The Myth of a Superhuman AI - <AUTHOR> https://backchannel.com/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai-59282b686c62 <comment><USER3> > Temperature is not infinite [...] There is finite space and time. Finite > speed.

Just want to point out this is true, however these things go astronomically high.

> what evidence do we have that the limit is not us?

We can measure the speed impulses travel through neurons, and compare that to, say, the speed of electrical impulses through silicon or light through fiber.

We can find the maximum head-size that fits through a vaginal canal, or the maximum metabolic rate a human body could support, and try to determine if these factors imposed any limitations on intelligence during human evolution.

We can look at other evolved/biological capabilities, like swimming or flying, and compare them to state-of-the-art artificial analogs, and see if a pattern emerges where the artificial analogs tend to have similar limitations as their biological counterparts.

<comment><USER4> > Temperature is not infinite [...] There is finite space and time. Finite > speed.

There's no theoretical limit for temperature, and we believe spacetime could be infinite even though the observable universe is not. Nevertheless this is a very silly argument. If it's finite but absurdly high it's good enough for the purpose.

<comment><USER5> If the energy density in a fixed volume of space gets too high it collapses into a black hole. That seems to suggest that there is a kind of limit to temperature.

<comment><USER6> I'm a complete noob in this area, but that doesn't mean that temperature has reached it's limit does it? The black hole can carry on getting more dense and hotter.

<comment><USER5> No, the black hole can't get more dense. If you put more energy into it it gets bigger.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First, let me say that I'm generally a Kevin Kelly fan.

That being said, I think his article shows extreme arrogance for one simple reason: To suppose that superhuman AI (AI smarter than us) won't exist is roughly the equivalent of saying that humans are at the limit on the spectrum of intelligence. Really? Nothing will ever be smarter than us?? Highly doubtful.

That should stand on its own, but I have other critiques. For instance, why does silicon have to be assumed? Why not germanium or graphite, or something else? I have little faith that a CPU circa 2050 will be built exclusively on silicon. By 2100, no way.

Second, there is a simple definition of intelligence that is applicable to many forms: intelligence is the ability to recognize patterns and make accurate judgements / predictions based on previously seen patterns. The higher the accuracy or the more complicated the pattern, the higher the intelligence.

My final point of contention is the idea that AI must emulate human thinking. Why? Maybe human thinking sucks. Maybe Dolphins have much better intelligence, but due to a lack of opposable thumbs, they don't rule the world like we do. And lest you think that less intelligent species can destroy others, could you really doubt that roaches and ants will be extinct before us?

<comment><USER8> _To suppose that superhuman AI (AI smarter than us) won 't exist_

Which is exectly what Kelly doesn't say. He says that the _smarter_ concept is ill defined, and that our current fantasies of some universally superior AI galloping onto the scene and taking over everything may be just that - fantasies.

<comment><USER9> > He says that the smarter concept is ill defined

Which isn't a contradiction like he claims it is. It just means that there are many different ways that a future AI can be smarter than us. That intelligence could be multi-dimensional.

But guess what, we can easily take that multi-dimensional input, and find a formula that reduces it to a single scalar value based on our practical valuation of these forms of intelligences (almost like an intelligenc 'utility function' from economics), and problem solved. We're right back to a single order dimension for ranking intelligence.

It was a really weak argument he put forward.

Additionally a weak argument was the branching / fan pattern of various species. Yes all living species are at the peak of evolution for their environment, but they weren't all pressured to evolve more intelligence. Some evolved strength, speed, flight to their environment.

If instead natural selection began only selecting for intelligence (like humans searching for AGI will), then you would could definitely rank all animals linearly on a single path of intelligence.

<comment><USER8> _It just means that there are many different ways that a future AI can be smarter than us. That intelligence could be multi-dimensional_

A condensed way of saying precisely what Kelly is saying in the article. Allowing for the very real possibility that I am simply too dumb and not grasping your point.

 _but they weren 't all pressured to evolve more intelligence_

And it isn't claimed that they were. General evolution is used as an example of potential patterns in evolution of various intelligences.

<comment><USER9> He attempted to use the multi-dimensionality of intelligence to make the following claim:

> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so "smarter than humans" is a > meaningless concept.

This is poor reasoning. The fact that intelligence is multi-dimensional has no bearing on our ability to declare something smarter than us. It isn't at all meaningless. Because of this he claims that there will be no super-human AI.

Via analogy. He says, "you can't compare two football players because one may be stronger, while another if faster." So the concept of "better" is meaningless. And no player can be declared better.

My response is that's absurd. A simple counter-example, a single player can be both strong and faster, and thus clearly better.

<comment><USER8> A third player is weaker, but faster. And smarter. Or tougher. Or more agile. More agile but not quite as smart. More persistent. Less predictable. And so on and so forth. Your 'meaningless' only has meaning because you apply it to a hugely simplified model.

<comment><USER9> > we can easily take that multi-dimensional input, and find a formula that > reduces it to a single scalar value based on our practical valuation of > these forms of intelligences (almost like an intelligenc 'utility function' > from economics)...

My original comment addressed that specific case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> This is completely silly. Superhuman AI is inevitable because there is nothing magical about human brains. The human brain is only _the very first_ intelligence to evolve. We are probably very far away from the peak of what is possible.

Human brains are incredibly small, a few pounds of matter. Any bigger and your mother would be killed giving birth or you would take 10x as long to grow up. They are incredibly energy constrained, only using a few watts of power. Because any more and you would starve to death. They are incredibly slow and energy inefficient; communication in the brain is done with chemical signals that are orders of magnitude slower than electricity and use much more energy. And they are very uncompact - neurons are enormous and filled with tons of useless junk that isn't used for computation. Compared to our transistor technology which is approaching the limits of physics and built on an atom by atom scale.

That's just the hardware specs of the human computer. The software is hardly better. There are just more unknowns because we haven't finished reverse engineering it (but we are getting there, slowly.)

But beyond that, the human brain evolved to be good at surviving on the Savanahs of Africa. We didn't evolve to be good at mathematics, or science, or engineering. It's really remarkable that our brains are capable of such things at all! We have terrible weaknesses in these areas. For instance, a very limited working memory. We don't realize how bad we are, simply because we have nothing else to compare ourselves to.

Consider how even today, relatively primitive AIs are vastly superior to humans at games like chess. Human brains also didn't evolve to be good at chess after all. Even simple algorithms designed specifically for this game _easily_ mop up humans. And play at a level of strategy far above what even the best human players can comprehend.

Imagine an AI brain that is optimized for the purpose of mathematics, or computer programming, science, or engineering. Or at doing AI research... Imagine how much better it could be at these tasks than humans. It could quickly solve problems that would take the greatest human minds generations. It could manage levels of complexity that would drive humans crazy.

<comment><USER11> >They are incredibly slow and energy inefficient;

Human brains are energy inefficient? Well, thats a first ;)

 _" In 1990, the legendary Caltech engineer Carver Mead correctly predicted that our present-day computers would use ten million times more energy for a single instruction than the brain uses for a synaptic activation."

"Last March, AlphaGo, a program created by Google DeepMind, was able to beat a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained on a database of thirty million moves, running on approximately a million watts. (Its opponent's brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)"_

[1] [http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to- rival-t...](http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/a-computer-to-rival-the- brain)

<comment><USER12> For that to be a fair comparison, wouldn't you need to look at all the energy consumed by the human brain over the many hours it took them to become a Go champion?

<comment><USER13> I think that's a fair argument, but from the quote above

> "Last March, AlphaGo, a program created by Google DeepMind, was able to beat > a world-champion human player of Go, but only after it had trained on a > database of thirty million moves, running on approximately a million watts. > (Its opponent's brain, by contrast, would have been about fifty thousand > times more energy-thrifty, consuming twenty watts.)"

Let's say alphaGo trained for a year, that would be 1 MWyr energy consumed. And lets assume that Lee Se-dol's brain consumed 20W over 34 years of his live doing nothing but working on Go, that would be 640 Wyr, still a factor 1000-ish smaller.

<comment><USER12> Totally, I'm sure it's correct, and even if you were to bring the comparison in to line then the outcome is still "computer is watt hungry". The point is that the original statement, while correct, doesn't really say anything useful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Overall I am sympathetic to the authors argument that fear of super ai is overblown. But I do take issue with some of his arguments.

> Even if the smartest physicists were 1,000 times smarter than they are now, > without a Collider, they will know nothing new.

I'm not a historian but I have read that some scientific discoveries are made through pure logic. Einstein and relativity come to mind as he was not an empiricist. So perhaps there is some hope that ai can lead to scientific discoveries without experimentation

>So the question is, where is the limit of intelligence? We tend to believe that the limit is way beyond us, way "above" us, as we are "above" an ant. Setting aside the recurring problem of a single dimension, what evidence do we have that the limit is not us? Why can't we be at the maximum? Or maybe the limits are only a short distance away from us? Why do we believe that intelligence is something that can continue to expand forever?

The idea that humans could, just by chance, be pushing the limits of intelligence strikes me as silly

<comment><USER15> Einstein's work was based on a lot of evidence that seemed very strange. Light somehow had a fixed speed in all reference frames WTF?

<comment><USER16> Sure. Question is: how many other discoveries await today such that we, collectively, as a species, already have all the puzzle pieces, but haven't yet put them together? An AI as smart as your average grad student, but which somehow could retain in mind at the same time all of our accumulated scientific knowledge, might be able to quickly draw all sorts of seemingly brilliant conclusions. Now imagine its reasoning process works 6 to 7 orders of magnitude faster than ours, even if not qualitatively different in its logic or biases.

Dunno, I don't really believe we are that close to building that sort of AI, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible, and it does seem like it could do things that to us would look as "more intelligent" than us. It might in the end be better at creating scientific knowledge in the way current computers are better than us at solving arithmetic: faster and capable of holding more in memory, rather than following any qualitatively different process. But even that would be enough.

<comment><USER15> IMO, few major ones. We have billions of man years of research and things are better than before that period, but diminishing returns are real.

Don't get me wrong I think it would be useful, just that the gap from human level AI to 1,000x human AI is simply not that huge. Let's say you moved someone from 2006 to 2016 or even from 1996. Yea sure there is real progress, but not really. We have better drugs in terms of AIDS for example, but we are worse off in terms of antibiotics. Game graphics have improved, but quake is from 1996 so we already had real 3D first person shooters and gameplay is not that different. Hell FTP is arguably worse. Further that's 20 years so we are talking literally millions-man years of effort and trillions of dollars worth of R&D for not much.

In terms of machines the SR-71 is still the fastest manned aircraft, no supersonic passenger aircraft. Tallest building is much taller, but lacks much space on the top floors making it more monument than utility as the sears tower has more useable space and a smaller footprint.

<comment><USER17> Invention proceeds because of game-changing insights.

Maxwell's equations were a game changer. So were Newton's laws. So were Relativity and QM.

Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been anything equivalent in computing since.

There's been a lot of application, but no game-changing deep theoretical insights.

Quantum computing may - should? - eventually throw up something new.

It's going to have to. If it doesn't I think we're going to be stuck with much less progress than we're expecting.

<comment><USER18> > Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been > anything equivalent in computing since.

Quantity when the difference is large enough becomes quality. The 9 orders of magnitude or so that computers have gone through in storage capacity and speed definitely count as a game-changer.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Better quality than most such posts, but still seems to be missing the point. The remarkable thing about Bostrom's book is how well it anticipated the objections and responded to them, yet no one seems to bother refuting his analysis, they just repeat the same objections. I actually agree with a decent bit of what he says on these points, though his application of these observations is kinda baffling. He makes a lot of misguided claims and implications about what proponents believe. I'll sloppily summarize some objections to his points.

1\. This doesn't really bother making an argument against superhuman intelligence. Yes, of course intelligence has many components (depending on how you measure it), but that's not an argument against superhuman intelligence. I'm reminded of the joke paper claiming machines can never surpass human largeness, because what does largeness even mean? Why it could mean height or weight, a combination of features, or even something more abstract, so how can you possibly say a machine is larger than a human?

2\. Mainly arguing about the definition of 'general' without even trying to consider what the actual usage by Bostrom et al is (this was in the introduction or first chapter if I recall correctly). I agree that the different modes of thought that AI will likely make possible will probably be very useful and powerful, but that's an argument for superhuman ai.

3\. Well he makes his first real claim, and it's a strong one: "the only way to get a very human-like thought process is to run the computation on very human-like wet tissue." He doesn't really explore this, or address the interesting technical questions about limits of computational strata, algorithm efficiency, human biological limitation, etc.

4\. Few if any think intelligence is likely to be unbounded. Why are these arguments always 'x not infinite, therefore x already at the maximum?' He also seems to be creating counter examples to himself here.

5\. Lots of strong, completely unbacked claims about impossibilities here. Some number of these may be true, but I doubt we have already extracted anything near the maximum possible inference about the physical world from the available data, which is basically what his claims boil down to.

<comment><USER20> I haven't read Bostrom's book. I don't think I would enjoy it. Maybe I need to grudgingly read it to be able to respond to what Bostromites say.

Here's the thing. If Bostrom's claims about AI are so strong, why does everyone who's referring to his book as their source of beliefs about the future spout non-sequiturs about AI?

Here's an example. 80000 Hours has a mission that I generally agree with, to find the most important problems in the world and how people can most effectively work on them. But somehow -- unlike cooler-headed organizations like GiveWell -- they've decided that one of the biggest problems, bigger than malaria, bigger than global warming, is "AI risk" (by which they mean the threat of superhuman AGI, not the real but lesser threat that existing AI could make bad judgments). [1]

To illustrate this, they refer to what the wise Professor Bostrom has to say, and then show a video of a current AI playing _Space Invaders_. "At a super- human level", they say pointedly.

What the hell does Space Invaders have to do with artificial general intelligence?

For that matter, what the hell does deep learning have to do with AGI? It's the current new algorithmic technique, but why does it tell us any more about AGI than the Fourier Transform or the singular value decomposition? I would say this is a bias toward _wanting to believe_ in AGI, and looking for what exists in the present as evidence of it, despite the lack of any actual connection.

Has 80000 Hours been bamboozled into thinking that playing Space Invaders represents intelligence, or are they doing the bamboozling? And if Bostrom is such a great thought leader, why isn't he saying "guys, stop turning my ideas into nonsense"?

[1] [https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world- problems/#artifici...](https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world- problems/#artificial-intelligence-and-the-control-problem)

<comment><USER19> Bostrom is in no way in charge of people who happen to agree with him wrt ai risk. For the book he mostly collected and organized a lot of existing thought on ai risk (not that he hasn't made his own novel contributions). That's very valuable, largely because it makes for a good reference point to contextualize discussion on the topic. Unfortunately the critics don't seem to have read it because (in my experience) they repeat the same objections without reference to the existing responses to those objections.

People do sometimes overblow alphago/ dqn playing Atari, but it's not meaningless. These systems (and other deep learning based systems) can truly learn from scratch on a decent variety of environments. One of the most important unknowns is exactly how difficult various cognitive tasks will prove to be for a machine. Each task accomplished is another data point.

<comment><USER20> I wouldn't say that DeepMind learns Atari games "from scratch" any more than Deep Blue learned chess from scratch. It learns to play Atari games because it's a machine designed to learn to play Atari games.

<comment><USER21> I strongly disagree. You don't seem to be aware of the difference in approach between Deep Blue and DeepMind.

Deep Blue was hand-led directly and specifically to solve the problem of chess: It was provided with a library of opening moves, some sophisticated tactical algorithms relevant to the problem of chess, a library of strategies for chess, and so on. Many actual human masters of chess were consulted, directly or indirectly, to help with developing Deep Blue's approach to the problem.

DeepMind, on the other hand, was created as a "blank slate" with no more hard- wired instruction than "create optimal algorithms to achieve the winning state, given the inputs." Critically, its learning phase is completely self- directed. Essentially, the box is given access to the controls and the video screen content and then sent on its way.

It's instructive to note that this is pretty much exactly how, very generally speaking, evolution and intelligence solve the problem of survival: every organism has controls and a glimpse of "game state" and has to learn (collectively as a species, individually as an organism) to play the game successfully.

<comment><USER22> > DeepMind, on the other hand, was created as a "blank slate" with no more > hard-wired instruction than "create optimal algorithms to achieve the > winning state, given the inputs." Critically, its learning phase is > completely self-directed. Essentially, the box is given access to the > controls and the video screen content and then sent on its way.

Have you seen DeepMind algorithm to be able to say this ? Are there other people outside of Google who have seen the algorithm and can confirm Google's press release?

<comment><USER21> Maybe you have some legitimate concern about Googles' claim as per their press release and my comment. Who knows, maybe they have some reason to lie about what they did!

But then I wonder why you aren't asking the same question of my parent poster. Has he viewed the DeepMind code, is he qualified to tell us it works the same as chess code? Having made that claim backed on even less evidence than I made mine, I'd say his burden of proof is somewhat greater.

<comment><USER20> I think there's a heavy dose of press release to what Google is saying. Most people wouldn't call PR puff "lying", but only because standards are low.

I don't think Google has fundamentally different deep-learning technology than everyone else. In fact, TensorFlow indicates that they have the same kind of deep-learning technology as everyone else and they just want to do it more cleanly.

Deep learning is parameter optimization. There are more parameters now, and they optimize more things, but don't get caught up in wild visions of machines designing themselves. Would you consider the bzip2 algorithm to be "self- directed learning"? What's the difference, besides the number of parameters?

The PR people, when they say "blank slate", are discounting all the programming that went into the system because it sounds more impressive that way. This is unfortunate. It has happened in AI for decades. To be a responsible consumer of AI press releases, you need to understand this.

<comment><USER21> > _I don't think Google has fundamentally different deep-learning technology > than everyone else._

That's true, and I never claimed otherwise, but that doesn't help you argue your point - in fact, you just proved yourself wrong. From IBM's press release:

> _Does Deep Blue use artificial intelligence? The short answer is "no." > Earlier computer designs that tried to mimic human thinking weren't very > good at it. No formula exists for intuition. So Deep Blue's designers have > gone "back to the future." Deep Blue relies more on computational power and > a simpler search and evaluation function._

I'll summarize for you: Deep Blue and DeepMind, similar names notwithstanding, work in very different ways.

<comment><USER20> What comparison are you even making here? I know that Deep Blue and Deep Mind are different. There is 25 years (edit: sorry, 20 years) between them! Deep Blue is not deep learning. Did the word "deep", used in two unrelated ways, confuse you?

What I am saying is that I know how deep learning works, actual deep learning of the present, and it does not involve "programming itself".

You are trying to tell me that it must be programming itself, because a press release said so, and press releases would never lie or exaggerate. Based on the current state of AI, this is very improbable. You should focus less on trying to "prove" things with press releases.

I made the comparison to Deep Blue because there is little mystique around it now, and because IBM was even reasonably responsible about avoiding AI hype in their press at the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> The article is wrong, in my opinion.

Regarding point #1, still not being formally wrong, world computing capability is growing at exponential rate. Not even the end of the Moore's law will stop that, e.g. 3D transistor stacking, strong semiconductor demand for consumer and industrial market, etc. Aso, the author don't know if there is already CPU capacity for matching human intelligence: may be the key missing is not the hardware, but software (efficient algorithms for "human" intelligence running on silicon).

Point #2 is clearly wrong. Demostration: I, for one, if still alive, and having the chance, will try to implement general purpose intelligence, "like our own". And, come on, I know no hacker able to resist that.

Again, point #3 is wrong, unless you believe we're smart because a religious "soul".

Point #4 is a void argument: the Universe itself is finite.

Point #5 is right: a superintelligence may, or may not, care at all about our problems. In the same level you don't have the guarantee of a human government caring about you (e.g. totalitarian regime).

</comment><comment><USER24> Not a particularly well written article, but he has a few good ideas. Here's a couple of important paragraphs:

" _I asked a lot of AI experts for evidence that intelligence performance is on an exponential gain, but all agreed we don't have metrics for intelligence, and besides, it wasn't working that way. When I asked Ray Kurzweil, the exponential wizard himself, where the evidence for exponential AI was, he wrote to me that AI does not increase explosively but rather by levels. He said: "It takes an exponential improvement both in computation and algorithmic complexity to add each additional level to the hierarchy…. So we can expect to add levels linearly because it requires exponentially more complexity to add each additional layer, and we are indeed making exponential progress in our ability to do this. We are not that many levels away from being comparable to what the neocortex can do, so my 2029 date continues to look comfortable to me."_

" _What Ray seems to be saying is that it is not that the power of artificial intelligence is exploding exponentially, but that the effort to produce it is exploding exponentially, while the output is merely raising a level at a time. This is almost the opposite of the assumption that intelligence is exploding. This could change at some time in the future, but artificial intelligence is clearly not increasing exponentially now._ "

The last bit about requiring experiments in real time is also interesting.

</comment><comment><USER25> Interesting article from an opinion point of view but I find very little real substance behind his arguments.

He is fight the original myth with his own myth except that his myth is founded upon his own assumptions and intuitions as opposed to those of someone else.

It seems more likely that we simply don't know the answer to many of these questions yet because we still have major disagreements around exactly what intelligence is. To use Richard Feyman's famous quote: if we can't yet build it, then we don't understand it.

</comment><comment><USER26> Maciej Ceglowski's takedown of superintelligence is a much better articulation of these arguments, and more (and it's funny): [http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm](http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

<comment><USER27> And a tongue-in-cheek response from Scott Alexander: [http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai- ri...](http://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/01/g-k-chesterton-on-ai-risk/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER28> I didn't read the whole article... of what I did read, I didn't find it convincing. Few things:

AI doesn't need to exceed humans in every dimension to become a threat. Just sufficient dimensions.

Humanity is basically a bacteria colony in a petridish with I/O. Disrupt infrastructure, and you disrupt input leading to changes in the size of the colony. And mind you, much of our infrastructure resides in the cloud.

Of course, It will be a while before this even becomes an issue, but this is basically how a machine would frame the problem.

Implementation wise, AI doesn't need to be general. At its most inelegant (and not too distant) design, ML can be configured as a fractal of specific of algorithms, with one on top with the task of designating goals and tasks, and subordinates spawning off generations and evaluating performance.

Andy Grove had a good saying, "anything can be done will be done"

Autonomous AI, if it does not break the laws of physics, will exist. It's development will be spurred by our curiosity or profit.

</comment><comment><USER29> One of the big issues with people that talk about controlling super human intelligence, is that any talk of controlling it is fantasy. We cannot control actual human intelligence for good. What makes us think we could control super human intelligence?

<comment><USER30> If suddenly we had a black box containing a superhuman intelligence and no details about how it worked, then absolutely, we could not control it. For human minds we have something similar, but the box isn't _totally_ black; we've done some neuroscience and psychology to figure out the heuristics and biases it tends to use, how it's easily exploited, etc. And then we have neural networks which duplicate the functioning of some subsystems, and of course our own subjective experience which provides at least a _little_ evidence. It's not enough, but it means that, for example, we can write effective propaganda and advertising.

If we didn't just have the results of scattered tests, but had an exhaustive set of docs written by the creator of the black box, it still wouldn't be easy. But we'd have a chance. This is why one of the main strands of AI value alignment research focuses on building an AI that we can understand. If we can build something we can understand, that gives us leverage to alter it to value our interests.

(What "our interests" are, in a well-specified technical sense, is a whole 'nother problem, and one that there's very little progress on.)

<comment><USER29> I don't see how you can call an AI created by humans that humans can understand, "super-human"? By definition, a super-human AI would be able to stuff we could not understand.

<comment><USER31> tldr; AI could be on a higher plane of thought, but I'm of the camp that they could come up with new formal systems to explain their advances.

Well there's the old saying, "If you can't explain it to a six year old you don't understand it yourself." I think if there were a super human intelligence it would likely understand where our limitations are as humans and be able to break down the components of its discoveries into simplest terms and be able to teach us even if it's at an incredibly slower pace then they can process.

This reminds me of Godel's proof about how by our current formal systems of mathematics we cannot prove everything, and it maybe even went as far as saying every single formal system will always leave some things that it cannot prove. Obviously a robot had to use some formal system to come to its conclusion so if it's really so smart can it break down the system it used so that we can understand its basic building blocks. Of course there's always the rate of computation and memory problem of humans in the way.

Of course if you're saying that the super human intelligence would be on an entirely different plane of thought impossible for us to understand then that's understandable, but probably less believable.

This line of thinking reminds me of the book Flatland by Edwin Abbott. Flatland is basically a story of a two dimensional square who lives on a two dimensional plane and only knows his world by his limited perception of it. One day he is visited by a three dimensional sphere who explains his world in a way imperceivable to him. The sphere somehow magically takes him off his plane of existence and shows him his world from his (the spehere's) view. He then goes on to take him on a tour of different hosts of worlds who perceive their worlds in different dimensions. He goes from point land to line land then to three dimensional space and finally back to his home plane land. Where is eventually locked in a mental institution for telling people of his adventures. Any ways it's an interesting fantasy story I recommend it.

Hate to go all meta-physical on you all, but basically the story just goes to show you we only know things from our limited perspective of the things around us if there are any higher "planes" of perception it's entirely possible that we wouldn't know about them. Some things can only be known with certain perceptions/experiences/knowledge.

It may sound ludicrous, but I would even say Christianity backs this idea to some degree attributing God to a higher plane of thought like in Isaiah 55:8-9.

Of course I would never put a robot on that level, but I could see some things being imperceptible to the human mind, so it's similar principles. Can robots achieve a higher plane to any degree... beats me. Honestly I'm thinking it wouldn't be high enough that they couldn't explain their thoughts to us.

<comment><USER29> Great points. I do not disagree that a super human AI could explain stuff to humans, just like I could explain explain stuff to a six year old. However, a group of six year olds would be hard pressed to constrain your actions that you really wanted to do. In addition, first grade teachers are experts at manipulating six year olds, and a super human AI would also be very good at manipulating humans and working around any constraints the humans tried to impose on it.

With super human AI, we would be in much the situation as the great apes - their survival depends far more on what we do than on what they do. Just like the great apes cannot constrain our actions, we would not be able to constrain the super human AI's actions.

On a darker note, as Homo sapiens wiped out all the other hominids, there is a good chance that super human AI would try to wipe out humanity, as we are probably the greatest threat to their independence and well being.

<comment><USER31> Definitely don't disagree with you there. These are all plausible. I think a lot of AIs choices concerning us would come down to whether they actually would care for us at all.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> Oh boy. Much respect for Kevin Kelly, but I am afraid he missed the mark with his analysis.

Unfortunately he gets hung up on the definition of Intelligence - and not unreasonably so - because it is very ill defined and largely unknown. So all of what he says is true, but orthogonal to the argument he is trying to debunk.

It's basically setting up a pedantic straw man and then taking it apart.

There are other great and more compelling arguments against an all powerful superhuman AGI, unfortunately he doesn't make any of those.

</comment><comment><USER33> Ugh, not another AI article by a Wired editor. I skimmed it and saw only strawmen and non-sequiturs.

These issues are mind-bending topics that stretch the imaginations of the most brilliant people I am aware of. It takes them a lifetime to build good intuitions and analogies. I wish that writers of this caliber _felt_ as qualified to write one sentence about it as they actually are.

</comment><comment><USER34> This person doesn't understand the concept of super AI. Of course intelligence is not one dimensional. But the current limit in pretty much all of those dimensions is physical: It's the larger amount of neurons and connections we could fit in the smallest space that can pass through the pelvis while still feeding enough energy to the brain.

You can imagine this as a bunch of people that speaks with each other. The faster they can communicate ideas with each other, the more potentially intelligent the group can be. Machines can surpass the speed of this collective intelligence by orders of magnitude, even if everything else is exactly as a human. This is exactly the reason we evolved to have so many brain resources for language.

<comment><USER20> No, the current limit is not physical, it's that nobody has any idea how general intelligence works.

You do not, in fact, get general intelligence by accident by throwing a lot of connections in one place, just like you do not get a human just by throwing a lot of organic molecules and water in one place.

<comment><USER35> As the other commenter noted, "letting a bunch of molecules sit around" was precisely where we got intelligence from in the first place.

So it is _possible_ that we reach AI just by randomly permuting connections and weights. Of course it's more likely we intelligently set (or "evolve") these connections and weights, but this allows us to set an upper bound on computation/time needed.

<comment><USER36> > As the other commenter noted, "letting a bunch of molecules sit around" was > precisely where we got intelligence from in the first place.

I don't think this was the case. Yes there is evolution but it is not random. Actually most of the molecules sitting around did not evolve to intelligence. In case our evolution we had natural selection. In case of AI we have artificial selection (selection made by humans) and even if we consider ourselves smart enough to do this we cannot prove that we are able to make it happen (choosing the correct AIs/algorithms to survive) until it happens. Maybe I cannot express this clear enough but the advantage natural evolution has over artificial evolution is the huge number of "experiments" \- meaning it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something worked.

<comment><USER37> > Maybe I cannot express this clear enough but the advantage natural evolution > has over artificial evolution is the huge number of "experiments" \- meaning > it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something worked.

I think you have that backwards; natural evolution is absurdly slow because it takes a very long time to cycle through generations of animals whereas genetic programming on a computer to evolve algorithms can happen billions of times a day because computers are much faster at cycling through possibilities.

> meaning it had time enough to do a lot of small changes until something > worked.

Computers can do it faster.

<comment><USER36> Yes, now you got me thinking more about my concept of how I see the difference between evolution by natural selection and evolution by artificial selection.

And I agree with you that AI can be much faster.

I still think the artificial selection can be influence by us - humans - so we might add flows in the sistem from the beginning. Of course AI can learn to identify them maybe. But maybe not. Like in the case when looking from inside a system one cannot see how the system really is so it cannot fix it.

Of course what I say are just some hypothesis, nothing proven and I think they cannot yet be falsifiable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> This article is just a series of strawman arguments. It sets out misconceptions that proponents of strong AI mostly don't believe, then argues against them.

I'll be honest, I didn't read the arguments in detail (since they're just rebutting strawman arguments it hardly seemed worthwhile), but I was sort of surprised at how poorly reasoned the arguments were even for the parts I agree with.

</comment><comment><USER39> At a certain point it doesn't matter how much smarter you are, the limit on progress is the ability to take action and to make measurements, enough measurements so that you can discern whether a subset of those measurements are biased and in what way. As a result I tend to think that in order to get true super human level intelligences they will need to have super human levels of agency, and that is something that is much harder to build and get us meatbags to support than building a really powerful brain in a jar. Building systems with super human agency also isn't something that happens just by accident.

<comment><USER40> I agree, in the long-term, big-picture, distributed eye and hand is important. e.g. Although relativity could have been deduced from the evidence, first you have to obtain that evidence, by the action of constructing observation devices.

But there's nothing to stop centralized computing from having distributed terminal-like i/o devices, cameras and waldos.

A cognitive argument for distribution is that a diversity of ideas, developed somewhat in isolation, using their local unique observation and unique action, is more likely to innovate. Many points of view will see more. However, this can be simulated with internal divisions.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Actually, to see how well DeepMind has mastered certain video games with minimal instructions, AI already can look in certain cases superhuman.

What EVERYONE is missing, though, is that enhanced human intelligence is inevitable. And will be vastly more "intelligent" than superhuman AI. Though as human intelligence increases so will AI naturally. I think enhanced human intelligence will have immeasurably greater impact and probably greater impact than any conceivable technology since it lets us engineer who we are. What is a world like that's inhabited by 7 billion Leonardos?

</comment><comment><USER42> I was at the park the other day with my sons, I noticed some other kids on the swings, 2 kids turned and locked legs then a 3rd sat on their joining legs like a huge human-made swing. The point being is I never thought of doing that before with my friends when I was a kid. An AI will be able to think of things we never tried because there are so many more things that we haven't. Speculating on the short end of this seems laughable to me, like someone from the 1800's talking about balloon travel in the 2000s, basing our limited understanding of possibility on our current limitations.

</comment><comment><USER43> So, extremely intelligent AI can't take over Earth in the future because "extremely intelligent" is ill defined. No worries everyone!

</comment><comment><USER44> I liked the article, and agree with it mostly. Here's a couple of ideas I see again and again that bother me about the singularity theory and the hype in general about general AI:

* The idea of exponential growth, which seems like an important underpinning of the singularity theory. Nothing in nature as far as I am aware, grows exponentially. Some growth trajectories may for a time look exponential, but they always turn out to be the bottom of an s-curve. The idea that once we develop the first AI with superhuman intelligence, that it will necessarily beget one of even greater intelligence, is deeply flawed for this reason. It is analogous to predicting that Moore's law will continue forever, because ever faster and more capable computers will assist in the design the next generation of chips. At some point the laws of physics will contrain further advances, and we will encounter the upper half of the s-curve.

* The idea of AI in a box. It's the idea that anything we would call intelligence can evolve divorced from a high-bandwidth, real-time sensory apparatus, and divorced from a way to directly manipulate its environment.

* The idea that _more_ intelligence always makes a significant difference. If we look at thinking disciplines where computers are already better than the best humans (chess, heads-up poker, recognizing certain kinds of objects etc.), the differences are small. If the best human's decisions are 99% optimal, say, a computer's may be 99.9% or 99.999% optimal. The point being that a computer can never makes decisions that are better than 100% optimal.

<comment><USER45> 1\. An AI might not need long exponential growth to make humans obsolete. Maybe the computing power of one data center is enough to outperform and dominate humans? Imagine if you had infinite patience, and experienced time 1000x slower than everyone else. That number might be in the millions. Or more.

2\. I agree that it's a very strange and unpredictable scenario.

3\. How optimal do you think humans are in the real world? In chess you have a very limited number of possible actions at each point, but in reality your possible moves are almost limitless.

<comment><USER44> 1\. I'm not sure what you mean by the "computing power of one data center". Surely not one present-day data center? And whether or not I can imagine experiencing time 1000x slower than everyone else, has no bearing on whether or not that's a realistic scenario. I can imagine all sorts of things, like Moore's law holding true forever, or P=NP.

3\. That obviously depends on the endeavour. But humans are pretty great at a lot of stuff. We learn quick too.

<comment><USER46> > And whether or not I can imagine experiencing time 1000x slower than > everyone else, has no bearing on whether or not that's a realistic scenario.

It is a staple of AGI speculation that a computer program with even near-human IQ would spark the singularity since, at least, the hardware running it could be improved so that the AGI would be able to perform person-months of cognitive labor in days. Since the first target of this labor would be improving the AGI program and hardware, compounding improvements are expected.

<comment><USER44> Yes, I get that. I just doubt whether it's physically possible. And like the author of the original story, I also doubt very much that _cognitive labor_ is the constraint that limits human progress. To believe so is what he calls _thinkism_.

<comment><USER46> > I just doubt whether it's physically possible.

Biological brains achieve their ends with relatively low speeds and energies. Even simplistic substitution with equivalent electronic components would be hundreds of times faster, and I'm sure we'll do better than that. I don't see the difficulty in the conjecture.

> I also doubt very much that cognitive labor is the constraint that limits > human progress

That statement is impossible to discuss without defining "human progress", but if the work of the world's universities for the next 100 years was available in one year's time, at the very least someone with access to that information would have a significant competitive advantage. It seems clear that the next 100 years will include significant advances in automated fabrication, at which point physical labor also essentially becomes cognitive labor.

<comment><USER44> _Even simplistic substitution with equivalent electronic components would be hundreds of times faster, and I 'm sure we'll do better than that_

The way you state that one wonders why we haven't already achieved superhuman, general AI.

 _if the work of the world 's universities for the next 100 years was available in one year's time_

But that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the character of the work that goes on in universities. Knowledge is only rarely produced by people _thinking_ about problems. It's produced by mundane trial and error experimentation. Experiments that take time. And money.

<comment><USER46> > The way you state that one wonders why we haven't already achieved > superhuman, general AI.

Brain emulation is still expensive ...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain#/media/File:E...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_brain#/media/File:Estimations_of_Human_Brain_Emulation_Required_Performance.svg)

It'll be interesting to see what we can learn at the different levels of emulation.

> It's produced by mundane trial and error experimentation.

Fair point, although experiments in computer science and applied mathematics can usually be carried out without constructing physical apparatus. Also identifying and designing experiments to efficiently characterize a problem space is a large part of experimentation. And again, once automated fabrication improves, some automated experimentation in physics and chemistry becomes possible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> I am not believer in superintelligence, but for a different reason than author. I assume the following about superintelligence:

\- It somehow needs to be distributed, that is, composed of smaller computing parts, because there is a physical limit what you can do in unit of space.

\- It needs to change to adapt to environment (learn), and so all the parts need to potentially change.

From this follows that the parts will be subject to evolution, even if they don't reproduce. And so the existence of the parts will depend on their survival. This, in my opinion, inevitably leads to evolution of parts that are "interested" in their own survival, at the expense of the "superintelligent" whole. And it leads to conflict, which can eventually eat up all the improvements in the intelligence.

Look at humans. Humanity (or biosphere in general) didn't become a superintelligent whole, capable of following some single unified goal. Instead, we became fighting factions of different units, and most of the actual intelligence is spent on arms races.

Anyhow, even if superintelligence is possible, I believe the problem of friendly AGI has a simple solution. We simply need to make sure that the AGI doesn't optimize anything, but instead takes the saying "all things in moderation" to its heart. That means, every once in a while, AGI should stop whatever goals it pursues and reflect on purpose of those goals, if it is not, by some measure, going too far.

You can argue that we don't actually know how to make AI to stop and think. I would respond, AI that cannot do that, and only pursues some pre-programmed optimum mindlessly, is not really general.

<comment><USER9> It's really hard for me to understand a viewpoint that non-human higher intelligence is anything but inevitable.

At somepoint (ignoring us destorying ourselves) we will be able to accurately simulate a cell in software. As computing gets cheaper we will be able to simulate a human brain's worth of cells. We'll feed it inputs and give it outputs just like a brain would have. The only technological challenge here is scanning and reading data from a live brain. A very small challenge in the grand scheme of things.

Once that thing works it's a brain, and an artificial intelligence. Any other discussion simply complicates the situation. Accurately simulate a larger number of individual interconnected neurons and you're running an intelligence.

No I'm not 100% certain we'll ever be able to program intelligence the way to do reasoning symbolically in math, but we sure as heck can engineer one.

<comment><USER48> A simulated heart does not pump real blood. Also in the process, why should one start or stop at cell level, seems arbitrary, go further down to atoms and electrons etc. or go higher level to mental state or what not.

There are completed projects of smaller organism whose all neurons have been simulated, there hasn't been any revelations.

Our brain doesn't contain any 'data', so whoever decides to extract data from it will have to decide what the data will be or why it would be of any use. There has also been many objections made on why brain correlates are more or less useless on question of mind/intelligence.

<comment><USER9> > Our brain doesn't contain any 'data'

It absolutely does! Where do you think our memories are stored?

It doesn't store it in 1s and 0s like computers, but I think it's fairly non- controversial to say that all of everything you know is encoded in the physical state of the cells and atoms of your body.

<comment><USER48> > Where do you think our memories are stored?

You are applying computer metaphor and then asking where the 'memory' is 'stored' or 'encoded'. Metaphors/abstractions are useful tool, but when talking about differences, we should be more careful.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I dont think I worry about general AI so much as a having specialized AI in almost every area, including collections of algos that recognize the task at hand and select which specialized AI to engage, as well as other collections of specialized AI algos that select which selector algos to use based on longer term goals, etc. That is what makes me afraid.

<comment><USER50> Yeah what you described is one of the current leading hypotheses of how we get to generalized AI and not totally unlike how the human brain actually seems to work (specific tasks or stimuli will activate specialized regions of the brain and not others).

<comment><USER49> ;-) My point exactly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> While one individual might not be have "general purpose intelligence" to the satisfaction of this author (being able to excel at different fields/activities), at the population level, it is fair to say human intelligence is general purpose.

Then, there are aspects that are greatly overlooked in all these narratives:

Human geniuses occur very rarely and take literally decades to learn, while the AI equivalent could be consistently "instanced" multiple times, live forever, evolve after birth and work 24/7 without sleep.

Then, humans have crappy I/O. AI is not bounded by the shortcomings of writing/reading/typing/talking at low rates of words per minute...

Generally speaking, AI has theoretically a substantial advantage over humans. Even if AI remains dumber for a time, these advantages are enough to make them prevail.

<comment><USER52> If I gave an example of something machines can easily do today, but no human could ever do, does that show that human intelligence is not general-purpose? If not, what do you mean by general-purpose?

<comment><USER51> The human brain has the ability to create models to solve problems in an unsupervised way. Be it problems around survival, reproduction, and things that rank higher in the hierarchy of needs that can be very abstract in nature.

Some people might then argue that the human experience is also about creativity, entertainment, learning, social interaction, spirituality, fitness and a long list of things.

Part of it is because the brain is not only raw problem solving power... it is embodied in a human body, with bodily needs and hardwired behaviors coming from older brain structures. Like having an intuition for what may look like a predator or threat (and therefore evokes fear), what may be fine to eat, etc... and other stuff correlated with survival that guided our evolution, but not necessarily has to do with survival.

But AI can be embodied into anything, and the equivalent to its primitive mind can be played with. While we have many learned behaviors, there are aspects that are not learned. AI will be different. What AI ends up developing into will greatly depend on how that is done.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> "Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs."

The author must not have met many humans.

<comment><USER54> _Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs._

Our minds _are_ "general purpose" compared to, say, a chess playing computer program. But they're not necessarily "general purpose" in the most, well, general, sense. They're evolved with specific capabilities and talents that are geared towards helping humanoid, bipedal, mammalian creatures survive and replicate on a specific small blue planet, orbiting a particular yellow star.

As he pointed out in the article, there are examples of animals, like squirrels, demonstrating "intelligence" of a form that humans don't even remotely come close to having.

So, whether or not we have "general purpose mind" depends on how generally you define "general purpose." Which I think is actually an interesting point, in the context of what the author was driving at.

<comment><USER55> "... orbiting a particular yellow star."

Our star actually casts white light. It just looks yellow from Earth. If the sun were yellow, then the moon would look yellow when it was straight overhead. The moon looks white overhead, because the light from our star is white.

<comment><USER54> Good point. Guess I read too many Superman comics as a kid and that whole "yellow star" thing really sank in.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> Perhaps my self preservation instinct is completely broken, but why are people so afraid of the possibility that the human race could be replaced by hyperintelligent machines? We aren't perfect (quite the opposite), and a brain that works in the way that ours does has severe built-in limitations. Perhaps the greatest achievement the human race could ever obtain is to create something greater than ourselves. Something that can carry on learning and understanding the universe around us in ways that no human mind ever could.

<comment><USER57> I agree, as long as it is better than us at _everything_.

My fear is being crushed by an amazing strategist that won't ever get poetry, for instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER58> I didn't read this at first because I thought it just sounded like it would be some opinionated clickbait full of strawmen and superlatives. But then I caved in and read it and it turns out that my instincts were right. Then I saw the author was Kevin Kelly and I felt sad. Almost as sad as when Steven Hawking said we should discontinue the SETI program because it is most likely that aliens will want to harvest our precious carbon and organs and enslave us if they found out we were here. UNSUBSCRIBE!

<comment><USER58> For a much better and more constructive read toward the effort of a stringent definition of intelligence, I would recommend anything from Shane Legg - <USER2> pragmattically this: [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.5951v2.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1109.5951v2.pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> The author should read this: [https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987](https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.10987)

</comment><comment><USER60> > Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

Technology assets generally decline in price as more efficient means of production and distribution become available (i.e. cloud) and the cost of technology components becomes more commoditized.

> I will extend that further to claim that the only way to get a very human- > like thought process is to run the computation on very human-like wet > tissue.

I think wetware (or human-like wet tissue) needs to be created first, before any judgement can be made about it's costs.

</comment><comment><USER61> Nice to see some push back but all the chatter in the MSM these days about self-driving cars and AI that's going to replace everyone's job (except, I note : lawyers..) makes me strongly suspect that somewhere there is someone with an agenda, driving this chatter. Someone's bonus depends on the received knowledge being that "AI is a commin' ta getcha..", which it decidedly isn't, imho. Yes it works for facial recognition (sometimes) and deciding whether to reject spam (sometimes), but not for large swathes of the blue and white- collar job world. Long long way off.

Note: obviously there's nothing special about the meat between a human's ears, so _one_ day someone in theory should be able to build a machine that matches and exceeds a human's thinking ability. But that's not going to happen in any of our lifetimes.

<comment><USER62> lol you may want to pull your head out of the sand [https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data- ce...](https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre- cooling-bill-40/)

[http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/lawyers-could-be-replaced- by-...](http://www.cnbc.com/2017/02/17/lawyers-could-be-replaced-by- artificial-intelligence.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER63> _These complexes of artificial intelligences will for sure be able to exceed us in many dimensions, but no one entity will do all we do better._

Hah, I don't think so. For sure future systems we design will have multiple kind of intelligence. And then we'll slap on some pattern matching onto the front end to help it recognise what intelligence to apply to what situation. Much like how you recognise a math problem and pick up a calculator, or encounter a concept you don't recognise, and pick up a dictionary.

So we'll develop systems that have many more of these intelligences, which will each have superior abilities to what we have now (think infinite precision math library vs a cheap handheld calculator) running at high speed and in general able to handle much larger problems.

How is this not a superintelligence by any reasonable definition?

</comment><comment><USER64> I think this whole thing misses the point.

The main difference between these machines and biology is that, once an improvement is discovered, it can be downloaded very quickly and cheaply onto all the machines.

Copying is perfect and can be checksummed. Unlike learning in a university, say.

This is also what enables things like deep learning across all the world's medical data for Watson. A doctor somewhere can't know all the news everywhere and discover statistics and patterns on command. While Watson not only an ingest all this info but upload the results to all the places.

This ability to perfectly replicate a program also makes the "self preservation" aspect and the "identity" aspect of computers different than that of biological organisms. What is identity, after all, if a program can be replicated in many places at once?

<comment><USER36> > Copying is perfect and can be checksummed. Unlike learning in a university, > say.

What if exactly this flawed way of copying information allowed us to make discoveries?

I mean what if exactly because we have a human transmitting the information/theory with not the same confidence as the one who discovered/invented allowed the possibility to doubt it so making the next discovery more possible?

Edit: formatting

<comment><USER52> Adding perturbations is a common technique in machine learning. For example, the evolution strategies approach [[https://blog.openai.com/evolution- strategies/](https://blog.openai.com/evolution-strategies/)] makes 100s of randomly tweaked policies, evaluates them against the task, and recombines them with weights proportional to their performance.

Another approach is to train several different neural networks (an ensemble) on a task, and then train a final neural network based on the average of the ensemble. [[https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.02531v1.pdf](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1503.02531v1.pdf)]

So you can probably replicate the useful features of flawed copying between humans.

<comment><USER36> In light of this, my idea does not hold on. Perturbations can be simulated so there is a way to add this type of chaos into the system. Thank you for the counter arguments. I need to learn more about the ML.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> On the criticism of treating intelligence as a one-dimensional number, I briefly note that the one dimensional conceptualization is a simplified but useful abstraction. It abstracts over the fairly blatant fact that things can be smarter than other things in ways that we care about. For example, I'm smarter than a mouse, and Einstein is smarter than me. Maybe not along every possible dimension. But for every operational intelligence metric you could come up with, every way of assigning intelligences numbers that was interesting and useful, I would probably have a higher number than a mouse and Einstein would probably have a higher number than me.

</comment><comment><USER66> Tools mankind invented so far have been extremely productive as well as destructive. I think worry should not be on if one day the Superhuman AI will take over the mankind, but if we will be able to stop/limit the destruction of that advanced tool in the wrong hands. Definition of who's right or wrong unfortunately contested. We are a species of justifying our actions.

The leverage and exploitation of advanced AI in the hands of malicious people/corporations/states are in a much closer timeline than the "Superhuman AI" could get.

So Open AI kind of initiatives are very important to balance things out. Somehow I am not optimistic.

</comment><comment><USER67> Planes don't have to abide by bird flight laws. There would be some breakthrough from bird-like mimicry of neural networks and algorithms that allow to perform what NNs(our mechanical birds) need days to calculate. Watch for research on how the black boxes of NNs are reverse-engineered and mapped. "Superbird" AI is just discovering that more general laws(flight) exist from bird emulation(bird flight) and applying it to extract direct algorithms that birds(NNs) produce internally(as instinct).

</comment><comment><USER68> The word intelligence is a word from natural language, it is natural for different people to have different interpretation of it.

And this article basically give a redefinition and interpret upon it.

</comment><comment><USER69> Squirrel super memory: it's a combination of scent and memory [http://jacobs.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/Animal...](http://jacobs.berkeley.edu/wp- content/uploads/2015/10/Animal-Behaviour-1991-Jacobs.pdf)

Possibly enhanced by smelling their own saliva? Just guessing

</comment><comment><USER70> You have heard this talk from faraway lands about a new type of machine that can supposedly do more than a person with a stick and something to put it against as a lever. The Watt steam engine, some people call it. If thousands of years before Our Lord, humans could roll on logs, pull on pulleys, or push on the inclined plane vast blocks of stone culminating in a Pyramid to their pretended gods, the argument goes, what is to keep someone from making a device more powerful than a man?

I am here to tell you that such lunacy rests on seven wrong misconceptions. While I will freely grant that perhaps it is possible to apply a lever, yet it is human power and human power alone that moves that lever. The idea that anything but a human could do work is absurd on its face. Nobody will ever get from one town to another except on foot, or perhaps on a horse. To allow the idea that a machine could do this or any other task is as deranged as suggesting that machines will fly like birds across continents, carrying people, or that one day men will simply climb up and into the atmosphere and go and land and walk upon the moon. It is clear from first principles that raising or moving anything takes work and power: it is just as clear that nobody but man shall ever provide that power, let alone any more.

I do not have time to rewrite the above: substitute a hundred billion neurons doing chemical reactions, and add that it is clear computers can never do either the same or even less so, any more, and you will see how completely wrong the author is in every way.

Nobody but a man can ever do work, and nothing but a hundred billion neurons can or will ever think.

</comment><comment><USER71> I'm re-reading a bunch of Asimov robot stories that I read as a child, and in them there is no concept of superintelligence at all. Robots have human-level intelligence, but there is no suggestion that they have a possibility of becoming anything other than useful tools for people.

I blame Iain M. Banks for all the AGI kerfuffle

</comment><comment><USER72> I agree with his proposition that there is no linear "better or worse"

That being said there is no evidence that an AI that is fundamentally different (and potentially inferior) from humans could not be much more effective at controlling human behaviors, thoughts, viewpoints or actions.

Furthermore it may be the case that an AI can sense or understand information we cannot simply because we do not have the "sensors" to understand such information. The actual "intelligence" does not need to be very high if the data is that much richer.

From another perspective: the AI may not be as intelligent but may have more control over the environment than humans (e.g controlling the smart grid, traffic routing etc.) because of this its ability to influence human behavior is larger.

Either of these two cases could be deemed as "greater intelligence" ... just intelligence of a different kind. We need to look at intelligence less in terms of human constructs and more in terms of "ability to manipulate human behavior" \-- this would be a human centric definition.

</comment><comment><USER48> The article is good first step, the second step would be to pick up an introduction to philosophy of mind book and realize the enormous number of issues one has to resolve, and methods needs discovering before getting close to answering such questions as whether AGI is possible.

</comment><comment><USER73> > The assumptions behind a superhuman intelligence arising soon are: > ... > > 4\. Intelligence can be expanded without limit.

The only assumption _required_ is that intelligence can be expanded just beyond human limits, which I think is a much less controversial claim.

<comment><USER24> If I can solve an exponential problem with 5 elements in a reasonable amount of time, a mind 1,000,000 times smarter than I can solve the same problem with how many elements in the same time?

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Irrelevant anecdote: I first saw that radial evolution chart while wandering the UT Austin campus, I think it was in a lobby, though I remember it being dominated by bacteria. Interesting to think that might have been Hillis's lab.

</comment><comment><USER75> It's hard to tell where this author is coming from. The three main assumptions you have to make for AGI are (via Sam Harris):

1\. Intelligence is information processing.

2\. We will continue to improve our intelligent machines.

3\. We are not near the peak of intelligence.

The author's first counterpoint is:

> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so "smarter than humans" is a > meaningless concept.

Intelligence is information processing so "smarter than humans" just means better information processing: higher rate, volume, and quality of input and output. Aren't some humans smarter than others? And isn't that a power that can be abused or used for good? We don't have to worry about it being like us and smarter; it just has to be smart enough to outsmart any human.

He then talks about generality like it's a structural component that no one has been able to locate. It's a property and just means transferrable learning across domains. We're so young in our understanding of our own intelligence architecture, it's ridiculous to build a claim around there being no chance of implementing generality.

This statement is also incredibly weak:

> There is no other physical dimension in the universe that is infinite, as > far as science knows so far...There is finite space and time.

There is evidence that matter might be able to be created out of nothing which would mean space can go on forever. We might only be able to interact with finite space, but that isn't to say all of nature is constrained to finite dimensions.

Even still, he doesn't make sense of why we need infinite domains. You only need to reach a point where a programmer AI is marginally better at programming AIs than any human or team of humans. Then we would no longer be in the pilot's seat.

<comment><USER76> > Intelligence is information processing

That's a claim. What is your support for this? Computers in the 1940s could process information. Were they intelligent?

> just means better information processing: higher rate, volume, and quality > of input and output.

Computers have been able to perform information processing better than humans from the beginning, thus the reason for their creation. Information processors are tools to extend human intelligence.

<comment><USER75> The exact quote is "Intelligence is a product of information processing in physical systems."

It's the scientific definition rather than the colloquial definition.

<comment><USER76> That's a philosophical assumption of what intelligence is. It's based on the metaphor that thought is calculation, and computers are thinking by virtue of manipulating symbols, and human brains are therefore doing the same thing in wetware.

<comment><USER75> There isn't any counter evidence at this point that it's a false premise.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> AI is undergoing exponential growth. As it gets better it becomes more profitable and feeds investments into itself. It may not make everyone redundant, but it will make most.

</comment><comment><USER78> Not sure about your list of 'some of the smartest people alive today'; makes me think the article was written by someone definitely not nearly on such a list.

</comment><comment><USER76> We already have the equivalent of Superhuman AI in the form of corporations, governments, and society in general. I don't buy the claim that sometime in the future a singular artificial mind will come into existence whose continual improvement will make it smarter with access to more resources than that of Google, the US government, or all of human civilization, with its billions of organic human intelligences being empowered by machines already.

We've already achieved super intelligence. It's us empowered by our organizations and technology.

</comment><comment><USER79> I completely agree with the author. Hiding my head in the sand and plugging my ears will completely avoid the AI apocalypse.

</comment><comment><USER80> refreshing. i think the cost factor isn't brought up enough. none of this is to say that ai isn't going to change the shit out of everything, it's just that the superhuman, "summoning the demon" rhetoric is imprecise, premature and distracting.

</comment><comment><USER81> A one sentence rebuttal to this is that the exponential take-off of human civilization ~= accelerating distributed intelligence.

You can quibble about what an AI is; if you draw a box around human civilization and observe its leverage and rate of change, well, the evidence is that we are riding the superhuman takeoff.

</comment><comment><USER82> It may be a myth, but that doesn't mean people won't manifest powerful images of it.

</comment><comment><USER83> It seems like the only thing this author can offer is playing on words to make things seem obscure, blurry and unclear.

His central argument seems to be that intelligence is not a thing, and although he doesn't say it directly, but I think he doesn't believe in IQ.

He's committing the same kind of fallacy committed by certain radical ideologues, that basically says something along the lines of: since you cannot define something accurately 100% then any statement about the thing is equally invalid.

We don't have to engage in this kind of meaningless argument about semantics.

There are clear and easy to understand examples of scenarios where super AIs can cause harm to human societies that speakers like Sam Harris have articulated pretty well.

</comment><comment><USER84> When you want to discuss "the myth of a superhuman AI", it's important to carefully separate the two categories of claims:

1\. The claims by economists that AI-- even if it's not "strong AI"\-- will put lots of people out of a job with potentially severe societal/economic repercussions

2\. The claims by the Bostrom/Yudkowsky/etc. crowd that an AI intelligence explosion will cause the extinction of humanity

Without saying anything about the plausibility or lack thereof of either 1 or 2, I think we can all agree that they are very different claims and need to be analyzed separately. Right from the very first sentence the author seems to muddle the two, so I don't think there's much of cogent analysis in here.

<comment><USER85> > 2\. The claims by the Bostrom/Yudkowsky/etc. crowd that an AI intelligence > explosion will cause the extinction of humanity

Maybe someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, but I have a hard time understanding what /any/ "utility function" would be, that the super ai people talk about. It can't be a passive deep learning network that parses information and gives an output, it has to be some kind of complex perception / action loop of many neural nets and actuators in the real world that somehow leads to an intelligent self improving behavior? I guess you could make a deep learning controller for self driving cars say, and if an input to many cars is wrong, all the cars crash and create a big cascading mess of wrong input values, but that kind of accident is a far cry from an intelligent chain of events where every link in the chain is an intelligent decision but the ultimate goal is bad.

And, do we even know any way to chain many deep learning networks together that accurately give correct output values, that we then can hook up to a controller to give a utility function, which can then lead to a cascade of intelligent decisions across domains?

<comment><USER86> Check for instance the 'Paperclip maximizer' thought experiment, [https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer)

<comment><USER76> The Paperclip maximizer assumes that you could have an AI smart enough to turn the world into paperclips, but not smart enough to understand what the human meant by "make me some paperclips".

My guess is that paperclipping the world takes magnitudes more intelligence than understanding what a human means when saying something ambiguous.

<comment><USER87> Not necessarily. It could be smart enough to know what you meant (and indeed to deduce the entire history of your thoughts!) and simply not care, because you told it to care about something else.

For example, maybe you inadvertently programmed it to "be totally literally 100% certain that you've completed the task I told you to do". Then from its perspective, there's always a tiny, tiny chance that its sensors are being fooled or malfunctioning, so it can't be literally 100% certain that it's _ever_ made a paperclip successfully, so by your programming, it should keep making more paperclips. This is independent of whether or not you wanted it to do that: it's a result of what you programmed it to do and what you told it to do.

<comment><USER76> If a human being is smart enough to realize that you don't want to paperclip the entire world, then surely a super AI would be smart enough, by definition. Part of intelligence is knowing when to ignore all those tiny chances. Human intelligence is less brittle than artificial because we can handle ambiguity and know when it's ridiculous to continue a task, just because there might be some small chance that it's not finished.

We also know that paperclipping the world will get in the way of other goals, like going to the show or making money.

<comment><USER87> I did indeed say that a superintelligent AI could realise that we don't want to paperclip the world. But it need not _care_ what we want, unless we're really, really careful about how we program it.

What is "ridiculous" about continuing a task because we're not certain that it's done yet? It's only your human moral system saying that. Just because humans usually don't value things enough to pursue them to the exclusion of all else…

<comment><USER76> I tell my super intelligent assistant, who's much better at understanding human language than Siri, to make me some paperclips.

It understands some to mean more than one and less than infinity. In fact, some means less than "a lot". The meaning of a lot depends on the context, which happens to be paperclips for me.

What is "some" paperclips for me? It depends on how many papers I might need to clip (or whatever use I might have for paperclips). My super intelligent assistant would be able to work out a good estimate.

After having an estimate, it can go make me "some" paperclips, and then stop somewhere short of paper clipping the entire world.

Alternatively, it could just ask me how many "some" means.

<comment><USER87> You're still assuming that the assistant cares about doing what I mean, rather than doing precisely what I say or doing what I programmed it to do. That only happens if we're really, really careful about how we programmed the AI in the first place. I grant you 100% that the AI probably knows precisely how many paperclips I want, but you're assuming that it wants the same number of paperclips that I want.

What an agent considers to be "good" is orthogonal to how intelligent that agent is. An agent of arbitrary intelligence can have arbitrary goals; the goals of an intelligent agent need not in principle look anything like those of a human. The only reason a superintelligent AI's goals would look like those of a human is because the humans very, very carefully programmed them into the AI somehow. Very, very careful programming is not a feature of how humans currently approach AI research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Super intelligence is a cargo cult for some, you know who I am talking about, but it doesn't mean it won't happen to some degree.

</comment><comment><USER89> I think It is OK to point out obvious errors in your approach when trying to create something new. But in this post all I can read is that you cannot create superhuman AI just because he thinks it is not possible. I don't think I read any real arguments.

All he is doing is trying to convince us all that it is not possible to create AI.

Hopefully nobody is convinced by this post not to try to create a superhuman AI. Most of us will fail but at least one will succeed. I don't think it is any exaggeration to say that this will probably be our last great invention, for good or for bad. Of course, I may just be biased given my own interests in AI.[1]

[1] [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057043](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14057043)

</comment><comment><USER90> Why do people like Kevin Kelly? Everything i've ever seen him say is consistently misinformed and poorly thought out. I tried to read one of his books recently, because I heard a number of people recommend it, and I couldn't even finish it (highly unusual for me).

Basically every point he makes in this post is just fundamentally wrong in one way or another. He clearly has no understanding whatsoever of what he's talking about, on the technical, biological, or psychological sides. He's just saying things that seem true to him, with zero context or understanding of any of the issues involved.

> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so "smarter than humans" is a > meaningless concept.

Multi-dimensional vectors have magnitudes just like scalars do. When will people get over this whole "intelligence is not one thing, therefore you can't say anything at all about it" nonsense?

> Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

False absolutism. Human minds are certainly _more_ general purpose than an AI. When an AI has a mind that is more general purpose than ours, I think its fair to call it a general purpose AI.

> Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

According to who? The only person that could answer that would be someone who already knew how to emulate the human brain. Although, come to think of it, some 50% of the human population are able to create new brains, at quite little cost. So it is empirically possible to synthesize new brains extremely cheaply.

> Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Lol, according to who? What does this even mean?

> Intelligences are only one factor in progress

Sure. So what?

There are plenty of perfectly legitimate, well thought out, informed critiques of AI fear mongering. This, however, is not one of them. This is garbage.

<comment><USER22> > When an AI has a mind that is more general purpose than ours, I think its > fair to call it a general purpose AI.

Can you give an example of an intelligence that is more general purpose than human intelligence?

<comment><USER90> I didn't claim one existed.</comment></comment></comment>


The Kickstarter Recession  - <AUTHOR> http://hive.slate.com/hive/10-rules-starting-small-business/article/the-kickstarter-recession

<comment><USER2> The article doesn't convince me that money thrown away by individuals on a Kickstarter pipe dream is any worse economically than money wasted by a large corporation on a failed product or an unproductive hire. Economic growth happens because the few successes more than make up for the many failures. This will be as true for Kickstarter as it is for the economy in general.

</comment><comment><USER3> This is a completely misguided article, from the ground up.

The point of Kickstarter is to fund things that people want but where traditional funding sources are unable to accurately assess the demand for those things.

In other words, KS does not create market inefficiencies, it corrects them.

</comment><comment><USER4> Optimizing the (immediate) measured economy doesn't necessarily reflect the most important goal of society. People might measure their productivity in forests paved, or maybe we can maximize the needle on some Fed metric by building more napalm factories. On the other hand, most corporations doubted the value of exploring packet switching back in the 60's.</comment>