Technological Singularity

When robots are smarter than people, then people will be obsolete. Believe it or not, this will occur in 2018 when Intel delivers an exascale supercomputer to the White House and then they simulate a human brain in real-time. Obama just signed the executive order.

Isn't that special?

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. :lol:
But, for real, I totally welcome the new technology. It's good to have supercomputers, and since they can't have true artificial intelligence (Searle's "Chinese Room" is a fine proof for this) there is no risk of sci-fi takeover by a machine revolution.

What's really exciting is that these supercomputers don't make humans obsolete -- they make working obsolete. Every day we get closer and closer to the utopia envisioned by many authors and philosophers where human beings won't have to work and can instead dedicate their lives to entertainment, spirituality, or thinking of more important things. Truly a philosopher's paradise.

Things have advanced in artificial intelligence. It's to the point now where AI can diagnose medical conditions, drive cars, recognize faces, deliver packages, etc.

I think we need to go beyond the superficial employment ramifications. I'm talking about a superior intelligence to humans. To make an analogy: AI is to humans as humans are to chimpanzees. Eventually, humans will go extinct or of the AI is benevolent, there will be "nature preserves" to "save the humans", lol.

First things first, citation, please. We google words or concepts we don't understand in their entirety; we shouldn't have to google to find your sources - though we might want to google anyway to fact-check.

Why am I being this skeptical or dismissive? Well, part of it is that it's me and I have a reputation here for being this way, so enjoy *bows*. Another part is that Intel is not exactly an independant party free of conflicts of interests. To announce that they will in three years release a supercomputer that is on par with a human brain (as if current processors weren't) is not exactly a humble announcement and is sure to get them both attention and funds and neither are things they'd reject. On the face of it it just sounds like a marketing gimmick, how ever much of it is actually accurate.

Then of course there is what Dude says. What does "obsolete" even mean? Ever since the printing press, scribes are essentially obsolete. Ever since gunpowder, archers are obsolete - though we did get other types of marksmen and canoneers... Come to think of it, bow marksmen have been obsolete for as long as crossbows were around, too, though archers were still useful for areal sweeps. The point is, just about every machine we invent made some profession people previously held obsolete. Some of them brought us new professions previously never thought of, others might not have. Obsolete is a term deeply fuzzy for both its inconsistent definition, the relativity of the definitions given, and the base assumptions necessary to accept any definition. How can you say anything has become obsolete if you cannot say it has had any particular purpose previously? And if we acknowledge the subjectivity and limited scope of purpose, so we must for obsoleteness rendering both of them terms that cannot without endless debate be applied to anything.

And as for the predictions you made in the latter post: How could you possibly know that? And how petty is it to need to be the most intelligent thing around? Are we humans really this insecure?

Sure, they can recognize faces and diagnose medical conditions. But that's simply taking in information, comparing it to previous information, and then relaying information. The computer might be able to translate English into Chinese perfectly by comparing the input text to a dictionary and then a translator's dictionary. Maybe some day it could even do grammar correctly. But that doesn't mean that it knows English or Chinese. Just like any form of original thought, computers simply will not ever be able to think for themselves or feel emotions. I don't see us being in nature reserves, lol.

TheDude wrote: Sure, they can recognize faces and diagnose medical conditions. But that's simply taking in information, comparing it to previous information, and then relaying information. The computer might be able to translate English into Chinese perfectly by comparing the input text to a dictionary and then a translator's dictionary. Maybe some day it could even do grammar correctly. But that doesn't mean that it knows English or Chinese. Just like any form of original thought, computers simply will not ever be able to think for themselves or feel emotions.

I don't know about that... It's not like in our brains anything more happens than in the brain of a computer. We process the information in pretty much the same way. Emotions are just as much reactions to internal and external stimuli as anything else. Can you prove you are not a computer? As awful as the Transcendence movie was, that one question about self-awareness is not really misplaced. If you can question the self-awareness of a machine, how can you not question your own?

That's quite a gamble to take. The brain can be accurately reproduced using neural networks. It's just a matter of time before someone assembles the right network to simulate an entire brain. It's kind of like this: you click "play" on your computer and it starts thinking and learning. It learns how to communicate, write poems, etc. It's no different than you or I except is based on inorganic material and we are organic.

Sure. The computer registers data and gives an output based not on what we would call mental processes, rather on a rigid "if a then b" structure. I stand by Searle's example of the Chinese room. In essence, what a computer does is receive a Chinese character, go through a database which says "if you receive this character, respond with this other character", and that's the end of it. It doesn't learn Chinese, as the extent of its knowledge would be to respond with something preset. Siri and Cortana are good examples of this. If I ask, "Cortana, how are you feeling?" Cortana will reply with "Splendid." This is because the computer does not actually experience reality in the same way that a living being does; it simply has preset answers and is incapable of truly learning. (I understand that artificial intelligence can learn, but it is only within very strict parameters. It isn't true knowledge, it's pattern recognition and fitting those patterns into other presets.) While the computer doesn't understand the Chinese characters that it puts out based only on input-output, the human being can learn Chinese.

And even if a computer were to perfectly match a human brain, what about the mind/soul/elan vital? The proposition that AI could rival human intelligence/experience/whatever is based on a presumption of non-dualism in the Cartesian sense, which I'm not so quick to buy into.

TheDude wrote: I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords. :lol:
But, for real, I totally welcome the new technology. It's good to have supercomputers, and since they can't have true artificial intelligence (Searle's "Chinese Room" is a fine proof for this) there is no risk of sci-fi takeover by a machine revolution.

What's really exciting is that these supercomputers don't make humans obsolete -- they make working obsolete. Every day we get closer and closer to the utopia envisioned by many authors and philosophers where human beings won't have to work and can instead dedicate their lives to entertainment, spirituality, or thinking of more important things. Truly a philosopher's paradise.

There's a TV show over here at the moment called 'Humans' where this exact subject comes up. The argument of one of the characters is that she can't be bothered with her future because anything she does will be outmatched by a computer. Another argument is that being able to work is a human right.

I don't agree with the Chinese Room. Pattern recognition does not equate to semantic discovery.... so the presence of a process without understanding doesn't seem to equate as necessarily mindless to me.

A 'program' that is so simple that he can manually run it does not really sound like a 'Strong AI' to me anyway. I don't much time for the Turing Test either. For me a real AI (Adder's AI!)would need to be a modeled quite closely to how (it seems) the human mind works, with its own self referential framework (ego) for recursive contextualization and accumulation of an apparent ultimate truth (worldview) to contrast its own relative awareness as a sense of self ([language of] memory {past} or perception {present}). Provided with the Chinese Room this Adder AI would seek out patterns like anyone else would, and come to its own conclusions based on its own experiences. It might not know Chinese, but it could still be said to have a mind with its own understanding of what it was trying to do. After all, we are comparing it to our sense of mind, so it would have to be somehow similar.... until it discovers better ways to think and supersedes us - then perhaps it becomes AE, artificial evolution
:huh:

The problem with the brain is its immense complexity... neural architecture, electro-chemical gradients, epigenetic mapping, blood flow and drainage, heck even temperature might play a role in function. The eyes are even part of the brain and indeed the rest of the nervous system could be said to be part of the brain too. I don't think we can even measure the actual complexity of it yet, and until we do that we will not be able to reproduce a copy of it. I think we'll be able to create an AI before we can replicate the human mind.

If someone does, perhaps a good idea not to let it access the internet :blink: