singularity skeptic
by fledgling otakuI am not a luddite by any means, but I just have to state my position plainly: I think all talk of a “Singularity” (of the Kurzweil variety) is nothing more than science fiction. I do not have an anti-Singularity manifesto but rather just a skeptical reaction to most of the grandiose predictions by Singularians. I’d like to see someone articulate a case for Singularity that isn’t yet another fancy timeline of assertions about what year we will have reverse engineered the human brain or have VR sex or foglets or whatever. I am also leery of the abusive invocation of physics terms like “quantum loop gravity” and “energy states” as if they were magic totems (Heisenberg compensators, anyone?).
If I were to break down the concept of Singularity into components, I’d say it relies on a. genuine artificial intelligence and b. transhumanism. Thus the Singularity would be the supposed union of these two. But I guess it’s not much of a surprise that I am an AI skeptic also. AI is artificial by definition - a simulation of intelligence. AI is an algorithm whereas true intelligence is something much less discrete. I tend towards a stochastic interpretation of genuine intelligence than a deterministic one, myself - akin to the Careenium model of Hoftstadter, but even that was too easily discretized. Let me invoke an abused physics analogy here - I see artificial intelligence as a dalliance with energy levels of an atom, whereas true intelligence is the complete (and for all purposes, infinite) energy state of a 1cm metal cube.
The proponents of AI argue that if we just add levels of complexity eventually we will have something approximating the real thing. The approach is to add more neural net nodes, add more information inputs, and [something happens]. But my sense of the human brain (which is partly religious and partly derived from my career as an MRI physicist specializing in neuroimaging) is that the brain isn’t just a collection of N neurons, wired a certain way. There are layers, structures, and systems within whose complexities multiple against each other.
Are there any neuroscientists working in AI? Do any AI algorithms make an attempt to include structures like an “arcuate fasciculus” or a “basal ganglia” into their model? Is there any understanding of the difference between gray and white matter? I don’t see how a big pile of nodes is going to have any more emergent structure than a big pile of neurons on the floor.
Then we come to transhumanism. Half of transhumanism is the argument that we will “upload” our brains or augment them somehow, but that requires the same knowledge of the brain as AI does, so the same skepticism applies. The other half is physical augmentation, but here we get to the question of energy source. I think Blade Runner did it right:
Tyrell: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long. And you have burned so very very brightly, Roy.
Are we really going to cheat thermodynamics and get multipliers to both our physical bodies and our lifespans? Or does it seem more likely that one comes at the expense of the other? Again, probably no surprise here that I am a skeptic of the Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) stuff promoted by Aubrey de Gray - the MIT Technology Review article about his work gave me no reason to reconsider my judgment that he’s guilty of exuberant extrapolation (much like Kurzweil). I do not dismiss the research but I do dismiss the interpretation of its implications. And do they address the possibility that death itself is an evolutionary imperative?
But ok. Lets postulate that death can simply be engineered away. That human brains can be modeled in the Cloud and data can be copied back and forth from wetware to silicon. Then what do we become? A race of gods? or just a pile of nodes, acting out virtual fantasies until the heat death of the universe pulls the plug? That’s not post- or trans-humanism, its null-humanism.
I’d rather have a future akin to Star Trek, or Foundation, or even Snow Crash - one full of space travel, star empires, super hackers and nanotech. Not a future where we all devolve into quantum ghosts - or worse are no better than the humans trapped in the Matrix, living out simulated lives for eternity.
Tags: AI, brain, future, singularity, transhumanRelated posts at Haibane.info
March 2nd, 2008 at 10:11 am
I have yet to see any AI research address the real development question of intelligence, that of expectation and irritation.
Every single thing computers have done so far is carry out instructions given to it by a human. Not one, not a single solitary computer anywhere, has any awareness of its environment, any expectation that things are as they should be or shouldn’t be.
There is no motivation for a computer to do anything. If it is not told to do something, it sits there, if told to do something it does just what it is told and no more. It is not capable of getting irritated at its environment and noticing that there is a problem for it. It can’t even recognize that there is a problem in its environment.
It cannot notice, it cannot choose to act, it cannot explore possible problem solving techniques, even if we laid those out for it.
People modeling neurons are doing AI research ass-backwards, as far as I can tell. As humans we cannot deal with complexity very well, and even evolved programming such as field programmable gate arrays, is task oriented. I sometimes wonder if AI researchers ever had children. Until they can somehow ‘irritate’ a computer, no ‘intelligence’ will ever be produced.
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:08 pm
Well, it’s certainly true that the origin of awareness is a question outside of the domain of science. Maybe it hasn’t been addressed by the AI makers, but I’m not sure that it can. For example, I could respond to the previous poster by suggesting that *he* is not aware either, but is just giving the appearance of awareness by following various genetic codes - it’s easy enough to script a computer to Complain() when intAnnoy > 10. It’s worthwhile noting that even if we appeal to non-physical sources of intelligence, the means by which we normally distinguish conscious from unconscious (by asking the it looks physically human, if it gives the right responses in text etc etc) is totally materialistic.
Then again, it is my opinion that true AI is essentially a technical problem, not a metaphysical one. (The practicalities might prevent it from ever being done, sure.) My reason for believing this is a thought experiment:
First, note that the behaviour of individual neurons is well understood. Hence, in theory, we can take a person, and while he is still alive, replace one neuron with an artificial copy that behaves identically. Now, we all agree that the awareness of the individual isn’t affected. Now, repeat, step by step, until every neuron in his brain is artificial. Now the question: At what point does awareness go away? 3 options, that there is a sudden switching point, which seems kinda absurd. That awareness gradually declines, which doesn’t match the 1-0 feel of consciousness. Or that it never goes away, which seems to me the most convincing expectation.
Another argument is to realise that artificial intelligence already exists - in our children. The human reproductive system is ultimately just chemistry, DNA just a molecule, so it seems silly to say that we can’t consciously do using metal and electricity what we can already unconsciously do using amino acid bases, sugar molecules and a bit of heat and water, etc.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Jeffrey, I think that “irritation” is something that can be modeled in one sense, ie as a problem. For example the mars rover robots have a rudimentary AI that assists in navigating around obstacles en route to a destination. As far as the emotion of irritation is concerned, you are assuming that emotion is a necessary part of intelligence, which may or may not be true. I don’t know.
Fhnu, your thought experiment is awesome. But I think its a lot easier to magically replace a neuron with an “artificial” one than it is to do so in practice. You also are implicitly assuming that neurons are discrete entities that function individually, but that is also not quite true. A given neuron is enmeshed in its neighborhood in such a way that by removing it, you’d cause damage to surrounding ones, or at the very least upset the regional equilibrium that makes that local areas’ processing function. A neuron by itself is easy to model but no neuron is an island, and thats what I mean by multiplicative complexity.
As a corollary to your thought experiment, replace one human being with an AI. Then two, then N… at what point does human civilization become something else? The question is flawed, of course.
March 2nd, 2008 at 11:13 pm
The human reproductive system is ultimately just chemistry, DNA just a molecule, so it seems silly to say that we can’t consciously do using metal and electricity what we can already unconsciously do using amino acid bases, sugar molecules and a bit of heat and water, etc.
true, but you might as well argue that a human being is just a pile of water and some trace materials, but given a big pile of that stuff you don’t get a human, either
The process by which those raw materials become more, is encoded as information in DNA, and also an emergent property. Thats all part of billions of years of evolution, and not something we can just replicate without effort. It’s like breaking an encryption code - just numbers, right? But which numbers?
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:44 am
Are there any neuroscientists working in AI?
Quite a few, actually.
March 3rd, 2008 at 11:47 am
Every single thing computers have done so far is carry out instructions given to it by a human.
Every single thing humans have done is carry out instructions given to us by evolution.
It cannot notice, it cannot choose to act, it cannot explore possible problem solving techniques, even if we laid those out for it.
Sure it can. If we can give it eyes, it can notice things. If we give it motivations, it can choose between them (just as we choose between eating, sex, work, etc at a given moment). Computers can already solve chess problems better than we can.
March 3rd, 2008 at 5:08 pm
I guess that was a rhetorical question - I kind of assumed there were some, but the leading proponents of AI like Kurzweil betray no knowledge of neuroscience in their public writings that I have seen. My question about arcuate fasciculi, basal ganglia, and gray matter is a loaded one - these aren’t minor details when it comes to brain function. If we plan to “evolve” Ai towards the brain as a target, then we need to actually model the brain itself. I don’t see this, but if I am wrong please point me in the right direction.
I totally disagree that “every thing humans do is the result if instructions given us by evolution”. Thats arguing that humans are no more sentient than machines are. If you believe that AI can happen then you have to believe in teh I part first. If you think we are just bags of meat and chemical stimuli then what point is there in developing AI?
We certainly can give a artifical organism sensors, and program it for behaviors, but the choice is going to be like your Netflix recommendations - derived from weighted averages, not a choice. Case in point is chess - computers dont play chess. They massively brute-force the game to assess eveyr possible branching move N moves donwstream of the present board, then calculate a metric of how “good” the outcome is along each of those branches, and then “choose” the highest-scoring branch. Thats chess as algorithm not chess as a game.
I will be a lot more impressed when an AI beats a 1p dan at Go.
March 4th, 2008 at 3:15 pm
” If you believe that AI can happen then you have to believe in teh I part first. If you think we are just bags of meat and chemical stimuli then what point is there in developing AI?”
That, to me, is the big problem with AI. If we know how it works, we won’t consider it to be intelligent.
March 4th, 2008 at 11:55 pm
I’m skeptical about the ability to ever upload our minds to computers for a different reason, though.
Moving software around from machine to machine only works because computers are mass-produced. People, on the other hand, are unique. I expect that if there were some way to take a checkpoint of my brain, you would not be able to find another brain that could execute it.
I do expect that it will eventually be possible to move large quantities of *data* in and out; if you google Brainport you’ll find some intriguing stuff that points that way. Ultimately, I expect this to only be successful when it’s possible to install implants in infants so that as their brains learn about the world around them, they will also learn how to manipulate the implant. For them, moving large chunks of data will be as natural as speaking is for us.
I don’t expect the technology to be cheap, however, I suspect that there will be a variety of implants with different features for a range of prices. At some point, a child’s future may be determined by how far into debt their parents were willing to go to have a data port installed immediately after birth…
March 6th, 2008 at 4:58 am
When it comes to the transhumanist hopes of uploading our minds into computers, I stand with Roger Penrose. If our minds are algorithmic, so they could be accurately emulated on computers, the theorems of Turing and Goedel apply to our minds; and those theorems then imply that we cannot reach a complete understanding of ourselves. But we would need just such a complete understanding to create a means of translating our mental state to a form that runs on a computer. Therefore uploading ourselves is infeasible in principle. A mind superior to ours could emulate ours on different hardware, but we could not understand the emulator; we would be forced to trust the word of the one who made it, that it really does emulate our minds.
Paradoxically, transhumanism’s goal can be reached only if transhumanism’s assumption of philosophical materialism is wrong, and mind is more than an epiphenomenon of matter …
March 13th, 2008 at 1:20 pm
I question the motive behind singularity; I’d call it fear. When I was in my 20s, there was nothing I feared more than death. Now in my 40s, I find the idea of living forever to be horrible. While the science behind it all is quite interesting (and increasingly useful), those with a hard-on for “singularity” should take more walks.