I find that I agree with nearly all Loosemore's comments in his reply...
I certainly agree with Pei that, in terms of spreading the AGI meme among researchers in academia and industry, focusing on the Singularity aspect is not good marketing. And, as a matter of pragmatic time-management, I am spending most of my "AGI R&D time" working on actually getting to the point of achieving advanced artificial cognition, rather than thinking about how to make an advanced AGI yet more advanced. (Though I do agree with Eliezer Yudkowsky and others that it is important to think about the ethics of advanced AGI's now, in advance of constructing them; and that one wants to think very deeply before creating an AGI that has significant potential to rapidly accelerate its own intelligence beyond the human level.) But, all these issues aside, I am close to certain that once we have a near-human-level AGI, then -- if we choose to effect a transition to superhuman-level AI -- it won't be a huge step to do so. And, I am close to certain that once we have a superhuman-level AGI, a host of other technologies like strong nanotech, genetic engineering, quantum computing etc. etc. will follows. Of course, this is all speculation and plenty of unknown things could go wrong. But, to me, the logic in favor of the above conclusions seems pretty solid. -- Ben G On 4/15/07, Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Eric B. Ramsay wrote: > There is an easy assumption of most writers on this board that once the > AGI exists, it's route to becoming a singularity is a sure thing. Why is > that? In humans there is a wide range of "smartness" in the population. > People face intellectual thresholds that they cannot cross because they > just do not have enough of this smartness thing. Although as a > physicist I understand General Relativity, I really doubt that if it had > been left up to me that it would ever have been discovered - no matter > how much time I was given. Do neuroscientists know where this talent > difference comes from in terms of brain structure? Where in the designs > for other AGI (Ben's for example) is the smartness of the AGI designed > in? I can see how an awareness may bubble up from a design but this > diesn't mean a system smart enough to move itself towards being a > singularity. Even if you feed the system all the information in the > world, it would know a lot but not be any smarter or even know how to > make itself smarter. How many years of training will we give a brand new > AGI before we decide it's retarded? Eric, I am going to address your question, as well as Pei's response that there should not really be a direct relationship between AGI and the Singularity. In the course of building an AGI, we (the designers of the AGI) will have to understand a great deal about what makes an intelligence tick. By the time we get anything working at all, we will know a lot more about the workings of intelligence than we do now. Now, our first attempts to build a full intelligence will very probably result in many test systems that have a "low IQ" -- a system that is not capable of being as smart as its designers. If we were standing in front of a human with that kind of low IQ, we would face a long, hard job (and in some cases, an impossible job) to improve their intelligence. But that is most emphatically not the case with a low-IQ AGI prototype. At the very least, we would be able to inspect the system during actual thinking episodes, in order to get clues about what goes right and what goes wrong. So, combining the knowledge we will have acquired during the design phase with the vast amount of performance data available during prototype phase, there are ample opportunities for us to improve the design. Specifically, we will try to find out what ingredients are needed to make the system extremely creative. (As well as extremely balanced and friendly, of course). By this means, I believe there would be no substantial obstacles to our getting the system up to the average human level of performance. I cannot guarantee this, of course, but there are no in-principle reasons why not. In fact, there are no reasons why we should not be able to get it up to a superhuman level of performance just by our own R&D efforts (some people seem to think that there is something inherently impossible about a human being able to design something smarter than itself, but that idea is really just science-fiction hearsay, not grounded in any real limitations). Okay, so if we assume that we can build a roughly-human-level intelligence, what next? The next phase is again very different to the case of having a human genius hanging around. [Aside. By 'genius' I just mean 'very bright compared with average' - I don't mean 'person with magically superhuman powers of intelligence and creativity']. This system will be capable of being augmented in a number of ways that are simply not possible with humans. Pure physical technology advances will promise the uploading of the original system into faster hardware ... so even if we and it NEVER did another stroke of work to improve its intelligence, we might find that it would get faster every time an electronic hardware upgrade became available. After a few years, it might be able to operate a thousand times faster than humans purely because of this factor. Second factor: Duplication. The original AGI (with full adult intelligence) could be duplicated in such a way that, for every genius machine we produce, we could build a thousand copies and get them (persuade them) to work together as a team. That is significant: human geniuses are rare, so what would happen if we could take an adult Einstein and quickly make a thousand similar brains? Never possible with humans: entirely feasible with a smart AGI. Third factor: Communication bandwidth. This huge team of genius AGIs would be able to talk to each other at rates that we can hardly even imagine. Human teams tend to suffer from problems when they become too large: some of those problems could be overcome because the AGI team would all (effectively) be in 'telepathic' contact with one another ... able to exchange ideas and inspiration without having to go through managers and committee meetings. Result: the AGI team of a thousand geniuses would be able to work at a thousand (or whatever) the speed of a comparable human team. If you combine all these factors, and even if you allow for the fact that I have pulled 1000x numbers out of the hat just for illustration purposes, it seems quite likely that the AGI development efforts would quite quickly lead to a situation in which the state of the art in AGI design was improving *very* much more rapidly than the rate at which it would advance with only humans in the loop. Finally, I would point out that all we need to do to achieve the Singularity is to get AGI systems that can operate at about 1000x the speed of humans, with no qualitative improvements over the 'bright' level of human intelligence. With such systems available, and with facilities to duplicate them, we could easily find ourselves with an amount of inventiveness that was (a) greater in quantity of brain-units than all the human scientists and engineers that are now in the planet, and (b) working at a speed that would enable them to produce in one year what that number of human scientists/engineers would have produced in the next thousand years. Somewhere in that next thousand years is a full, safe form of nanotech. THAT combination is the Singularity. The path that I have described above does not contain any outrageous assumptions, just moderate advances and hard work. Coming back now to Pei's point: yes, I thoroughly agree that when people talk about the Singularity as being a result of just a gradual quickening of the pace of technology, I shake my head and wonder what they must be thinking: the *general* curves of technological improvement could be exponentential all the way up to the point where they hit some limitations that completely invalidate the projections. There is no earthly reason - distinct from the reasons I have given, purely derived from projected progress in AGI research - why the general improvement in technology should go on ramping up and send the world into the Singularity. I find that 'look at the curves!' argument unconvincing. But I find the argument from AGI progress thoroughly compelling. There are various qualifications that I know I should have made, but I will leave them for another time (persuading the AGIs to do what we wish is a big issue, and persuading today's AI researchers to wake up and understand that they are beating their head against a glass ceiling caused by the Complex Systems Problem is an even bigger issue). Richard Loosemore ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?&;
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