The Singularity

A technically informed, but very speculative

critique of recent statements of e.g. Elon Musk,

Stephen Hawking and Bill Gates in the last year

“The Doomsday Invention”

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/d

oomsday-invention-artificial-intelligence-nick-

bostrom

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Elon Musk Compares Building Artificial

Intelligence To “Summoning The Demon”

Musk: I think we should be very careful about artificial

intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential

threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with

artificial intelligence.

I’m increasingly inclined to think that there should be some

regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international

level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very

foolish. With artificial intelligence we’re summoning the

demon. You know those stories where there’s the guy with the

pentagram, and the holy water, and he’s like — Yeah, he’s sure

he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.

MIT, October 2014 (from Techcrunch.com)

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Elon Musk Compares Building Artificial

Intelligence To “Summoning The Demon”

Q: So I’ll take it there’ll be no HAL9000 going to

mars?

Musk: Heh. HAL 9000 would be easy [to deal with in

comparison to the AI he’s talking about]. It’s way

more complex… it’d put HAL9000 to shame. That’s

like a puppy dog.

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Elon Musk: a Machine Tasked with Getting

Rid of Spam Could End Humanity

“I don’t think anyone realizes how quickly artificial

intelligence is advancing. Particularly if [the

machine is] involved in recursive self-improvement .

. . and its utility function is something that’s

detrimental to humanity, then it will have a very bad

effect,” said Musk.

“If its [function] is just something like getting rid of

e-mail spam and it determines the best way of

getting rid of spam is getting rid of humans . . . ”

Musk trailed off, as the crowd laughed.Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit October 2014

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Stephen Hawking: AI could end human race

“The primitive forms of artificial intelligence we

already have have proved very useful. But I fear the

development of full artificial intelligence could spell

the end of the human race.

Once humans develop artificial intelligence, it would

take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever

increasing rate.

Humans, who are limited by slow biological

evolution, couldn't compete and would be

superseded“

Stephen Hawking

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Bill Gates

"I am in the camp that is concerned about super

intelligence. First the machines will do a lot of

jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That

should be positive if we manage it well. A few

decades after that though the intelligence is

strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon

Musk and some others on this and don't

understand why some people are not concerned.“

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2015/01/28/bill-gates-on-

dangers-of-artificial-intelligence-dont-understand-why-some-people-are-not-

concerned/

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The Coming Technological Singularity: How to

Survive in the Post-Human Era: Vernor Vinge 1993

"Within 30 years, we will have the technological

means to create superhuman intelligence.

Shortly after, the human era will be ended."

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Ray Kurzweil’s Singularity (Time Mag.)

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The Singularity – Origin of the phrase

“His conversations with friends on scientific subjects

could last for hours. There never was a lack of

subjects, even when one departed from mathematical

topics.

…

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating

progress of technology and changes in the mode of

human, life, which gives the appearance of

approaching some essential singularity in the history

of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know

them, could not continue.”

– John von Neumann 1903-1957, Stanislaw Ulam

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MIT Spinoff Funded $143M to Create

Sentient Computers

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Deep Neural Nets – Breakthrough in

Speech Recognition Accuracy

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Phone Error Rate

Training: 630 speakers x 10 sentences TIMIT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_learning

Best HMM result

Best DNN result

Bye-bye

Moore’s Law..

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Intel’s former chief architect Bob Colwell, head of DARPA’s

Microsystems Technology Office: “For planning horizons, I pick 2020 as

the earliest date we could call [Moore's law] dead. You could talk me

into 2022, but whether it will come at 7 or 5nm, it’s a big deal.”

The brain is complex in architecture..

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Nancy Kanwisher, Functional specificity in the human brain: A window into the

functional architecture of the mind, Proceedings of the NAS, 2010

“Real soon now”

“By 1991, the impressive list of goals penned in

1981 for Japan's Fifth Generation Project had not

been met. Indeed, some of them, like "carry on a

casual conversation" had not been met by 2010. As

with other AI projects, expectations had run much

higher than what was actually possible.”

History of Artificial Intelligence, Wikipedia

Most of us accept that our lives are limited…. Not Ray

Kurzweil. Kurzweil, 65, decided decades ago

that mortality wasn't for him. He didn't have to die, and

he wasn't going to, if he could help it. Fortunately, he

believes he can help it—and he's been working

feverishly at the task of staying alive ever since.

“How long do you think you will live?” I asked Kurzweil

in a recent phone interview.

“I think I have a good chance—I would put it at 80

percent—of getting to the point where it becomes

indefinite, because you’ll be adding more time than is

going by to your remaining life expectancy.”http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/11/ray_kurzweil

_s_singularity_what_it_s_like_to_pursue_immortality.html

Then why believe this?

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Three Bridges to Immortality

Bridge one: “ Our smartphones are

becoming extensions of our minds.”

Bridge two: “Kurzweil forecasts that

we’ll eventually be implanting computers and

nanobots in our bodies and brains to enhance

their natural functions.”

Bridge three: “And someday—by 2045, to be

precise—we’ll have machines so sophisticated

that we’ll essentially be able to back up our minds

to the cloud.”

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A Less Radical AI Apocalypse

It could happen….

The worst case scenario for artificial intelligence run amok isn't killer

robots. It's widespread unemployment.

That's the view expressed by Andrew Ng, chief scientist at Baidu, a

Chinese-language Internet search engine….

Ng, a veteran of Google and Coursera, said he doesn't see a path from

the state of current technology to the sort of super-intelligence necessary

for malevolent cyborgs. But he does see reason to worry about the

economic impact of advances in computer learning and expert systems.

"If we succeed in building self-driving cars, that's 3.5 million truck

drivers who might have to find a new job," he said.

During the industrial revolution, Ng said, the population had 200 years

to shift from 98% farmers to 2% farmers. The transformation brought about

by computer technology "will be much faster.“

http://www.informationweek.com/it-life/artificial-intelligence-will-put-us-out-of-work/d/d-id/1318875

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“Autonomous weapons: An open letter”

“Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point

where the deployment of such systems is … feasible

within years, not decades, and the stakes are high:

autonomous weapons have been described as the third

revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

“It will only be a matter of time until [autonomous

weapons] appear on the black market and in the hands of

terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their

populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing.

…” Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Daniel Dennett, Noam Chomsky,

Martin Rees …

Stuart Russell, Nils Nilsson, Barbara Grosz, Tom Mitchell, Martha Pollack, Henry

Kautz,

Penn CIS: Aravind Joshi, Eric Eaton, <me>

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It’s up to you…

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