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| Updates From Stanford Singularity Conference |
488 Views |
| posted on Tuesday, May 16, 2006 |
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SMARTER THAN THOU?
STANFORD CONFERENCE PONDERS A BRAVE NEW WORLD WITH MACHINES MORE POWERFUL THAN THEIR CREATORS
By Tom Abate
San Francisco Chronicle
Friday, May 12, 2006
Original Link
Is technology poised to develop machines that can outsmart their human creators?
And what will happen to mere mortals if such superintelligent machines arise?
These will be among the questions pondered when experts in artificial intelligence, brain research and other futuristic fields gather at Stanford University on Saturday for what is being called the Singularity Summit.
Borrowing a term from physics, singularity suggests a horizon beyond which we can't see. It describes the point at which some form of intelligence spawned by technology gains the ability to rapidly improve its own programming -- becoming so powerful that we cannot predict what it might do. At that point, its capabilities could exceed even the power of our imaginations.
"This could be very, very good if we get it right, and very, very bad if we get it wrong,'' said Eliezer Yudkowsky, a research fellow with the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a nonprofit group in Palo Alto that is co-sponsoring the event.
The speakers' lineup will include inventor and author Ray Kurzweil, whose recent book, "The Singularity Is Near," argues that a fusion of machine and biological intelligence is not only imminent but beneficial.
"It's not going to be an invasion of intelligent machines coming over the horizon,'' Kurzweil said recently. "We're going to merge with this technology. ... We're going to put these intelligent devices inside our bodies and our brains to make us live longer and healthier."
More-skeptical speakers will include Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist at Indiana University who is probably best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Gödel, Escher, Bach."
"I don't think it's inconceivable that some kind of singularity entity could eventually have superior intelligence to humans, but I'd be very surprised if anything remotely like this happened in the next 100 to 200 years,'' Hofstadter said, adding that if and when superintelligent machines arise, the question will be, "whether we become animals in the zoo, or go extinct or just coexist (with it) like ants.''
Organizers say more than 2,000 people have already signed up to hear these heady topics discussed. They suggest that anyone who is not already a confirmed registrant for the free event arrive early Saturday to wait in line for cancellations at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium. Other speakers will include:
-- Max More, chairman of the Extropy Institute, a nonprofit group that espouses lengthening the human lifespan and making other "improvements" to human physiology and character through technology;
-- Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, which also advocates "human enhancements" while simultaneously pondering the risks that a global catastrophe -- whether self-inflicted through thermonuclear war or naturally occurring as in an asteroid strike -- could wipe out the human species;
-- Environmentalist Bill McKibben, author of "Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age," who is expected to argue against such technological improvements.
In a way, the daylong summit is shaping up as the Bay Area coming-out party for the tech-inspired philosophy called transhumanism. In a nutshell, transhumanism holds that genetics, nanotechnology and robotics are converging, creating the potential for "human enhancements."
Saturday's event is supported by the Stanford Transhumanist Association, a student group that embraces the view that humankind is poised to take evolution into its own hands.
"We should view ourselves as a species in transition," said Michael Jin, a 20-year-old sophomore and founding member of the group. Jin and fellow sophomore Yonah Berwaldt have been pleased at how quickly the event drew a close-to-capacity crowd based largely on word of mouth and blog posts.
"There's a large audience for this sort of thing on the Internet,'' said Jin, who says it is possible and desirable to engineer away psychological flaws such as selfishness. "This is a troubling aspect of human nature and something we could actually fix,'' he said.
Although little known outside technological circles, transhumanism inspires intense opposition from ethical watchdog groups that dispute the notion that such technological tweaking would represent progress.
"As soon as you take issue, you're quickly labeled a Luddite,'' said Jennifer Lahl, national director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture Network in Oakland. "But transhumanism begs the question: What needs to be improved upon, who gets to decide and where does it end?"
Richard Hayes, executive director of Oakland's Center for Genetics and Society, likened modern transhumanists to the early 20th-century futurists who were fellow travelers with the fascist movements of that era.
"The transhumanists are fundamentally elitists," Hayes said. "Once they start enhancing themselves toward post-human status they will have little concern with the rest of humanity."
Yudkowsky, the artificial intelligence expert with the Singularity Institute, said those fears stem from Hollywood images such as the part-human, part-machine Borg of the "Star Trek" series whose collective consciousness is akin to a form of telepathy.
"How do they (scriptwriters) know that telepaths aren't nice people?'' he said.
Nevertheless, the Singularity Institute sees itself as a watchdog, working inside this movement to ensure that if and when smarter-than-human machines arise that they would behave like benign genies to help solve such problems as global warming.
"Humanity seems to have two choices in the long run: superintelligence or extinction," Singularity Institute Executive Director Tyler Emerson said.
Todd Davies, a lecturer at Stanford and associate director of the university's cross-disciplinary Symbolic Systems Program, said he knew the Singularity Summit would be controversial and tried to ensure some diversity of views on the agenda.
"I'm not at all convinced the singularity is near or that it will be a good thing,'' Davies said, adding that, "having the summit is a way to get these ideas on the table.''
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SINGULARITY: TECHNOLOGY, SPIRITUALITY AND THE CLOSE BOX
By Dan Farber
Between The Lines
May 13, 2006
http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3030
Ray Kurzweil responded to various critiques and questions, and stuck to his PowerPoint slides of datapoints that convey his Singularity theory. He emphasized that because of the accelerating pace of change, technology will be able to solve all problems, from the practical problems of climate change and energy efficiency to cutting poverty and disease On the software side, 10 to the 16th calculations per second should be sufficient to reach human level intelligence. and bridging the digital divide -- but only through the scale the new technologies will bring.
On radical life extension -- including immortality -- mastering and reprogramming who we are in terms of health processes through biotechnology is on the horizon, Kurzweil said that biology and medicine in post information era are about reprogramming biology to eliminate health problems, he said. "Within 15 years add a year to life expectancy every year," he predicted, which supports the "real goal of life is to expand human knowledge."
He added that "creating communities is what holds people together and enhance human relationships, and I would like more time to partake of that."
Kurzweil's notion of community includes the more extreme concept soft loading the contents of a brain onto a computing substrate. It's difficult to imagine the social dynamics of communities with computational intelligences as separate entities, full rendered proxies for a biological being or some merged entity with one million time the speed of human brain function.
"The whole uploading idea isn't necessary," Kurzweil said. "The idea is to pass the Turing test. We don't need your body and brain…we have this new better one in a computing substrate. We can observe and scan from inside and see what going in sufficient detail….One can make an argument that it is a different person, but this scenario not integral. We are talking about capturing strong AI, and it's becoming less narrow over time."Integrate the compute with who you are …more convenience.
Kurzweil dismissed Hofstader's critique, saying that there are some limitations in the accelerating pace of technology, but they are "not very limiting."
As a final piece, the panelists were asked whether they thought the shift to Singularity would have a happy ending. The majority of panelists were optimistic, or weren't willing to guess. Predictions on when human level machine intelligence would exist ranged from 2029 (Kurzweil) to 2100 (Hofstader, although he said he is not a 'futurist'). Kurzweil also doesn't believe that even a world catastrophe, which would be painful of course, would disrupt the trends on which Singularity is based.
Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence doesn't believe that human level AI can be predicted, even if know how to build real AI, how much work is involved and which organization and people are doing it. "We have to be careful not to mistake our ignorance for knoweledge about it," said, adding that AI doesn't fit into a Moore's Law expression. "We need more public funding for specialists who can think about these things full time," Yudkowsky said.
Kurzweil responded that the hardware and software are two sides of the problem. On the software side 10 to the 16th calculations per second should be sufficient to reach human level intelligence. "It's a matter of getting to the right level of representation of brain regions…it's a fairly complex system but at level we can handle." Hardware will follow Moore's Law, continue to deliver cheaper, faster, smaller, cooler systems.
Author Bill McKibben, who was remotely connected to the Summit from his country home in the Adirondacks, advised the Singularists to slow down. "One of ways we fool ourselves is thinking the past a good predictor of future. It's a natural human tendency to extrapolate out. That's possible and how lots of people lose their shirts in the stock market. The other possibility is that there are threshold points at which point it makes sense to say enough for now. We are clearly in one of those points," McKibben said.
He went on to say that in the last 150 things have gotten faster, and physical and social disintegration aof the world is around us. "We are living in a society with increasing depression. In the real world, to the degree that it's possible to slow down the progress of technology change and instead think hard about how to summon human abilities and try to bring them to the fore."
Cory Doctorow made the important point that "hitting the close box quickly is going to be one of the more important skills."
McKibben also adress the intersection of Singularity and spirituality. "It is taking something that is a deep part of the human experience and somehow confusing quality with quantity. In the end, the spiritual response has a great deal to do in that there is something important about human mortality. It would be an interesting process, and to a certain amount in conflict [with ideas of Singularity]."
"Technology can empower us on the positive side," Kurzweil resoonded. "We can see both the promise and perils, but at same time social networks and blogs are democratizing. Some of true values of religion, such as the golden rule, we keep in mind. The story of the 21st century hasn't been written."
The most important inventions of the last century, according to McKibben, were the wilderness area and the practical invention of non-violence as a political technique–the unique human ability to reign oneself in. That statement drew the greatest applause of the day.
Kurzweil responded that free enteprise competition makes it hard to slow down, and he clearly wants to continue marching forward.
McKibben chimed in that governments could intervene. "If we decided that the endless consolidation of agriculture was producing results we don't like in ecological terms and human cost, we could pass series of laws to slow that down. We aren't beyond that possilbity–we still live in world in which we can make a difference."
Doctorow cited a characterization of Singularity as the "rapture of nerds," and that the attraction of Singularity is partly pyschological, transcending problems of the world, wiping the slate clean. Kurzweil countered that the idea of Singularity doesn't just emerge from anxiety. "It's applying knowledge to solve problems, and we have to reach to transcend the problems in real, rather than imaginary, ways."
It boils down to whether you believe in the Singularity concept as a scientific endeavor, and how it will impact individuals and society. It's not hard to believe in the substance of the science aspects of Singularity. The question about how it will change our species, society and public policy beyond the notion of increasing life span, pervasive virtual reality and smart agents to do our bidding in that realm or in the worst case scenario over time to enslave us. As McKibben suggests, the concepts of Singularity need to be part of the big conversation.
Kurzweil concluded the session: "It's a complex topic." Indeed…
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The Singularity Summit At Stanford
Photos From The Singularity Conference
Singularity Summit Summary
Responsible Nanotechnology
Singularity Summit Summary
Down The Avenue
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NHNE Singularity Resource Page
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