http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9PWXrnsSrf0
Ray Kurzweil : The Singularity Summit at Stanford
Extrapolating the explonential growth seen in many (all?) areas of human endeavour indicates that, even as the world in changing at rates faster than ever seen, the rate if change is not slowing, it is increasing. Many people feel a sense of inability to cope with the changes, but the percentage is likely to increase perhaps to include most people. Ray Kurzweil indicates that we may have truely intelligent, learning systems, "strong artificial intelligence", before 2020. He cites the recent breakthroughs in voice recognition, reading machines and translating machines to drive home the point that growth here is exponential.
If this is the case, machines will be surpassing the abilities of humans not only in chess, but also in many, if not all, areas of human enterprise. Are we already investing too much control of the worlds economies in machines ? In themoney and futures markets, is there a trade-off being made between control and human understanding and the potential to make money ?
"Singularity" is a math term for a point on a surface where the value is infinite. In astronomical terms, a black-hole: a body whose mass is so great that at a certain boundary, there is no escape for any matter, or any radiation.
Is there an implication that there will be an intelligence that will win all arguments ?
So, what will decide when the rate of change is "fast enough" ?
Will it be the population of democracies ? Or, business ? Government ? .... or will people take the outputs of probabilistic models generated by semi- or super- intelligent machines that are far too detailed and intertwined for human checks ? Man will get other machines to test the models, and again these will be checked and verified by machines.
So... okay machines shouldn't become autonomous or dangerous on their own. The problem is that there will always be men that will fly too close to the sun, and build machines that would not be built, and those who would fight for stability need machines to counter such threats.
Update 26.11.08 from /.
DARPA's IBM-Led Neural Network Project Seeks To Imitate Brain
posted by timothy on Friday November 21, @16:49 (supercomputing)
According to an article in the BBC, IBM will lead an [0]ambitious DARPA-funded project in 'cognitive computing.' According to Dharmendra Modha, the lead scientist on the project, '[t]he
key idea of cognitive computing is to engineer mind-like intelligent machines by reverse engineering the structure, dynamics, function and behaviour of the brain.' The article continues, 'IBM will join five US universities in an ambitious effort to integrate what is known from real biological systems with the results of supercomputer simulations of neurons. The team will then aim to produce for the first time an electronic system that behaves as the simulations do. The longer-term goal is to create a system with the level of complexity of a cat's brain. ' "
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