Singularity Skepticism or Advocacy – to what extent is it warranted?
Why are some people so skeptical of the possibility of Super-intelligent Machines, while others take it quite seriously?
Hugo de Garis addresses both ‘Singularity Skepticism’ and advocacy – reasons for believing machine intelligence is not only possible but quite probable!
The Singularity will likely be an unprecedentedly huge issue that we will need to face in the coming decades.
There have been some enthusiastic and skeptical responses to this video so far on YouTube:
AZR NSMX1 commented that “Computers already have a better memory and a higher speed than human brain, they can learn and recognice the human voice since 1982 with the first software made for Kurzweil Industries, the expert systems are the first steps for thinking, then in 90’s we learned that emotions are more easy for machines than we believed, an emotion is just an uncontrolled reaction an automatic preservation code that may be good or not for a robot to reach its goal. Now in 2010 the Watson supercomputer show us that is able to structure the human language to produce a logic response, if that is not what does the thought, then somebody explain me what means to think. The only thing they still can’t do is the creative thinking and conciousness, but that will be reached between 2030 and 2035. Conciousness is just the amout and quality of the information you can process, IBM Blue Brain team said this, for example we the humans are very stupid when it comes to use and exploit all the possibilities offered by the smell sense compared to dogs or bears, in this dimension a cockroach is smarter than us because they can map the direction of smell to find the food or other members of their group, we can’t do this, we just have no consciusness in that world. Creativity is the most complex thing, if machines reaches creativity then our world will change because we will not only have to work anymore, but what is better we will not have to think anymore haha. Machines gonna do everything.”
My response: There has certainly been some impressive strides in technological advancement, it might asymptote at some stage – not sure when, but my take is that there won’t likely be many fundamental engineering or scientific bottlenecks that will block or stifle progress – the biggest problems I think will be sociological impediments – human caused.
Darian Rachel says “Around the 8 minute or so point he makes a statement that a machine will be built that is intelligent and conscious. He seems to pull this idea that it will be conscious “out of the air” somewhere. It seems to be a rather silly idea.”
My response: while I agree that a conscious machine is likely difficult to build, there doesn’t seem to be much agreement among humans about whether it exists, what consciousness actually is, whether it is a byproduct of (complex?) information processing and whether it is actually computable (using classical computation). Perhaps Hugo de Garis views consciousness as just being self-aware.
Exile438 responded that the “human brain has 100billion neurons and each connects to 10,000 other neurons, 10^11*10^4=10^15 human brain capacity estimate. Brain scanning resolution and speed of computers doubles every so often so within the next 2 to 3 decades we can simulate a brain on a computer. If we can do that it would run electronically 4million times faster then our chemical brains. This leads to singularity.”
My response: it’s certainly a strange and exciting time to be alive – the fundamental questions that we have been wrestling with since before recorded history – questions around personal identity and what makes us what we – may be unraveled within the lifetimes of most of us here today.