Artificial Intelligence  

With his latest Shot of Awe, Jason Silva looks at the intelligence explosion. According to him, intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe, and it is only a natural consequence of evolution that it will expand exponentially.

I n his latest Shot of Awe, Jason Silva looks at artificial intelligence.  Not content to talk about the current state of the art, Silva looks at how I.J. Good's intelligence explosion is the most likely result of our progress in this area of technology.

Leading with a great quote from Kevin Kelly's What Technology Wants, Silva talks over a dazzling array of technological images.

Image Source: Avatar Generation

"What artificial intelligence ultimately comes down to is outsourcing our cognition into a machine," says Silva.

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"It's about amplifying the most powerful phenomenon in the universe," he continues.  "Once we can create sentience which is not bound by our biology we will literally be creating a sentience that can upgrade itself.".

Silva doesn't feel threatened by the intelligence explosion, rather, like Ray Kurzweil, he sees our future being one where we evolve with our machines.

"The human era will have ended - we will become our creations."


SOURCE  Shots of Awe

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Artificial Intelligence

In thinking and writing about the future, Nick Bostrom is established as a prominent figure in Singularity thought, however he prefers the term intelligence explosion to Singularity. In a recent talk (embedded below) at the Emerce EDay, he explained why.

P hilosopher Nick Bostrom is a Swedish at the University of Oxford known for his work on existential risk and the anthropic principle covered in books such as Global Catastrophic Risks, Anthropic Bias and Human Enhancement. He holds a PhD from the London School of Economics . He is currently the director of both The Future of Humanity Institute and the Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology as part of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford University.

In thinking and writing about the future, Bostrom is established as a prominent figure in Singularity thought, however he prefers the term intelligence explosion to Singularity.  In a recent talk (embedded below) at the Emerce EDay, he explained why.

One of the earliest incarnations of the contemporary Singularity concept was I.J. Good’s concept of the “intelligence explosion,” articulated in 1965:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.

Good’s original idea had more to do with the explosion’s beginning than its end, or its extent, or the speed of its middle or later phases. His point was that in a short space of time a human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI) would probably explode into a significantly transhuman AGI, but he did not try to argue that subsequent improvements would continue without limit. Bostrom, like Good, is mainly interested in the explosion from human-level AGI to an AGI with, very loosely speaking, a level of general intelligence 2-3 orders of magnitude greater than the human level.

According to Bostrom, there is one absolute prerequisite for an intelligence explosion to occur, and that is that an artificial general intelligence must become smart enough to understand its own design. This will allow the intelligent agent the ability to reverse engineer itself and apply recursive self improvement.

The implications of an intelligence explosion are worth deeply considering — but, as Bostrom suggests the first thing is to very clearly understand that the intelligence explosion is very probably coming, just as I.J. Good foresaw.  Also, once we do achieve human-level artificial intelligence the exponential curves predict that the AI will very rapidly overtake humans.

Bostrom has been awarded the Eugene R. Gannon Award and has been listed in the FP 100 Global Thinkers list. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages, and there have been some 100 translations or reprints of his works. In addition to his writing for academic and popular press, Bostrom makes frequent media appearances in which he talks about transhumanism-related topics such as cloning, artificial intelligence, superintelligence, mind uploading, cryonics, nanotechnology, and the simulation argument.




SOURCE  Emerce

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 Existential Risk

Existential threats form a sub-category of global catastrophic risks, in which an adverse outcome would either cause the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically destroy its future potential. One such form of existential risk is the rise of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence.

Global catastrophic risks are those that pose serious threats to human well-being on a global scale. An immensely diverse collection of events could constitute global catastrophes: they range from volcanic eruptions to pandemic infections, nuclear accidents to worldwide tyrannies, out-of-control scientific experiments to climatic changes, and cosmic hazards to economic collapse.

Existential threats form a sub-category of global catastrophic risks, in which an adverse outcome would either cause the extinction of Earth-originating intelligent life or permanently and drastically destroy its future potential. It would spell an end to the human story.

One such form of existential risk is the rise of smarter-than-human artificial intelligence.

Due to the extreme severity of existential risks, they deserve extremely careful attention even if their probability could confidently be assessed to be very small. Reduction of existential risk is therefore important.

In 1965, I.J. Good proposed that machines would one day be smart enough to make themselves smarter. Having made themselves smarter, they would spot still further opportunities for improvement, quickly leaving human intelligence far behind. The pace of an intelligence explosion depends on two conflicting pressures. Each improvement in AI technology increases the ability of AIs to research more improvements, but an AI may also face the problem of diminishing returns as the easiest improvements are achieved first.

The rate of improvement is hard to estimate, but several factors suggest it would be high. The predominant view in the AI field is that the bottleneck for powerful AI is software, not than hardware. Continued rapid hardware progress is expected in coming decades. If and when the powerful AI software is developed, there may by that time be a glut of hardware available to run many copies of AIs, and to run them at high speeds. This could amplify the effects of AI improvements.

Humans are not optimized for intelligence. Rather, we are the first and possibly dumbest species capable of producing a technological civilization. The first AI with humanlike AI research abilities might be able to reach superintelligence rapidly "€” in particular, more rapidly than researchers and policy-makers can develop adequate safety measures.

Ted Bell, author of  Phantom: An Alex Hawke Novel which contains an 'evil' artificial intelligence character states, “We’re going to have to be really careful with these machines,” he said. “We’re ultimately going to have a war with these machines and we might not win it.”


Keeping the artificial intelligence genie trapped in the proverbial bottle could turn an apocalyptic threat into a powerful oracle that solves humanity's problems, said Roman Yampolskiy, a computer scientist at the University of Louisville in Kentucky.  Yampolskiy argues that AI agents should essentially be imprisoned to protect humanity.

In this short talk, Future of Humanity Institute researcher Stuart Armstrong has five minutes to lay out the reasons why Artificial Intelligence, if possible, will likely be extremely powerful and considerably dangerous (though not at all in the ways movies imply). The talk was given at the 25th Oxford Geek Night.




SOURCE  FHIOxford

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