Intelligence Does Not Spontaneously Emerge

SIAI's Eliezer Yudkowsky on the evolution of the web and artificial intelligence.

Category:

People & Blogs

Tags:

• convergence
• 08
• AI
• artificial
• intelligence
• Eliezer
• Yudkowsky
• SIAI

[otonanoC]

I never would have guessed before watching this, but Elezier Yudkowsky is fruitier than a salad bar.

[onetocome]

You need something to start with. You need an engine, an organism. Engines just don't pop up from nowhere.

[whiterabit998]

@jjsajd

a religious person might

its like some of them are completely obvious to logic..

[whiterabit998]

i think intelligence is proportionate to how self ware an organism is

[SuperLazyLearner]

So who the hell is responsible for Eliezer Yudkowsky intelligence?

[malthust]

I'm not actually arguing with Yudkowsky, I'm simply struggling to make the point that, according to Kurzweil's argument,  the SINGULARITY ITSELF (including the development/emergence/creation of artificial intelligence, call it what you will) is by definition actually a "spontaneous process."

[ReductioAdAbsurdum]

"the development of artificial intelligence is only a matter of time"

But we can't really "develop" AI, because evolved algorithms are generally inscrutable to humans. Evolution produces highly unorthogonal "code", with no respect for our intellectual limitations (human engineers rely on compartmentalization to limit design complexity), which is why our best bet is modeling the brain, or actually evolving an AI -- neither of which require that we *understand* how the resulting AI works.

[malthust]

Good point. We do not actually disagree here, but I have been nclear.

Yes, Kurzweil emphasizes reverse engineering of cognitive processes.

But the meat of his Singularity Hypothesis is pure teleology. Technology facilitates its own development along an invariable logarithmic trajectory. Once the first IT is designed, the development of artificial intelligence is only a matter of time.

From the outside, this progression up Kurzweil's graphs looks a lot like "spontaneous emergence."

[ReductioAdAbsurdum]

"hard adherence to this hypothesis seems to contradict your employer Kurzweil's notions of 'singularity'"

Not at all. Have you ever read/hear anything of Kurzweil's? He expects that the first AI will be modelled directly on the brain, as a result of our reverse engineering efforts. It will be 100% the result of a concerted effort to product an intelligent system, not some accident that randomly emerges from a general purpose computer, no matter now large. Yudkowsky is absolutely correct.

[malthust]

Interesting, but a hard adherence to this hypothesis seems to contradict your employer Kurzweil's notions of "singularity."

Essentially, boot-strapping effects should inevitably accelerate the evolution toward artificial intelligence at each step in Moores law, no?

Once 100 times the processing power of the human brain is availabe for, say $10, isn't the design of AI potentially reversed to something like 1% perspiration and 99% inspiration?

And therefore all but inevitable?