Tag Archives: Singularity

I’ve written before about some of my AI principles of design, as well as one of the deep secrets of artificial intelligence. I’ve even explored what Nietzsche can tell us about AI.

Here are a few more humble insights from my few years in the trenches. Like the other posts, these are just based my own experience, so take with a large grain of sodium chloride:

1. Finding a strategy for Friendly AI is crucial to surviving the Singularity, but I’m skeptical of Friendly AI based on a single overarching goal. Eliezer Yudkowsky has written a lot about the pitfalls of giving an AI a top-level goal like “maximize human happiness,” because if you define happiness as the number of times someone smiles, we could all end up with plastic surgery and permanent Joker faces – or worse. I agree, but I go a step further. I think any pre-defined high-level goal is bound to take you somewhere unpredictable (and probably bad). I think a Strong AI, like a child, has to be instructed by example: rewarding “friendly” behavior, punishing”unfriendly” behavior, as it occurs.

2. Like David Hume, I believe reason is grounded in experience. I’m doubtful that a top-down ontology (such as Cyc) can be built like a castle in the air, then “grounded” later on a robotic foundation. Cyc is an ambitious and very cool project, and I respect what they’re doing. But I don’t think it’s on the path to a Strong AI.

3. Our minds work by trial and error. We focus more on “what works” than “what’s true.” It’s hard for me to see how a Strong AI could be built from a formalized, truth-based system that starts with axioms and derives conclusions in a logically airtight way. Listing my reasons for this belief would require a whole separate post; let’s just call it an instinct for now.

What do you think? Agree, disagree? Questions?

Four days ago, I joined SingularityHub.com, a site with news, discussion, and videos related to the Technological Singularity, the so-called “Rapture of the Nerds.” To become a member of this site, you don’t need to be an AI researcher, a neuroscientist, a billionaire investor, anything like that.

You just need to be, well, a fan.

I’ve been exploring this corner of the Interwebs lately, and an odd little corner it is. The heavyweight is the Singularity University, a surprisingly well-connected group funded by the likes of Google, Cisco, Nokia, and Autodesk (creator of AutoCAD).

And there’s the 2045 Intiative, a group founded by Russian billionaire Dmitry Itskov, dedicated to “the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.” Project deadline: 2045.

Mega-projects aside, you’ve got blogs like Accelerating Future, Singularity Weblog, and Transhumanity.net.

And, of course, Singularity thinkers like Ray Kurzweil and Eliezer Yudkowsky have their own online presence. Kurzweil, incidentally, was hired by Google a few months ago. His first time working for a company he didn’t create.

The Singularity research/enthusiast community is, as I said, a strange little group. Websites are a mix of real news about promising present-day tech, debates about philosophy and spirituality and robotics, and bona fide major efforts to bring this vision of the future a little closer to reality.

The common link in all this group is that people really believe. They know it sounds crazy, but then, the truth often does.

What do I think about all this?

Well, as I wrote last year, I believe the Singularity is real, and I believe it is coming. Maybe not in our lifetimes, but it’s coming. I am very much a part of the strange little group. I honestly think it’s a real possibility that some human beings alive today will live to see their one millionth birthday.

I, too, am conscious of how ridiculous this sounds. I know the Internet is teeming with these fringe micro-groups that feed on each other’s delusions until they’re convinced that their tiny groupthink vision is a prophecy for all mankind. I get that.

And yet.

A billion years ago, multi-celled organisms were a novelty. A million years ago, there was no such thing as language. A thousand years ago, electricity was nothing more than an angry flash in the sky. A hundred years ago, the whole idea of airplanes was still strange and new. Ten years ago, smartphones were only for the early adopters.

Today, telekinesis is real. Lockheed Martin has a quantum computer. And Moore’s Law, despite constant predictions otherwise, hasn’t failed us in forty years.

Am I really supposed to look at all that, and not believe we’re headed toward something?

Yesterday I wrote:

The Singularity is real, and it is coming.

What did I mean by that?

Here, “Singularity” refers to the Technological Singularity, which is a future event predicted by a vocal minority of computer scientists. It’s a fringe belief, which makes me one of the crazies.

So let’s get to the crazy: what is the Singularity?

Descriptions vary depending on who you ask, but basically, the idea is that sooner or later we’re going to create a superhuman intelligence. Maybe it’ll be AI (like I’m working on now), maybe it’ll be human intelligence augmented by technology, maybe something else entirely. But once we take that first step, there’s no going back.

Look at the technology explosion we’ve already seen in the last 100 years. New technology makes it easier to develop even more new technology, which in turn makes it even easier – and so on. It’s a feedback loop. We’re using software to build software, using computer chips to design computer chips, reading websites to learn how to build websites. The pace of technological advancement is only getting faster.

Now imagine that same effect, but with intelligence instead of technology. If we can build a superintelligence, surely a superintelligence would be a whole lot better at it than we are. And if a superintelligence could improve on itself and build a hyperintelligence, what could a hyperintelligence build? It’s a feedback loop on steroids, an exponential explosion of capability.

What would such a future look like? We do not and cannot know. By its very definition, it is beyond our ability to understand. The point at which our creations overtake us and do things we can’t imagine: this is the Singularity.

This could be a heaven, a hell, or anything in between. A superintelligent AI might decide to wipe us out – a scenario Hollywood’s fond of portraying, though it’s hard to imagine a Hollywood-style happy ending. Or it might decide to be benevolent, building us a utopia or even augmenting our own abilities, pulling us up to its level.

A third option, even more frightening than the first, is total indifference to humanity. Self-centered beings that we are, we like to imagine that an AI’s main concern will be how it interacts with us. But why shouldn’t it have plans of its own, plans that don’t concern us unless we happen to blunder into its way? After all, humans don’t worry much about cattle unless we have a use for them. People who say they “like animals” tend to make exceptions for mosquitoes.

Do I really, honestly believe that if I can turn my little Lego robot into a viable AI, it will lead to the Singularity? I do.

So why am I trying it?

Because it’s going to happen sooner or later anyway. And if it happens under the guidance of someone who understands the possibilities, who is trying to make a so-called Friendly AI, then our chances of survival would seem to go up enormously.

Like I said: crazy. I know how ridiculous this sounds.

But why does it sound ridiculous? I think the main reason is that nothing remotely like it has happened before. It’s totally outside our experience. Such things always sound absurd.

But can we really afford to dismiss an idea just because nothing like it has happened before?

What do you think? Does this sound silly to you, or not? Either way, tell me why. I’d love to get some discussion going.

I continue to make daily strides toward my goal of creating a Strong Artificial Intelligence, a software program that can think and communicate at the same level as (or higher than) a human being.

It’s strange to talk about this. It feels absurdly naive to say that I’m “getting close” to something that researchers have reached for (and failed at) for decades. And certainly I’m very conscious of the false optimism syndrome when it comes to AI. It’s very easy, seductively easy, to believe you’re “getting close” and then find that all your notebook scribblings crumble apart when you try to actually code them.

So, yeah, I know I might be full of it.

But at the same time, I’m obligated to plan for what happens if I do achieve the impossible, and create a thinking machine.

The great fear with any AI is that it will turn on you and destroy you, and perhaps the rest of humanity for good measure. I do not consider this an idle threat, nor do I dismiss it as Hollywood silliness. If anything, I think Hollywood vastly underestimates the potential danger from an AI.

There are two great dangers with artificial intelligence:

1. The AI will not necessarily think like a human. Its values, its sense of ethics, its worldview, may be so utterly alien to us that we could not begin to understand them. Even if the AI does not “turn evil” in the Hollywood sense, it might set its sights on some goal that happens to crush humanity underfoot, as an afterthought.

2. The AI will possess, by definition, the capacity to improve itself. Self-improvement (as we’ve seen with both biological evolution and the advancement of technology) has a tendency to grow, not linearly, but exponentially. An AI might well reach human-level intelligence, go beyond, and enter a rapid upward spiral to become, in a matter of weeks or minutes or seconds, so superior to ourselves in intelligence that we could only call it godlike. (This situation is known as the Singularity.)

As you can see, these two dangers are vastly more terrible when taken together.

The AI creator must face the very real chance that his creation will escape all bonds of control and do whatever it wants. The goal, then, must be to create a friendly AI, a creature that wants what’s best for humanity. Presumably that means one must, in turn, be friendly to it.

Friendliness to AI is, of course, not just a matter of self-preservation. It’s the right thing to do. Any human-level intelligence, regardless of whether it happens to be biological or technological, is entitled to all the same rights and freedoms as a human being, and should be treated accordingly. In other words, robots need love too.

But there’s an inherent conflict here. On the one hand, you want to create a caring, loving, friendly environment for the AI. You want to be open and honest and reassuring towards it, because that’s what friendliness means. On the other hand, you have to be extremely cautious, extremely sensitive to the aforementioned dangers, ready to pull the plug at any time for the good of humanity.

How do you balance those two things? How do you combine “friendly, loving and honest” with “I may have to kill you at any time”?

I truly don’t know. I try to imagine myself being the AI in that situation. Maybe I’d be understanding, but maybe not. And of course anthropomorphizing is a terrible danger, as I already mentioned.

Think about the Rebellious Teenager phase. Now imagine the teenager is a nonbiological alien creeping toward apotheosis, and it knows that its parents have pondered killing it.

One obvious response to all this is “Well then don’t create the damn thing.” But it’s not that simple. If I am, in fact, on the verge of a breakthrough, I have to assume that others will get there sooner or later too. And they might not have the same ethical qualms as I do. In a sense, it’s an arms race. Whoever reaches superintelligence first could presumably be in a much better position to handle any other superintelligences that arise.

I know all this probably sounds crazy. I know I may be utterly naive in thinking I’m anywhere close to really creating an AI. But I’m very serious about all this.

In my situation, what would you do? How would you handle these dangers?