What is a singularity, and why do you care?

On Bot7 we tend to pore over press releases for the latest tech trivia and figuring how to parody accompanying photos. Doing so we tend to overlook the original inspiration for this blog - artificial intelligence.

While comfortable with robots as cute little guys with a CPU, or not, and the massive industry spawning ever more varieties, ultimately where this genus heads is toward fictional creatures like 2001’s HAL and Star Trek’s Mr. Data - awesomely intelligent artificial devices.

Trying to humanize them, the screen writers added hints of feeling, but in the cold light of cinema they were ever emotional imbeciles, which is where the more philosophical near-term arguments rage. Can a machine intelligence think like a life form without peripheral senses contributing ‘feelings’ and generating emotions?

All moot, ultimately. Whatever will happen will soon, according to the Singularity Institute.

A Singularity is ..

.. the technological creation of smarter-than-human intelligence.

For over a hundred thousand years, the evolved human brain has held a privileged place in the expanse of cognition.

Within this century, science may move humanity beyond its boundary of intelligence. This possibility, the "singularity," may be a critical event in history.    [Singularity Institute]

Forget everything you have seen in film or television, or ever read. This scenario frightens those who contemplate it most intently.

You have probably questioned the endless Star Trek quest of Imperial Earth and decided Hoyle’s "A for Andromeda" is far more plausible than either viral Von Neuman conquests of adjacent stars and galaxies or carbon-based units warping around in a tin can because they can’t find reverse.

If so, you would then puzzle over the blind spot in our near future.

All who future-gaze in these increasingly fluid times balk at the exponentiation of possibility. While anything and everything now seems possible in both the "real" (increasing unreal) world, and in virtual worlds, some almost inescapable possibilities effect standing waves in the writhing turbulence that is our modern techno-civilization. 

One of these is the artificial intelligence singularity.

It is increasing appealing to common sense (no, that’s not a scientific proof) that an artificial mind, a massive conditional expert system, will emerge from the efforts of our runaway information technology.

Many dispute this, their objections strongly enhanced by the pathetic examples of so-called AI and an apparently stalled progress (measured in five-year comparisons over the past 50 years).

For proponents there is only the (apparent) certainty of historic technological gains - brick walls notwithstanding - and endless optimism.

Reason and comments

Reason Magazine online reviewed the Singularity Summit of September, 2007, with a synopsis itself entertaining, but never as keen as the comments the article provoked.

Like all areas of science, the consensus is as wide as the population has opinion.

Will Ray Kurzweil shut .. up? This guy’s is a book mill … Let me be perfectly clear, there will be no singularity before 2050. None, zip, nada. Technology will continue to expand exponentially, yes.

But an artificial intelligence will not spawn itself out of it.  …  They can’t even make a damned chat bot that can’t be bamboozled in less then four seconds.."

.. err, and in reply:

I’ll be happy to stand in for Ray Kurzweil.

But your characterization is so broad it’s virtually a parody of what Ray Kurzweil has actually written and said. Here is an excerpt from his website (published in 2001):

""Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity — technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence..""

Gentlemen please, no fighting in the war room!

Leaving aside that angry little whirlpool of antipathy, a delicious array of views paraded in the comments:

What about the rights afforded to these hypothetical superintelligent creations? Based on their predicted abilities, they will easily pass the Turing test, or any other such measure of awareness. What rights will these things have?"

Fine testament it is to our nobler qualities that so much attention has been given to mere possibility. Science fiction has given it decades of coverage, the most recent in films I Robot and Artificial Intelligence, the latter’s bleak depiction being more likely, given current (2007) estimates that 800 million people are starving on Earth while over a billion are obese.

Ah, strong AI. I see that it’s still the realm of crackpots. This stuff comes on Coast to Coast AM all the time. These folks can’t get a paper published in a decent scientific publication so they form their own conference."

Ouch!

I’ve never been a huge fan of the philosopher John Searle (though he was kind to my term paper as an undergraduate), but to quote him in a different context, ‘this kind of stuff gives bullshit a bad name’. .. Kurzweil talks about a computer program able to ’simulate’ a human mind in 10 years; in what way? Will it go out on dates?"

 Dextre isn’t a huge fan either.

Weak AI posits that intelligent behaviour can be modeled and used by computers to solve problems. Whereas strong AI believes that we can create machines that can think and are conscious.  … Sorry to be snippy, but I’ve encountered a lot of strange people who monopolize AI gatherings with their bizarre theories. … It would be nice to focus on where we are making progress instead of on unlikely scenarios. "

It seems entirely reasonable to expect that an integration of cumulative knowledge can produce an uber-humanoid when the processing power advances enough. This cyber-consultant may not be able feel emotion the same way as a normal human, but that does not seem to be necessary for amazing intellectual productivity gains to be realized.

The few quotes above were barely a scratch on the surface.

Amongst many useful links posted, a reader referred to this YouTube video "Computers and Common Sense," a refreshing reminder of just how short we are - today, 2007 - of attaining an even half-smart program, let alone AI of searing intellect:

On the Vinge

No singularity discussion is complete without introducing Vernor Vinge, retired San Diego State University Professor of Mathematics, computer scientist, and science fiction author, whose 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity epitomized thinking on this line.

Vinge in part attributes his notion to statistician I.J. Good who stated in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever.

Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.

Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."

Extinction scenarios

Why do students of AI quake at the downside of their work?

Fathers of the atom bomb were in obvious awe and trepidation at their isotopic offspring. So too can AI researchers see high possibility of self-annihilation from their handiwork.

Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom elaborates ethical principles governing the creation of AI, the absence of which might rapidly promote superintelligence as a possible cause of humanity’s demise:

When we create the first superintelligent entity, we might make a mistake and give it goals that lead it to annihilate humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual advantage gives it the power to do so.

For example, we could mistakenly elevate a subgoal to the status of a supergoal. We tell it to solve a mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the person who asked the question. "

Strip the Terminator movies of a few wild premises and you have a chilling scenario - one of millions - in how the machines might turn on us.

More likely, per the Wargames movie, it will probably be due to a programming oversight :0)