Douglas Hofstadter Looks At the Future 387
An anonymous reader writes with a link to this "detailed and fascinating interview with Douglas Hofstadter (of Gödel Escher Bach fame) about his latest book, science fiction, Kurzweil's singularity and more ... Apparently this leading cognitive researcher wouldn't want to live in a world with AI, since 'Such a world would be too alien for me. I prefer living in a world where computers are still very very stupid.' He also wouldn't want to be around if Kurzweil's ideas come to pass, since he thinks 'it certainly would spell the end of human life.'"
Hail to the robots (Score:4, Insightful)
Intelligent Beings (Score:2, Insightful)
To build a machine that is intelligent, we need to understand how our own intelligence works. If our intelligence was simple enough to understand and decipher, we humans would be too simple to understand it or decipher it.
Ergo, we humans will never ever build a machine that is intelligent. We can build a machine that will simulate intelligence, but never actually make it intelligent.
Re:I liked "I am a Strange Loop" (Score:5, Insightful)
I like Hofstadter a *lot* though. His book of essays from SciAm: Metamagical Themas is still woeth grabbing if you ever see a copy.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:2, Insightful)
If you use the Copernican principle (i.e. we are not special) it is easy to assume we, as species, are not specially intelligent nor specially stupid. So the statement that there could be AI more intelligent than us is not that hard to believe.
All this, of course, assuming you don't believe in the soul, god, ghosts and those things.
Re:End of *this* human life... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:5, Insightful)
If a singularity does occur, it will likely emerge from multiple paths at once.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:3, Insightful)
Usually the "singularity" is illustrated by some graph going vertical, where I can only assume that X=Time and Y="Awesomeness". The fact that I didn't commute to work on a flying car makes me a bit skeptical.
Re:Hail to the robots (Score:3, Insightful)
There is hope though, check out Wired's R is for Robot [wired.com] for some interesting insights into human/machine interaction.
"Overproduction" did not cause great depression. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:5, Insightful)
I believe that we'll gradually come to understand the brain better, and from that, how the mind arises from its physical functioning. *That* is where an artificial intelligence can be designed, when we understand the cognition provided by the brain.
A lack of vision... (Score:5, Insightful)
This topic seems to make the nerdy and the not-so nerdy alike, a little crazy. Let's see if we can't illuminate this conversation just a wee bit? Eh!
Am I the only one who wouldn't mind... (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't give me any of that, "Oh, it'll kill coders *first* because they represent the biggest threat" nonsense. Do you know how hard it is to get a machine to exhibit anything *remotely* resembling intelligence? If you created something capable of even *reasoning* that you were a threat, you'd have created something smart enough to deal with that deduction in better ways than killing you. And if it's not really smarter than you, but just more dangerous - like those automated border guard robots they had to turn off because they turned their guns on the engineers during the demo - well, the world probably *is* better off without you. *First* you make it intelligent, *then* you install the guns. Jeez - how hard is that to figure out?
Or maybe it's just that running from Terminator style robots would be far more exciting that sitting at this freakin' desk all day. But to me, dying at the hands of creation that surpassed your intelligence would be right up there with dying of a heart attack during your honeymoon with Jessica Alba. The kind of death where the epitaph on your tombstone could be: "My work here is done!"
Re:Kind of a strange response really (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Hail to the robots (Score:3, Insightful)
By the way, if you manage to find one at a reasonable price, let me know so I can buy one too.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:1, Insightful)
Sorry, but this part of your post is basically just semantic nonsense. It sounds like you're saying something that could be possible - but in fact there is no question of whether or not it's possible, because you don't even know what you've said. Just like all of Vinge's and Kurzweil's books. The entire theory of the singularity is predicated on this ill-defined statement of nothing. That's why it the singularity never amount to more than anything but the far-off, distant figment of imagination that it is now. Again, sorry - I don't mean to sound like an asshole and bust your bubble, I'm just offering a small dose of reality. The truth is no more complicated than this.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:4, Insightful)
We'd need robots who could design equipment for themselves, to scale mountains. To invent instruments. To scour the depths of the ocean. The point is still valid in the sense that people are a product of their environment, and what makes the human experience so unique is that we're constantly attempting to gain more access to more input. Presumably, any old brain in a box placed in a single room, unable to move, would cease being healthy after awhile, and probably even recognizably human after years because I would have to imagine that some part of the programming of the human mind requires or in the very least infers the ability to alter and modify our environment to a satisfactory degree.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:5, Insightful)
We will always create tools to accomplish specific work and our tools (assuming they become aware) will do the same.
Quite frankly, I don't care if some CEO can pay to upload himself into some AI construct. I will believe that the singularity has created true advancement when "the other 85% of humanity" has adequate access to clean water, nutritious food, and medical care.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what the record is for the longest uptime of a computer system, but it's surely less than a normal human lifetime - hardware wears out, and without infrastructure to support it, the 'singularity' will die through disk/memory/processor/whatever failure in fairly short order.
I think Hofstadter's spot on when he refers to it as 'the nerds rapture' - it's bollocks on the scale of Drexler's imaginary nanorevolution, and should be treated as such.
AI in itself is a noble field of research, but pointless speculation such as Kurzweil's makes the whole field poorer.
Re:End of *this* human life... (Score:3, Insightful)
Throughout history, and I expect throughout the future, the battle between good and evil will continue wherever life exists, material or virtual. That battle is, in my opinion, the same in all places and for all time: Between those who use others and those who would not be used.
I don't see Kurzweil describing post-singularity existence as utopian, however. Merely way different from the material existence we have today. It's as if he is simply warning us of changes to come, and to make a best effort to prepare for them.
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Singularity is naive (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not arguing against this point, I just thought you had a silly example of the difficulties involved.
Yeah, it would add another $139 to the cost, like this device [amazon.com]. If you were thinking about a device that can recognize and move the pieces of any "normal" chess board, then it would be a bit harder, a robotic arm, a camera, and some image recognition software, but still probably at a cost below $1000000, including development. Most likely somebody has already built it as part of a thesis in robotics already.
If, on the other hand, you are thinking of a device that has to go the library/bookstore and borrow/buy books, and then read them, in order to extract and encode the knowledge in its database of opening moves and endgames, then it would be a tad more difficult. If it also had to learn the rules of chess this way (and how the chess-pieces looked), it would be even more difficult. And if it also had to go to the library to learn about alpha-beta-pruning to learn how computers efficiently play chess, and reprogram itself in this way, even more so. If it also had to design its own hardware for chess playing, even more so. All of these problems would probably require full AI capability/human-equivalent thought (something we do not know how to make)
On the other hand, it could also be the case that these problems eventually become "easy" when they are finally solved. Circuits that could add and multiply seemed pretty much like magic when they first appeared. Today they are viewed as "dumb". Face-recognition software is rapidly becoming mainstream, even though just a few years ago it was viewed as extremely difficult, and thirty years ago people like me would probably say it would require human-equivalent thought. Natural language processing and computer learning could take a similar leap, but it wouldn't necessarily mean that computers would be able to do everything else we do.
Because computers doesn't recognize faces like we do, they do it another way, but it still works. Similarly, a breakthrough in natural language processing or computer learning could mean that computers understood natural language (or learned) as well as we do (just like they currently recognize faces as well as we do), but still in a different way. Eventually the frontiers of AI move. When it's a solved engineering problem, it's no longer AI.
I don't know what the definition of AI is, but when humans are no longer needed, I guess we have it.