Comments on: Singularity Economics

By: Peter Scott

Peter Scott — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 19:47:16 +0000

The reason Google was able to predict that you wanted to know when the Superbowl started was not because of some generally-applicable intelligence; it was because Google noticed that a lot of the people who started out typing “what” on that day went on to type “time does the superbowl start”. That trained a Hidden Markov Model somewhere, and when you came along, it had a pretty good prediction going. The math here is a lot easier than training a computer to play chess, or most of the other classic AI feats that looked more intelligent than they were.

No understanding of language was necessary for this.

By: cesium62

cesium62 — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 23:13:38 +0000

Superhuman intelligence has been experimented with. The moon shot in the 60′s is a fabulous example of super-human intelligence. Hundreds of thousands to millions of people organized and collaborated to achieve a goal that no one of them could come close to alone.

The need to organize that complexity did not swamp the benefits of the increased complexity.

To Tim’s point, arguably Google has built the first AI worthy of that name. Last year, on superbowl sunday while wondering what time the game starts, I started to ask google “what…” and it figured out that the question I probably wanted to ask was “what time does the superbowl start”.

Up to this point, understanding language has really been what AI is all about. So now we will probably redefine AI so that computers actually have to show creativity in order to be considered intelligent.

By: Overcoming Bias : Key Disputed Values

Overcoming Bias : Key Disputed Values — Wed, 22 Dec 2010 19:07:43 +0000

[...] as I have suggested, within roughly a century whole brain emulations appear and induce rapidly falling wages, world [...]

By: Ajay

Ajay — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 23:42:30 +0000

I finally got around to finishing up this piece from the Spectrum and I have to say the third page with all the predictions is incredibly stupid. I cannot imagine a larger collection of stupid statements about the robotic future from a smart guy. Just to name a few examples, what possible gain would artificial AIs have from inhabiting mm-size bodies, rather than solely existing online? Why would "copying... make robot immortality feasible in principle, [but] few robots would be able to afford it" when copying is already so cheap today? The next sentence about how "few robots would be able to afford robot versions of human children" I cannot even parse to make any sense. The future will be a highly complex interaction of so many effects that it's extremely hard to have any idea today how it will all play out. However, the predictions that Robin makes are so dumb and slipshod that it's easy to see that it will not play out that way. These predictions are best viewed as insight into Robin's haphazard understanding of economics and technology more than anything else.

By: Tim Tyler

Tim Tyler — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:48:17 +0000

Writing is a possible cause of any 4,000-5,000 BC growth spurt. The timing is not really in favour of farming - since that arose more like 10,000 - 15,000 years ago. Also, logically, the ability to transmit ideas reliably across generations is really the more significant evolutionary development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tărtăria_tablets

By: Tim Tyler

Tim Tyler — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 12:43:44 +0000

Disagree. The first AIs worthy of the name will most likely be built by Google/NSA/DARPA or similar – and they will probably be huge entities which play on a global scale.

Uploading is irrelevant. AIs will come a long time before that becomes possible – and once you have AI, uploading becomes a pretty pointless exercise. There are easier ways to simulate a human, if you really want to do that for some reason.

Similarly practically nobody builds mechanical birds to fly items about. We have aeroplanes and helicopters for that. The funding fell out of the drive to make mechanical birds a long time ago.

The only reason to discuss uploading is as a proof-of-concept of the idea of AI not being too far away these days. The idea of uploading as an implementation plan is way out there: surely nobody in their right mind would deliberately create such an unmaintainable, incomprehensible mess for any practical purpose.

By: Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 11:57:54 +0000

Tim, the issue is timescale. Diaspora is set centuries later, while my forecasts are for the early period after uploads are possible. Yes it is unlikely that the ultimate optimal mind size is human, but the minds would start out human size with coordination gains to interacting with minds of a similar size.

By: Tim Tyler

Tim Tyler — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 09:18:48 +0000

Ben G – on the bizarre idea of insect AIs:

“This, I guess, is one of the oddest things about the digital minds in “Diaspora”. After all those centuries, it’s still optimal to have computer memory partitioned off into minds roughly the size of an individual human mind? How come entities with the memory & brain-power of 50,000 humans weren’t experimented with, and didn’t become dominant?”

- http://www.sl4.org/archive/0101/0481.html

The idea may make sense if you are crafting a novel for 20th century human readers – so they can identify with the characters – but I can’t see how or why anyone would take it seriously as futurism.

God may love beetles – but he also made whales – and Google.

By: michael vassar

michael vassar — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 16:32:05 +0000

My impression is that this is not a Euro-centric version of history. Maybe stretch to 600 BC but that’s pretty much the max period of change everywhere prior to 1700. Maybe its Euro-centric not to note that globally, but not in Europe, there were other periods of less rapid but still rapid change between say 850 and 1150 and between say 2100 BC and 1600 BC?

In any event, I am pretty strongly suspicious of all pre-modern population numbers. We don’t even have confident estimates of the population of contemporary Afghanistan to within a factor of two! Native American population uncertainty is more like a factor of 30. Historical populations look likely to me to be largely compromises between people who want to guess by summing up the land areas we know were heavily cultivated and fairly casually estimating the efficacy of the agricultural techniques available and people who simply want to assert long-term progress and extrapolate backwards globally simple trends that work in Europe from 1500 to 1700.

By: Douglas Knight

Douglas Knight — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:35:13 +0000

Phil,
that it is regarded as the greatest period of growth is rather Euro-centric, while the population estimates are not. Not that looking just at Greece or the Mediterranean will solve that problem.