The Technological Singularity and super intelligence revolution

[Eddie Teach]

Technically, that's a Trunk Ape. 

Awesome gif, btw.

[crazy canuck]

This is a gross over-simplification of how evolution works. The mechanism of evolution doesn't understand why or how it works, it just uses random fluctuation to try various crap until something is a little bit better and repeats.

That wasnt just a gross over simplification.  That isnt evolution at all.

Argument by assertion is not argument at all.

Which is why I found your assertion so troubling. 

[grumbler]

Argument by assertion is not argument at all.

Which is why I found your assertion so troubling. 

Well-done!  You have decisively out-stupided Berkut.  You make it seem so effortless.

[11B4V]

[Siege]

Well Raz, you really  should read the link in the original post instead of talking shit out of your ass over and over about the diff between speed and quality.

"A key distinction is the difference between speed superintelligence and quality superintelligence. Often, someone's first thought when they imagine a super-smart computer is one that's as intelligent as a human but can think much, much faster2—they might picture a machine that thinks like a human, except a million times quicker, which means it could figure out in five minutes what would take a human a decade.

That sounds impressive, and ASI would think much faster than any human could—but the true separator would be its advantage in intelligence quality, which is something completely different. What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn't a difference in thinking speed—it's that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps' brains do not. Speeding up a chimp's brain by thousands of times wouldn't bring him to our level—even with a decade's time, he wouldn't be able to figure out how to use a set of custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying.

But it's not just that a chimp can't do what we do, it's that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist—a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he'll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to build a skyscraper, it's beyond him to realize that anyone can build a skyscraper. That's the result of a small difference in intelligence quality.

And in the scheme of the intelligence range we're talking about today, or even the much smaller range among biological creatures, the chimp-to-human quality intelligence gap is tiny. In an earlier post, I depicted the range of biological cognitive capacity using a staircase:3"

[Siege]

Ok, Raz, this is just for you.
Please nobody else read this.
Thank you.

Before we dive into things, let's remind ourselves what it would mean for a machine to be superintelligent.

A key distinction is the difference between speed superintelligence and quality superintelligence. Often, someone's first thought when they imagine a super-smart computer is one that's as intelligent as a human but can think much, much faster2—they might picture a machine that thinks like a human, except a million times quicker, which means it could figure out in five minutes what would take a human a decade.

That sounds impressive, and ASI would think much faster than any human could—but the true separator would be its advantage in intelligence quality, which is something completely different. What makes humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn't a difference in thinking speed—it's that human brains contain a number of sophisticated cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or longterm planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps' brains do not. Speeding up a chimp's brain by thousands of times wouldn't bring him to our level—even with a decade's time, he wouldn't be able to figure out how to use a set of custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying.

But it's not just that a chimp can't do what we do, it's that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist—a chimp can become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he'll never be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world, anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to build a skyscraper, it's beyond him to realize that anyone can build a skyscraper. That's the result of a small difference in intelligence quality.

And in the scheme of the intelligence range we're talking about today, or even the much smaller range among biological creatures, the chimp-to-human quality intelligence gap is tiny. In an earlier post, I depicted the range of biological cognitive capacity using a staircase:




To absorb how big a deal a superintelligent machine would be, imagine one on the dark green step two steps above humans on that staircase. This machine would be only slightly superintelligent, but its increased cognitive ability over us would be as vast as the chimp-human gap we just described. And like the chimp's incapacity to ever absorb that skyscrapers can be built, we will never be able to even comprehend the things a machine on the dark green step can do, even if the machine tried to explain it to us—let alone do it ourselves. And that's only two steps above us. A machine on the second-to-highest step on that staircase would be to us as we are to ants—it could try for years to teach us the simplest inkling of what it knows and the endeavor would be hopeless.

But the kind of superintelligence we're talking about today is something far beyond anything on this staircase. In an intelligence explosion—where the smarter a machine gets, the quicker it's able to increase its own intelligence, until it begins to soar upwards—a machine might take years to rise from the chimp step to the one above it, but perhaps only hours to jump up a step once it's on the dark green step two above us, and by the time it's ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it's distinctly possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first machine reaching human-level AGI, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the Earth with something that's here on the staircase (or maybe a million times higher):




And since we just established that it's a hopeless activity to try to understand the power of a machine only two steps above us, let's very concretely state once and for all that there is no way to know what ASI will do or what the consequences will be for us. Anyone who pretends otherwise doesn't understand what superintelligence means.

Evolution has advanced the biological brain slowly and gradually over hundreds of millions of years, and in that sense, if humans birth an ASI machine, we'll be dramatically stomping on evolution. Or maybe this is part of evolution—maybe the way evolution works is that intelligence creeps up more and more until it hits the level where it's capable of creating machine superintelligence, and that level is like a tripwire that triggers a worldwide game-changing explosion that determines a new future for all living things:



And for reasons we'll discuss later, a huge part of the scientific community believes that it's not a matter of whether we'll hit that tripwire, but when. Kind of a crazy piece of information.

So where does that leave us?

Well no one in the world, especially not I, can tell you what will happen when we hit the tripwire. But Oxford philosopher and lead AI thinker Nick Bostrom believes we can boil down all potential outcomes into two broad categories.

First, looking at history, we can see that life works like this: species pop up, exist for a while, and after some time, inevitably, they fall off the existence balance beam and land on extinction—




"All species eventually go extinct" has been almost as reliable a rule through history as "All humans eventually die" has been. So far, 99.9% of species have fallen off the balance beam, and it seems pretty clear that if a species keeps wobbling along down the beam, it's only a matter of time before some other species, some gust of nature's wind, or a sudden beam-shaking asteroid knocks it off. Bostrom calls extinction an attractor state—a place species are all teetering on falling into and from which no species ever returns.

And while most scientists I've come across acknowledge that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe that used beneficially, ASI's abilities could be used to bring individual humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state—species immortality. Bostrom believes species immortality is just as much of an attractor state as species extinction, i.e. if we manage to get there, we'll be impervious to extinction forever—we'll have conquered mortality and conquered chance. So even though all species so far have fallen off the balance beam and landed on extinction, Bostrom believes there are two sides to the beam and it's just that nothing on Earth has been intelligent enough yet to figure out how to fall off on the other side.



If Bostrom and others are right, and from everything I've read, it seems like they really might be, we have two pretty shocking facts to absorb:

1) The advent of ASI will, for the first time, open up the possibility for a species to land on the immortality side of the balance beam.

2) The advent of ASI will make such an unimaginably dramatic impact that it's likely to knock the human race off the beam, in one direction or the other.

It may very well be that when evolution hits the tripwire, it permanently ends humans' relationship with the beam and creates a new world, with or without humans.

Kind of seems like the only question any human should currently be asking is: When are we going to hit the tripwire and which side of the beam will we land on when that happens?

No one in the world knows the answer to either part of that question, but a lot of the very smartest people have put decades of thought into it. We'll spend the rest of this post exploring what they've come up with.

___________

Let's start with the first part of the question: When are we going to hit the tripwire?

i.e. How long until the first machine reaches superintelligence?

Not shockingly, opinions vary wildly and this is a heated debate among scientists and thinkers. Many, like professor Vernor Vinge, scientist Ben Goertzel, Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, or, most famously, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, agree with machine learning expert Jeremy Howard when he puts up this graph during a TED Talk:



Those people subscribe to the belief that this is happening soon—that exponential growth is at work and machine learning, though only slowly creeping up on us now, will blow right past us within the next few decades.

Others, like Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, research psychologist Gary Marcus, NYU computer scientist Ernest Davis, and tech entrepreneur Mitch Kapor, believe that thinkers like Kurzweil are vastly underestimating the magnitude of the challenge and believe that we're not actually that close to the tripwire.

The Kurzweil camp would counter that the only underestimating that's happening is the underappreciation of exponential growth, and they'd compare the doubters to those who looked at the slow-growing seedling of the internet in 1985 and argued that there was no way it would amount to anything impactful in the near future.

The doubters might argue back that the progress needed to make advancements in intelligence also grows exponentially harder with each subsequent step, which will cancel out the typical exponential nature of technological progress. And so on.

A third camp, which includes Nick Bostrom, believes neither group has any ground to feel certain about the timeline and acknowledges both A) that this could absolutely happen in the near future and B) that there's no guarantee about that; it could also take a much longer time.

Still others, like philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, believe all three of these groups are naive for believing that there even is a tripwire, arguing that it's more likely that ASI won't actually ever be achieved.

So what do you get when you put all of these opinions together?

In 2013, Vincent C. Müller and Nick Bostrom conducted a survey that asked hundreds of AI experts at a series of conferences the following question: "For the purposes of this question, assume that human scientific activity continues without major negative disruption. By what year would you see a (10% / 50% / 90%) probability for such HLMI4 to exist?" It asked them to name an optimistic year (one in which they believe there's a 10% chance we'll have AGI), a realistic guess (a year they believe there's a 50% chance of AGI—i.e. after that year they think it's more likely than not that we'll have AGI), and a safe guess (the earliest year by which they can say with 90% certainty we'll have AGI). Gathered together as one data set, here were the results:2

Median optimistic year (10% likelihood): 2022
Median realistic year (50% likelihood): 2040
Median pessimistic year (90% likelihood): 2075


So the median participant thinks it's more likely than not that we'll have AGI 25 years from now. The 90% median answer of 2075 means that if you're a teenager right now, the median respondent, along with over half of the group of AI experts, is almost certain AGI will happen within your lifetime.

A separate study, conducted recently by author James Barrat at Ben Goertzel's annual AGI Conference, did away with percentages and simply asked when participants thought AGI would be achieved—by 2030, by 2050, by 2100, after 2100, or never. The results:3

By 2030: 42% of respondents
By 2050: 25%
By 2100: 20%
After 2100: 10%
Never: 2%

Pretty similar to Müller and Bostrom's outcomes. In Barrat's survey, over two thirds of participants believe AGI will be here by 2050 and a little less than half predict AGI within the next 15 years. Also striking is that only 2% of those surveyed don't think AGI is part of our future.

But AGI isn't the tripwire, ASI is. So when do the experts think we'll reach ASI?

Müller and Bostrom also asked the experts how likely they think it is that we'll reach ASI A) within two years of reaching AGI (i.e. an almost-immediate intelligence explosion), and B) within 30 years. The results:4

The median answer put a rapid (2 year) AGI → ASI transition at only a 10% likelihood, but a longer transition of 30 years or less at a 75% likelihood.

We don't know from this data the length of this transition the median participant would have put at a 50% likelihood, but for ballpark purposes, based on the two answers above, let's estimate that they'd have said 20 years. So the median opinion—the one right in the center of the world of AI experts—believes the most realistic guess for when we'll hit the ASI tripwire is [the 2040 prediction for AGI + our estimated prediction of a 20-year transition from AGI to ASI] = 2060.





Of course, all of the above statistics are speculative, and they're only representative of the center opinion of the AI expert community, but it tells us that a large portion of the people who know the most about this topic would agree that 2060 is a very reasonable estimate for the arrival of potentially world-altering ASI. Only 45 years from now.

Okay now how about the second part of the question above: When we hit the tripwire, which side of the beam will we fall to?

Superintelligence will yield tremendous power—the critical question for us is:

Who or what will be in control of that power, and what will their motivation be?

The answer to this will determine whether ASI is an unbelievably great development, an unfathomably terrible development, or something in between.

Of course, the expert community is again all over the board and in a heated debate about the answer to this question. Müller and Bostrom's survey asked participants to assign a probability to the possible impacts AGI would have on humanity and found that the mean response was that there was a 52% chance that the outcome will be either good or extremely good and a 31% chance the outcome will be either bad or extremely bad. For a relatively neutral outcome, the mean probability was only 17%. In other words, the people who know the most about this are pretty sure this will be a huge deal. It's also worth noting that those numbers refer to the advent of AGI—if the question were about ASI, I imagine that the neutral percentage would be even lower.

Before we dive much further into this good vs. bad outcome part of the question, let's combine both the "when will it happen?" and the "will it be good or bad?" parts of this question into a chart that encompasses the views of most of the relevant experts:




We'll talk more about the Main Camp in a minute, but first—what's your deal? Actually I know what your deal is, because it was my deal too before I started researching this topic. Some reasons most people aren't really thinking about this topic:

◾As mentioned in Part 1, movies have really confused things by presenting unrealistic AI scenarios that make us feel like AI isn't something to be taken seriously in general. James Barrat compares the situation to our reaction if the Centers for Disease Control issued a serious warning about vampires in our future.5

◾Due to something called cognitive biases, we have a hard time believing something is real until we see proof. I'm sure computer scientists in 1988 were regularly talking about how big a deal the internet was likely to be, but people probably didn't really think it was going to change their lives until it actually changed their lives. This is partially because computers just couldn't do stuff like that in 1988, so people would look at their computer and think, "Really? That's gonna be a life changing thing?" Their imaginations were limited to what their personal experience had taught them about what a computer was, which made it very hard to vividly picture what computers might become. The same thing is happening now with AI. We hear that it's gonna be a big deal, but because it hasn't happened yet, and because of our experience with the relatively impotent AI in our current world, we have a hard time really believing this is going to change our lives dramatically. And those biases are what experts are up against as they frantically try to get our attention through the noise of collective daily self-absorption.

◾Even if we did believe it—how many times today have you thought about the fact that you'll spend most of the rest of eternity not existing? Not many, right? Even though it's a far more intense fact than anything else you're doing today? This is because our brains are normally focused on the little things in day-to-day life, no matter how crazy a long-term situation we're a part of. It's just how we're wired.

One of the goals of these two posts is to get you out of the I Like to Think About Other Things Camp and into one of the expert camps, even if you're just standing on the intersection of the two dotted lines in the square above, totally uncertain.

During my research, I came across dozens of varying opinions on this topic, but I quickly noticed that most people's opinions fell somewhere in what I labeled the Main Camp, and in particular, over three quarters of the experts fell into two Subcamps inside the Main Camp:

Ok, I got tired of so much cut and paste.
Keep reading here is you care:

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html

[Razgovory]

Dude, I read you link the first time. 

[11B4V]

Ok, Raz, this is just for you.

**SNIPE**

BUNCH OF BS

[Valmy]

I just want that computer put in my brain so I can function like a Mentat from Dune.

[Siege]

Dude, I read you link the first time. 

Oh, ok.

[Siege]

Ok, Raz, this is just for you.

**SNIPE**

BUNCH OF BS

I don't speak wirh trators.

[11B4V]

Ok, Raz, this is just for you.

**SNIPE**

BUNCH OF BS

I don't speak wirh trators.

It's spelled Traitors.

[Siege]

Ok, Raz, this is just for you.

**SNIPE**

BUNCH OF BS

I don't speak wirh trators.

It's spelled Traitors.

I don't speak english.

[Eddie Teach]

I don't speak english.

אני לא מדבר עברית

[Razgovory]

None of us know Arabic.