intelligence or by more biological means – "direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, [and] ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation," are some of their ideas.
They don't believe this is centuries away; they think it will happen sometime in the next two or three decades. What will the world look like then? Some singularitarians believe our world will become a techno-utopia, with humans uploading their consciousnesses into machines to live a disembodied, after-death life.
Others, however, anticipate a kind of technodamnation in which intelligent machines will be in conflict with humans, maybe waging war against us. The proponents of the singularity are technologically astute and as a rule do not appeal to technologies that would violate the laws of physics. They well understand the rates of progress in various technologies and how and why those rates of progress are changing. Their arguments are plausible, but plausibility is by no means certainty.
My own view is that things will unfold very differently. I do not claim that any specific assumption or extrapolation of theirs is faulty. Rather, I argue that an artificial intelligence could evolve in a much different way. In particular, I don't think there is going to be one single sudden technological 'big bang' that springs an AGI into life. Starting with the mildly intelligent systems we have today, machines will become gradually more intelligent, generation-by-generation. The singularity will be a period, not an event.
This period will be a time when we will invent, perfect and deploy, in fits and starts, ever more capable systems, driven not by the imperative of the singularity itself but by the usual economic and sociological forces.
The singularity.
While I agree with Robin Brooks starting point,that we are essentially machines we have escaped being predictable machines via the unpredictable emergent properties of our highly complex brains.
It is from this source that conscious thought and personality arise.
Thus that while the deterministic model is self evidently true, the enhancing effects of emergent properties transmutes us into an indeterminable condition of open ended possibility.
The proposition that humans are predetermined is a logical brain twister in the same class as that old chestnut
"I always tell lies"
So if we can do this with a machine then by definition the result will be unpredictable.
Question, please Sir is this a GOOD idea?
Answer, maybe not
Q When?
A Not soon
Q will it like us/ be like us?
A which do you prefer?
Q are you?
A guess
Ron Horgan.
Be careful what we instill
Rodneys comments on what we instil into AI raise the key issue on AI - you instill what you are. That is the problem. we will instill human nature its strengths and frailties. Someone, somewhere will instill the capacity for war in their intention to protect themselves from other humans. Then we let the "children" protect us. Well we know how that goes down.
ok
It all sounds very nice, creating ourselves in our own image stepping back and patting each other on the shoulders. Just like the boys down at the Manhattan project did 50 years ago. But let me get this straight mankind currently is drowning in our own apathy, watching species after species disappear, "talking" about global warming and twiddling our thumbs, not really giving a shit about the world now nor since the dawn of the first singularity, when we started clubbing animals with bones. And you expect AI to clean up our mistakes live in some sort of quasi-utopia with Nano bots that clean up our toxic waste, plug ourselves into the matrix, blah blah blah. Get over this ridicules god complex that all these futurists cling too. It’s now, not maybe, grow up and take stock of the current world and its problems not some AI 40 years from now. i mean Jesus thinking and talking about this stuff is cool, but actually giving funding to these pipe dreams only divides the reasonable from the absurd. The best part of life is that we die, who wants to be uploaded into a computer, life isn’t a cyberpunk game there are certain responsibilities humans have, and one of them is to die, not continually consume for eternity. Get a grip.
Super-human intelligence
I believe there is a fundamental blocking to what we can know about
a super-human intelligence. Simply, we can't know what such an entity will
think or do, because per definition we can't think like superhumans.
So no matter what precautions we take, we can't predict the actions of these creatures. We can't even say "low probability of killing us" or something like that.
Exceeding our design
It is easy to believe that the creation of AGI will happen soon, or happen at all for that matter. From reading countless science fiction books, it would be a fantastic concept to visualise, humans and robots co-existing peacefully.
I would like to point out however, that it is a rather selfish act to design AGI in our own image. Given that we would be recreating our own mistakes, in efforts to conceal or solve our current problems. We would be re-developing the laws that govern us, and programming these traits according to our functions and needs. There will still remain many characteristics and faults at large which we wouldn't be able to predict.
I'm offering that human control does not offer greater possibilities.
I gather that this production would be a slow process to the 'ideal' final design. But what this fantasy result (of an AGI) consists of exceeds our human abilities to fathom. So it is only realistic to be able to replicate ourselves in the form of synthetic matter, if we ever do get there. However unrealistic to think mankind (primitive as it still is in its development) can create something beyond comprehension, and beyond the human "ideal".
In light of this discussion I would love the idea of a self emergent AGI from the depths of a network such as the world wide web.
( This reminds me of the same idea sparked in a novel by Orson Scott Card, called "speaker for the dead". Embedded in this text, an immaterial super intelligence emerges as a "network of ansibles" capable of awareness, sentience and a million performances at light speed.)
-19, female, aus
Would this cause the intelligent design camp to win?
By recursive logic?