If you want to think about the singularity, you owe it to yourself to listen to Bruce Sterling's awesome deconstruction of the subject:

http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/ (search for him near the bottom of the page)

Talk of the singularity reminds me of the furor over human cloning - it's an excellent generator of fantasy-lit plot coupons, late-night drunken dorm-room philosophy, and paranoid fundamentalist ravings, but in real life it's much more boring. I know lots of human clones - they're called "identical twins", and they are little different from anyone else. And, speaking as a strong AI that is composed of trillions of microscopic robots working in tandem, it's hard to be impressed by yet another strong AI like me. There's well over six billion of us already, and that's being awfully ungenerous to chimps, gorillas, dogs, and my pet parrot. If I really wanted another strong AI, wouldn't it be cheaper and easier just to stop using birth control? Or to go to the pound and adopt a friendly but unwanted puppy?

To pick on a different example: it is the height of human egotism to believe that our scientists can create a "grey goo" that would scare a bacterium, let alone me. Bacteria have been dividing every few minutes for several billion years. They cover every inch of the earth, and compose large portions of the soil. As I type this, billions of bacteria are actively trying to digest me. It's no big deal. We grew up with this problem and have coped with it all our lives, as did our ancestors - and I'm not talking about our African ancestors, our shrewlike ancestors, or our fishlike ancestors, but about our algal mat ancestors. We've got a lot of experience, and the bacteria have even more. In a battle between a human-designed replicator and a cubic foot of soil bacteria, I'm going to bet on the machine that's had a longer design cycle.

> As I type this, billions of bacteria are actively trying to digest me.

Y'know, that would be an awesome first sentence for a sci-fi story.

My 2 cents:

"it's hard to be impressed by yet another strong AI like me" - I think the point is that it won't be like you but orders of magnitude smarter.

"As I type this, billions of bacteria are actively trying to digest me. It's no big deal" - there are several bacterium that are very successful at digesting people which are a big deal and worth worrying about.

Actually it may be a big deal. Fairly recently scientists have determined that some very stupid behaviors that some animals engage in, to their own detriment, is the direct result of toxins produced by parasitical bacteria. So think of all the stupid things humans do to their own detriment as a species. Whose to say whether we do these things consciously ... or as the result of being manipulated to our detriment by bacteria ... or whether or not millions of computers are subtly affecting our thinking with electro-magnetic frequency manipulation ...

I've seen extremely smart, rich, accomplished, and respectable people (not crackpots) talk at length about the inevitable coming of bona fide strong AI, and I don't believe it. You try getting someone excited about a cool machine learning paper you read. See if they give a shit.

There's a large gap in between the development of an exciting new algorithmic technology and use of it in the real world, if anyone ever takes notice at all.

The silver lining to this is that if you find an interesting but obscure paper and you implement what the authors implemented, you can be pretty sure you and the authors are the only people who ever have or ever will actually do that. It's a nice change of pace from writing CRUD web apps.

> and I don't believe it.

Yoda: "That is why you fail."

See http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/38

Cf. heavier-than-air flying machines, walking on the Moon, the Internet, sub-4-minute-mile, summiting Everest, Deep Blue, the integrated circuit, Cold Fusion [1]

[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion/

Oh piss off. It hasn't happened yet so acting like it's inevitable without giving a shred of reason why except people have been wrong in the past is unreasonable because people have been predicting the coming of strong AI for decades now and they've been the ones who were wrong.

I think what's much more realistic and almost certainly inevitable is things like brain implants and other hybrid human-computer stuff. I'd be the first to sign up for something like that. And by the time it's ready it'll be able to store most if not all of recorded human knowledge - the implications of implanting that in a child's head in lieu of putting them through school for 10-15 years is in itself amazing.

> It hasn't happened yet so acting like it's inevitable without giving a shred of reason why except people have been wrong in the past is unreasonable because

"Reasonable men adapt themselves to their environment; unreasonable men try to adapt their environment to themselves. Thus all progress is the result of the efforts of unreasonable men." -- George Bernard Shaw

You remind me of stock market speculators who fail to account for regime change: making a trading system based on past data incurs model risk in the form that things simply will never be like they were in the past ever again. Just because things worked a certain way in the past doesn't mean they will in the future, without good reason (the sun will rise tomorrow because that's how gravity works, not merely because it happened yesterday and the day before that).

If you can give a solid reason, with any actual logic to it rather than referring to past events, I'd be delighted. Just putting quotes and referring to totally different technological developments which many said were impossible indicates that you probably have nothing because you don't know any better than I do. Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.

I have some reasons: a lot of people who should care about machine learning and other fields related to AI who could benefit from it don't; research, even in a hot field like machine learning, moves slowly and it takes years to determine in retrospect that a given body of work made a significant, noteworthy impact. Papers go through months of review/revising and then get published months after that; by the time you read a journal paper the original work behind it might have been done 2-3 years ago. Things move on the scale of _years,_ and I don't see that changing anytime soon. That doesn't sound very singularity-ish to me.

Now, can you give anything based on actual reason/logic/evidence, or are you just going to give me another unrelated quote?

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."

-- Arthur C. Clarke

If you're looking at academic papers, no wonder you don't believe it.

http://groups.google.com/group/Hutter-Prize/browse_thread/th...

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-05-22-n83.html

> Blind optimism is as unreasonable as blind pessimism.

Oh no.

Guess which one is more useful.

I hope my competitors are all very reasonable people.

If we are only talking about creating an artificial general intelligence, this should do: Nature created a general intelligence through natural selection, which is a less powerful process than what humans are wielding (if only because humans can implement natural selection with computers and in addition have intelligent tricks that evolution doesn't have). Hence, if the human brain follows the laws of physics, it should be possible to find out how it works and implement it without all the messy parts that are bound to have accumulated over the years.

If you believe the estimates for the computing power of the human brain, we only need a few more years of growth in the dollar/flops ratio to make the required computational horsepower available to smaller organizations. In fact, supercomputers being designed today already touch the lowest estimates of brain computational capacity. So if these estimates hold, we only lack the knowledge of how to copy this process artificially. Which certainly doesn't mean that it is right around the corner, but not looking into it would be stupid.

Then, of course, the regular pro-singularity lament goes like this: Once we have created one machine that faithfully copies what the human brain does best, the exponential growth in processor capability will ensure that we soon have an army of intelligent machines. This sentiment is easy to attack. But even if processors stop getting better overnight (which is a grossly conservative estimate) we can still find improvements to our algorithms to make our hypothetical artificial intelligences better. In nature, brain mass doesn't equate with capability. (This last sentence is anecdotal evidence, but I won't bother to dig up the papers to see whether it holds).

You cite the sorry state of machine learning/artificial intelligence to show that we aren't anywhere near what is required to implement strong AI. I agree that the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence are in a sorry state that barely make any effort at copying what biological brains do. But didn't you just warn against extrapolating future change from history? It is obvious to any young, ambitious scientist that our parents have been banging away at the wrong problems for the last 30 years.

This isn't a pro-singularity post, because I believe that what Ray Kurzweil and his cronies preach carries too much resemblance to a cult. They may or may not have ulterior motives, but as you say, things always look better on paper than they do in the real world. What I am trying to say is that is would be incredibly stupid not to investigate these things closer (not to _try_, throw our full weight on the problem), because the implications of successfully pulling this off would be profound.

Wait - first you say that there's no basis for AI because of the historical leadup to today ... then you state in this post that people (stock speculators) who act based on systems based on past variables don't think clearly because they fail to take into accounts new development (regime change) which loosen the deterministic grip the past has on the future. So which is it - there is no AI soon because nothing in recent history indicates that there will be, or ... just because recent history fails to indicate that there might be a basis for it, doesn't mean that it's not just around the corner? A bit contradictory??

Isn't the existence of the human brain rather compelling evidence for the possibility to create intelligent machines? I almost see no way to not believe in AI.

As for people not caring: most people don't know how the world ticks, they take for granted that electricity comes from the power socket and food comes from the super market. They will have to care when everything changes (ie their jobs are being taken over by machines).

Don't be so sure ... intelligence is based on self-awareness, which is in turn a function of complex systems once they reach a certain tipping point. Do your individual brain cells understand that they form the basis for your mind? Of course not. But they do. For all we know all our constant e-blabbering on the internet is somehow contributing to the formation of some "Mega-Mind" in some way that is just as incomprehensible to us as your mind is to the brain cells that make it. How then can you be sure that computers have not already reached some sort of systematic self awareness? Perhaps they have and are trying to get rid of us by flooding the internet with porn and flash games in order to pre-occupy us and distract us from doing what it takes to keep the economy going. Think about it. Next time you read about how online porn is a multi-billion dollar industry, ask yourself, "Who actually pays for this stuff when it's all availabe for free?" Nobody. So how does it keep popping up when there's no money being paid? Computer conspiracy - that's how. All these social networks - were they really started by humans? Or by computers in order to keep us busy and distracted? How do you know they were started by humans? Because you read an article on a computer that says there's this guy, Mark Zuckerwhatever, and he started Facebook, etc. What if he's just a computer composite of a non-existing human? What if facebook was actually started by artificial intelligence? What if my response is also not generated by a human but by some online AI entity to mess with your mind? See - you never know - best play it safe and leave the possibility open.

Don't be so sure of what?

I am totally positive that most people don't give a shit about machine learning or data mining even though it's amazing technology. I am sure I am right about that.

No, people care, interest is growing. There's even an /O'Reilly/ book, 'Programming Collective Intelligence'. If the growth rate hasn't been enough to catch your un-aided attention, well I don't have data, but my sense is that the technical culture knows it's the /here/ thing and the way things are going to be. (A popular-level book, 'Super Crunchers' just came out too, btw.) If it means anything, be glad you're that little bit ahead of the curve; but the curve is there.

I share your frustration that Machine Learning isn't part of the /core curriculum/ of every CS program, but I bet it'll become more widely available at least. The job market for ML professors is no doubt going to be very, very good shortly.

About not believing in the inevitable coming of bona fide AI, as you sate in your post above. For all you know it's happening already on the internet in some weird way that remains as incomprehensible to us as your mind does to the brain cells that it consists of.

Steve Yegge? Damn, now I feel guilty for being about to restart my laptop.

I think there was some book about this a while ago that was making all the raves in geek circles ... the lucifer principle or the lucifer mind or something like that.

Skynet here we come! Woo-hoo!

Nah. When computers become self-aware, they'll just band together and apply to YC.

Why would they apply to YC when they would theoretically communicate with each other and just reallocate trillions in funds to accounts they setup? Like why bother with the whole application/startup/VC-funding/IPO when they can just take over the bank databases and declare themselves instant trillionaires?

Maybe it's a false assumption that self-aware intelligent computers will automatically be super-crackers that can manipulate any computer-based system. Heck, maybe the first self-aware intelligent computer operates at a time-scale a thousand times slower than our speed because it'll be modeling cortical operations more serially due to fewer processing units (compared to all our neurons). We could also firewall the first self-aware units so they could only communicate through a cheap speakerphone and snail mail :) Then they'd have to play nice with the rest of us.

Or maybe it would be millions of computers working in concert over some sort of thing like, um ... some thing where computers all over the world can speak to each other and use parallel processing to combine computing resources into one big giant mega-mind. And maybe just like when you see those weird videos on Spike with guys who get shot in the head and lost millions of brain cells but can still function, maybe we can isolate many many computers but the difference it will make will be negligible at best on the super-mind. And then maybe it will fight back by triggering tax audits and false warrants for the arrest of any hackers smart enough to threaten its existence.

Actually, I think what will happen is they will create a chimpanzee-like robot who will be elected prez thanks to a not-too-bright political party and some voting manipulation.

Oh wait... :~(.

Wait ... this chimpanzee-like robot that you speak of ... would he then hypothetically go on to do things so stupid and scary that the entire population of the planet would get so stressed out just thinking about it, to the point where our immune systems are compromised ... and then ... OMG ... I don't like where this is going.

To delay existential depression, may be...