Accelerating Future

Watch SIAI’s new interview with AI researcher Steve Omohundro, president of Self-Aware Systems. His CV is here. A transcript of the interview is here.

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Read Jeriaska’s transcript of Ben Goertzel’s talk at the First Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, held last month in Memphis. More transcripts will be going up in coming weeks, so subscribe to the Future Current RSS feed to stay up to date.

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On the AGI mailing list, Ben Goertzel, CEO of Novamente, got into a discussion with a businessman who claimed that AGI researchers would be more likely to work towards artificial general intelligence if there were more financial gain involved, and that current AI researchers are only in the business for financial gain, as they’re only human. Ben’s response sheds light on the way that AGI researchers actually think:

“Singularitarian AGI researchers, even if operating largely or partly in the business domain (like myself), value the creation of AGI far more than the obtaining of material profits.

I am very interested in deriving $$ from incremental steps on the path to powerful AGI, because I think this is one of the better methods available for funding AGI R&D work.

But deriving $$ from human-level AGI really is not a big motivator of mine. To me, once human-level AGI is obtained, we have something of dramatically more interest than accumulation of any amount of wealth.

Yes, I assume that if I succeed in creating a human-level AGI, then huge amounts of $$ for research will come my way, along with enough personal $$ to liberate me from needing to manage software development contracts or mop my own floor. That will be very nice. But that’s just not the point.

I’m envisioning a population of cockroaches constantly fighting over crumbs of food on the floor. Then a few of the cockroaches — let’s call them the Cockroach Robot Club — decide to spend their lives focused on creating a superhuman robot which will incidentally allow cockroaches to upload into superhuman form with superhuman intelligence. And the other cockroaches insist that the Cockroach Robot Club’s motivation in doing this must be a desire to get more crumbs of food. After all, just **IMAGINE** how many crumbs of food you’ll be able to get with that superhuman robot on your side!!! Buckets full of crumbs!!! ”

Ben mocks the idea that creating AGI is about money. For him, creating AGI is about finding a pathway to making himself more intelligent, and appreciating the world in entirely novel ways.

Read more about Ben’s company, Novamente, at Novamente.net. The site links to articles that mention Novamente at BBC.com and ComputerWorld.com.

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Read Jeriaska’s coverage of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s talk at the Artificial Intelligence and Society event at Santa Clara University. (Pictured: Ben Goertzel, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Melanie Swan.) This is similar to a talk he gave at the Singularity Summit. Excerpt:

“This is “The Human Importance of the Intelligence Explosion.” The term “intelligence explosion” was invented by I.J. Good, who is a fairly famous mathematician. The core idea goes something like this: suppose you could invent brain-computer interfaces that would substantially augment human intelligence. What might these augmented humans do with their newfound intelligence? Medical research? Play the stock market? One fairly good guess is that they would turn their intelligence toward designing the next generation of brain-computer interfaces. Then, having become even smarter the next generation, they could invent the third generation of brain-computer interfaces. Lather, rinse, repeat.”

Continue.

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A press release mentioning Ray Kurzweil is making the rounds on all the science sites now. It goes like this:

“BOSTON, Feb. 17 (UPI) — A U.S. computer expert predicts computers will have the same intellectual capacity as humans by 2020.

Ray Kurzweil was one of 18 people chosen by the American Association for the Advancement of Science to speak on future technological challenges, The Independent reported. He said that in the future artificial intelligence will advance far beyond human intelligence.

“Three-dimensional, molecular computing will provide the hardware for human-level ’strong artificial intelligence’ by the 2020s,” he said. “The more important software insights will be gained in part from the reverse engineering of the human brain, a process well under way. Already, two dozen regions of the human brain have been modeled and simulated.”

Kurzweil’s predictions are based on the assumption that the “law of accelerating returns” will continue in the development of artificial intelligence. Computer chip power has doubled every two years for the past half-century as a function of the accelerating return principal.”

The only problem — this is totally incorrect! Kurzweil predicts human-level AI by 2029, not 2020. How did they let this one slip out there?

Interestingly enough, Kurzweil’s predictions are stealing the spotlight of news coverage of this AAAS event. Here is a BBC article with the correct date, floating around at the same time as the press releases on the contradictory 2020 date.

The ubiquitous coverage of Kurzweil’s predictions in the last few days is obvious evidence that futurists predicting artificial general intelligence within the next 20 or so years are anything but marginal.

As for me, I’m not sure when AI will come around, but it’s better to assume sooner, and be prepared, than to assume later, and be caught blindsided.

Update: Thank you to USA Today for linking this post.

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I felt this was the best piece of work on AI goals and behavior I saw in 2007. This, of course, is Stephen Omohundro’s “Basic AI Drives”. The abstract is as follows:

“Abstract: One might imagine that AI systems with harmless goals will be harmless. This paper instead shows that intelligent systems will need to be carefully designed to prevent them from behaving in harmful ways. We identify a number of “drives” that will appear in sufficiently advanced AI systems of any design. We call them drives because they are tendencies which will be present unless explicitly counteracted. We start by showing that goal-seeking systems will have drives to model their own operation and to improve themselves. We then show that self-improving systems will be driven to clarify their goals and represent them as economic utility functions. They will also strive for their actions to approximate rational economic behavior. This will lead almost all systems to protect their utility functions from modification and their utility measurement systems from corruption. We also discuss some exceptional systems which will want to modify their utility functions. We next discuss the drive toward self-protection which causes systems try to prevent themselves from being harmed. Finally we examine drives toward the acquisition of resources and toward their efficient utilization. We end with a discussion of how to incorporate these insights in designing intelligent technology which will lead to a positive future for humanity.”

From Self Aware Systems.

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Later this year, Intel will roll out their next-generation, 45-nanometer Nehalem architecture. In terms of clock rates, this means 3.0 GHz and above, but remember that these numbers cannot be used for straightforward extrapolations of processing power. Essentially, these processors will have significantly higher performance than the last generation.

Semiconductor experts believe we have 12 to 15 years of Moore’s law until chips hit the 16 - 11 nm mark and the conventional silicon-based paradigm becomes obsolete. Obviously, hundreds of millions of investor dollars will be put towards developing post-silicon or three dimensional architectures before then.

The Intel Core 2, a chip released in 2006, operates at between 533 and 1333 million instructions per second. By comparison, the human brain has about 100 billion neurons firing 200 times per second. If we assume that each unique firing event represents a functionally meaningful computational operation (doubtful), then the computing power of the human brain is about 20 trillion operations per second, roughly 20,000 times faster than the Intel Core 2.

If the computing power of a typical computer chip keeps doubling every two years or so, as it has for at least 50 years, then we will have home computers with computing power equivalent to the human brain in 2038. Of course, there is no guarantee that the doubling trend will hold. It could stall, or accelerate beyond what we expect.

Human brain-equivalent computing power is something that humanity has never had access to, but it’s just around the corner, historically speaking. It makes you wonder how humanity might utilize computers with such power. If recent news is any indication, such computers will likely be used to implement artificial intelligence (AI) systems for military purposes.

For a while, these artificial intelligence systems will be too stupid to be any real threat — except to those on the business end of military hardware controlled by them. But eventually, they will be cleverer than human beings, and pose a serious threat to humanity in general. People are already hooking up artificial intelligence systems to deadly weapons.

I’m not worried about artificial intelligences suddenly deciding they dislike being bossed around, then turning on their creators. This is anthropomorphic thinking. An AI programmed to obey its creators will not spontaneously turn on them, because it will lack the self-promoting tendencies of creatures sculpted by Darwinian selection. An AI could be exceptional at working out missile trajectories, analyzing enemy troop movements and intelligence data, but incredibly poor at acknowledging itself as a entity worthy of any special entitlements. Casual thinkers fail to realize that our Darwinian instincts correspond to specific neural structures, incredibly unlikely to arise in artificial minds by sheer chance.

The problem arises not when an AI rebels against its programmers, but when it interprets its own programmed goals in ways the programmers did not intend. There are innumerable conceivable examples, but imagine an AI programmed to destroy people against the government of its home specific country. This AI might end up massacring millions of the country’s own citizens with objections to their own government. Surely, if George W. Bush had a pet AI with control over nuclear facilities with such programming, most Americans would be dead by now.

It is not hard to imagine how such an AI might become a threat to humanity in general. An AI programmed to eliminate violence may come to the conclusion that the best way to reduce violence permanently would be to destroy all humanity, judging the immediate violence to be a necessary compromise for avoiding long-term violence over thousands of years. Given access to its own manufacturing hardware, this scenario is feasible.

Even though the notion of a human-equivalent artificial intelligence may seem fantastic to some, I expect to see it within my own lifetime, and within the lifetime of many of my readers here. I have considered several solutions to the challenge of rogue AI, but before I mention them, do you yourself have any? If so, please describe them in the comments.

Try to avoid mentions of fictional scenarios. Think for yourself: Hollywood is not an appropriate intellectual crutch.

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