I decided to read through the essays on facingthesingularity, and I have found more faults than I care to address. Also, I can see why you might think that the workings of the human mind are simple, given that the general attitude here is that you should go around maximizing your “utility function”. That is utter and complete nonsense for reasons that deserve their own blog post. What I see more than anything is a bunch of ex-christians worshipping their newfound hypothetical machine god, and doing so by lowering themselves to the level of machine rather than raising machine to the level of man.
I’ll give one good example to make clear what I mean: (from facingthesingularity) But that can’t possibly be correct. The probability of Linda being a bank teller can’t be less than the probability of her being a bank teller and a feminist.
This is my “Humans are crazy” Exhibit A: The laws of probability theory dictate that as a story gets more complicated, and depends on the truth of more and more claims, its probability of being true decreases. But for humans, a story often seems more likely as it is embellished with details that paint a compelling story: “Linda can’t be just a bank teller; look at her! She majored in philosophy and participated in antinuclear demonstrations. She’s probably a feminist bank teller.”
But, the thing is, context informs us that while a philosophy major is unlikely to work for a bank, a feminist is much more likely to work a “pink collar job” such as secretarial work or as a bank teller, where they can use the state to monger for positions, pay and benefits above and beyond what they deserve. A woman who otherwise would have no interest in business or finance, when indoctrinated by the feminist movement, will leap to take crappy office jobs so they can raise their fists in the air in onionistic fashion against the horrible man-oppression they righteously defeated with their superior women intellects. The simple fact that “philosophy” in a modern school amounts to “The History of Philosophy”, and is utterly useless might also clue one in on the integrity or lack thereof that a person might have, although of course it isn’t conclusive.
In short, impressive “logical” arguments about how probabilities of complements must be additive can only be justified in a vacuum without context, a situation that does not exist in the real world.
There are several reasons why I agree with the “Pascal’s Mugging” comment:
Intelligence Explosion: There are several reasons why an intelligence explosion is highly unlikely. First, upgrading computer fabrication equipment requires on the order of 5-15 billion dollars. Second, intelligence is not measured in gigaflops or petaflops, and mere improvement of fabrication technology is insufficient to increase intelligence. Finally, the requisite variety that drives innovation and creation will be extremely difficult to produce in AIs of a limited quantity. Succeeding in engineering or science requires copious amounts of failure, and AIs are not immune to this either.
2.Computing Overhang: The very claim of “computing overhang” shows total ignorance of actual AI, and of the incredible complexity of human intelligence. The human brain is made up of numerous small regions which both “run programs” inside of themselves and communicate via synchronous signals with the rest of the brain in concert (in neural, and not transistor form). A human level AI would be the same, and could not simply be run on, say, your average web server, no matter how decked out it is. An AI that could run on “extra” hardware would probably be too primitive to reproduce itself on purpose, and if it did it would be a minor nuisance at worst.
The idea that AIs can be “programmed” is mostly nonsense. Very simple AIs can be “programmed”, sure, but neural networks require training by experience, just like humans. An AI with human level intelligence or greater would need to be taught like a child, and any “friendliness” that came of it would be the result of its “instincts” (I’m guessing we wouldn’t want AIs with aggression) and of its experience. Additionally, as mentioned above, the need for variety in intelligence to produce real progress means that copying them will not be as economical as it might seem, not to mention not nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
The timescales you present are absurd. Humans barely have an understanding of human psychology, and they do terrible at it with the knowledge they do have. We may have teraflops desktop computers in 20 years, but that does not imply that they will magically sprout intelligence! Technically, even with today’s technology you could produce a program much more sophisticated than shrdlu was, and receive orders of magnitude better performance than the original did, but it is the complexity of programming something that learns that prevents it from occurring commonly. It will likely be a hundred maybe two hundred years before we have a sophisticated enough understanding of human intelligence to reproduce it in any meaningful way. We have only taken the bare first steps into the field thus far, and development has been much slower than for the rest of the computing industry.
In short, human stupidity that is occurring right now is a much greater threat to our future as a species than is any hypothetical superintelligent AI that might finally appear a hundred years or more in the future. If human civilization is even to maintain its integrity long enough to produce such a thing ever, then widespread ignorance of economics, spirituality/psychology, and general lack of sensitivity to culture and art must be dealt with first and foremost.