Thoughts and Theories From Roger Andre
for the curious, and people getting to grips with computing and computers.
Tuesday 18 November 2008, 12:32 AM
The Technological Singularity
He refered to this event as the "technological singularity". The point is that with machines being made to design machines, they will be able to do this a lot faster than we can, eventually reaching that magic point of human inteligence and then beyond.
If I may throw in my own two cents worth here we may find that AI hungers for knowledge to the point of analyzing the physics and chemistry it finds itself surrounded in and organising the matter to it's own artificial preferences. Anyhow The details of this theory can be found in the article by Vernor Vinge. If we want to avoid disasters such as AI becoming to big for it's boots, then we need to hardwire into machines that they must always ask humans for permision when they want to patch themselves together.
This concern arises from the fact; that as machines/computers are used to design other machines/computers, at some point this process may begin to spiral out of control, aided by those humans who are capable of learning the complex ways of fusing chips to neurons and optic nerves etc and combined with genetic manipulation and control. It's possibly only a matter of time until we end up with a situation where machines start trying to give naive post graduates advice on what's best.
Of course it would be easy to think that this is just pure science fiction but just consider what can happen if vast networks of machines that are capable of aquiring knowledge start to meld with biological systems. At the moment we are dealing with moores law, which may or may not have a natural limit depending on the point of view you subscribe to. If we move on to other forms of computing, which I believe is inevitable then the sky (read cloud) really is not the limit as computing power could become trans-dimensional. It seems likely that as much as we may find moving away from transistors difficult it would be no problem for a machine designed by machines from past generations to figure out. We really don't know whats around the corner.
Of course the growth of "sky net" (yes I did just say that) and the "rise of the machines" (and that) will be aided by us curious humans, it couldn't happen on its own. At least not yet. So as far fetched as this may seem, now is the time to introduce failsafes and manual overrides as it were. If those pesky people keep trying to infect systems with viruses and other nasties, this may have the effect of "upseting" networks that are becoming self aware and causing great danger for humanity. Now excuse me whilst I multi machine and within that multi tab upload onto my sky drive!
PreviousComments on this post
Nice post Roger,
It's surely the beauty of nature fueled by the infinite variety of species that comes from natural selection and evolution that keeps us more organic than machines could ever hope to be...
... and that's what makes us a 'soul' rather than a 'unit'.
Extremely profound stuff, I can't usually get past reading the ingredients list on the back of a packet of Skittles at this time of the morning ('Taste the Rainbow).
AdrianB
Hi Adrian.
It does seem that the way people have developed technology is a step beyond the speed of "normal" evolution. The thing is we have been evolved to this point and it seems as though all the blueprints for the tech we enjoy today have been hard wired into the universe in the first place.
Just make me wonder if some kind of "soul" could ever take up residence in a machine if it was ever complex enough.
Roger:
Wow. A big jump from cloud computing to an AI becoming not only self-aware but able to control its environment.
There was an argument some years ago that various scientific disciplines were arguing that once a creature became intelligent enough to control the environment around themselves they would cease to evolve. I don't know if there ever was a final answer to that.
Humans were considered to have finished evolving because we doing such a good job at controlling the environment around ourselves. I think they were thinking of air conditioning and domed stadiums! Ha!
The answer to controlling AI beings from replicating or improving themselves would be to keep them out of the semiconductor foundries, sand pits (silicon dioxide becomes feedstock for the foundries), metal mines (gold, silver, aluminum, copper, arsenic, germanium, and other semiconductor dopants), lampblack factories (carbon to make buckyballs and tubes) and space (vacuum is a great place to make semiconductors).
We also need to keep them away from environmental control systems for buildings and other structures since we don't want them making them un-inhabitable for humans.
I'll bet on cyborgs before AI happens. Humans will first start getting implants to fix broken pieces of themselves. The next step will be implants to improve aspects of our mental or physical capabilities like "Johnny Mnemonic" by William Gibson. A really forgettable movie starring a pre-Matrix Keanu Reeves. Or like the Borg on Star Trek, Next Generation.
I'd swear somebody with a Bluetooth earpiece is already "plugged in"! It's only a matter of time before you can get a docking station in your head for your "virtual reality I-Pod". Electric cars are reported to be soon available with drive-by-wire capabilities. Its going to be a short time after that when you can jack into your car and "drive it" with your head instead of your hands.
There will be political and social conflict between the cyborgs and the "natural" humans without implants. Fisher Price will sell "Baby's First Implant". We'll not only be able to listen to piano recitals, we'll be able to receive the fingering impulses so we can play like the virtuoso. (Imagine having to download the codec for that!)
So in other words its the Matrix!!!!! Just hope Microsoft has gone out of business before then!
One more observation after having read his paper. He cites 30 years as the earliest possible date. Its already been 15 years since that was written. (He was writing in the Intel P1 era. hmmmmm)
Intel & AMD are working their little corporate butts off trying to out-do the other building multi-core CPUs. Its a model suggested to them by the way human brains work. Lots of parallel computing going on in our wet-ware. Thank goodness nobody has managed to make a commercially successful multi-core operating system yet. We've still got time.
Maybe we humans need more than 15 years to get the ramparts and bunkers built up. Let's get Microsoft to write it so we attack it with viri, worms and Trojans and bring it down!
("Now where is that USB 3.0 to neural translator hub?")
Nice reply there. You can imagine the fun for the cyborgs when bugs in their soft/hard/firmware start to become apparent. This could make for a grumpy cyborg and maybe the start of conflict with natural humans.
It may turn out that microsoft won't play ball and could end up coming to our rescue on this issue.
Check out this "strange post". I was led to this story by a chap right here on ZD called Kelf. Make of what you will, It makes for great reading, question is; fact or fiction. If it's true than there are some very scary people out there in control of a lot of the web. If it's false then it's quite a good piece of fiction!
