The Impending Future of Machine Intelligence?

[I_FH]

I personally believe AI is a when, not an if. If anyone looks at the advances in processing power over the last 30 years then the predicted advances of the next 30, the hardware will be there.
Teams of researchers and scientists across the planet are striving towards a sentient artificial conscience. They may begin simple but there is massive potential.
Science Fiction and futurists over the last century have made some amazing predictions. Even if you count flying cars (or hover boards) you have to admit mobile phones, the Internet, aircraft, space travel, medical advanced, modern weapons and a million other things that were dreams within living memory have all become reality.
I'm a massive believer in the power of the human imagination. An idea as powerful as a synthetic life form will always have backers willing to spend big to make it happen.

[Aldaron]

Originally Posted by In_Foxhole

I personally believe AI is a when, not an if. If anyone looks at the advances in processing power over the last 30 years then the predicted advances of the next 30, the hardware will be there.

Processing power has increased largely because of the ability to fit more transistors on CPU chips. Thing is, we're reaching the limit of how small we can make the gap between transistors because we're approaching the wavelength of the UV lasers used to etch the chips. We can't get below about 15 nm (IIRC) with UV lasers (we're currently at 20 - 25 nm).

So we either go the ridiculously expensive route and start using gamma-ray lasers, or we find an alternative. We might do that, yes.

But we have to somehow mimic the complexity of a brain to produce the emergent property of intelligence and consciousness. A hundred billion CPUs and trillions of interconnections are not going to be easy to build!!

Teams of researchers and scientists across the planet are striving towards a sentient artificial conscience. They may begin simple but there is massive potential.

Perhaps. In all seriousness, though, I think the mapping of the human genome was a 4x4 grid crossword puzzle in comparison to developing a true A.I.

Science Fiction and futurists over the last century have made some amazing predictions. Even if you count flying cars (or hover boards) you have to admit mobile phones, the Internet, aircraft, space travel, medical advanced, modern weapons and a million other things that were dreams within living memory have all become reality.
I'm a massive believer in the power of the human imagination. An idea as powerful as a synthetic life form will always have backers willing to spend big to make it happen.

All the money in the world can't change physical laws...like building a computer with the complexity of a human brain would take up about a continent's worth of real-estate, not to mention require all the electricity in the world to run the thing.

[curious]

Originally Posted by MikeJay

Where did you lean this?, what is your fundamental starting point for this train of thought? Did you read/hear/see it somewhere else or did you come up with the idea on your own? Did you check the validity of those premise or is it even possible to do so?

Fundamental starting point: my own experience of consciousness. The idea is not new. The validity rests on my own personal observations, not a scientific experiment. If this is problematic for you, then we have different theories about the types of knowledge we value.

Originally Posted by Inedifix

I would go so far as to say the alpha, omega, and all points in between.

So you believe the brain is the be all and end all of everything? The brain creates consciousness, or perhaps secretes it like a chemical? I edited in a third question to my post which you must have missed because you had already started replying, but the question was: What would you say consciousness is, exactly? You didn’t reply at all to my theory about how the brain might be a channel or a conduit for consciousness – just interested to hear your thoughts, is all.

Originally Posted by Inedifix

You "know" this? Really? Please do enlighten us.

Originally Posted by Inedifix

Frankly, I think you're making an enormous leap to a wild conclusion in saying that the "underlying fields" (not sure if you're talking about dark energy, the Higgs field or the search for a GUT) physicists talk about are the same thing as a universal consciousness permeating everything.

What I mean is that we’re all trying to posit an underlying cause, and we’re all naming it various different things and giving it various different attributes.

Originally Posted by Inedifix

I have no idea. And neither, let's be honest, do you.

Originally Posted by Inedifix

I'm not sure what you mean. Do you mean biological trends, or trends in popular understanding? Could you expound?

I see the questions “Why did life arise” and “What are some of the general trends (I mean not only biological, but cultural and technological, and yes, even the trends of our own understanding)” to be mutually involved. No, I don’t know why life arose exactly, but by examining some of the trends of evolution I can posit some theories. Where am I heading with this? As I see it, the general trend of evolution has been the development of intelligence in all its forms, from the simple exchange of genetic information in primeval bacteria to the complexity of human consciousness. A very good book on this subject, which doesn’t once evoke any sort of spiritual or religious ideas, which you might be interested in, is the Global Brain by Howard Bloom. To summarize via the blurb:

“He shows how plants and animals (including humans) have evolved together as components of a worldwide learning machine. He describes the network of life on Earth as one that is, in fact, a "complex adaptive system," a global brain in which each of us plays a sometimes conscious, sometimes unknowing role, and he reveals that the World Wide Web is just the latest step in the development of this brain. “

Here is an interview he did on the subject: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ss6IUTxQI88

Obviously I’m taking his conclusions one step further, but it’s useful to see how far you can step in understanding consciousness without having to depart from an atheist standpoint.

Originally Posted by owheelj
Argument from ignorance is a type of logical fallacy where you reason that because you don't know something, therefore another conclusion is true. In this case he says that because a number of scientific fields are uncertain or "mysterious", therefore some kind of pantheistic explanation for the universe might true.

Originally Posted by Inedifix

Hi Owheelj, don't worry, I know what an argument from ignorance is. What I meant is that I'm not sure he's actually making a formal argument, as such. He seems much less adamant than that, for which I was giving him credit. Perhaps I was wrong to though - I guess ultimately Curious's Pantheism/Panentheism does seem to boil down to that common malaise of: science doesn't have all the answers so I'll believe in X instead, even though X is unsupported by evidence and doesn't have all the answers either.

Inedifix is right – I am not making a formal argument. Nor would I ever want to claim to have defined the nature of reality using mere human language, which is utterly incapable of capturing the ‘truth.’

If you’re going to put a set of steps on how I came to my beliefs, it’d be more like this:

Science doesn’t have all the answers, but I am definitely interested in the answers it does have, and what those answers might mean, and I am also interested in the answers it doesn’t have, and what that might mean, and the summary of what those things mean has led me to ALSO believe in X, but this belief is not exclusive of science.

[Aldaron]

I'm kinda late to the party, so bear with me...

Originally Posted by curious

Hello,

I am curious to know any atheists opinion on what they think the future nature of machine intelligence will be like?

Allow me to expand the question a little. In the future, and I think most scientifically-minded, up-to-date atheists will agree, there will be some form of Machine Intelligence that will be:

Well, I'd like to think of myself as scientifically-minded and up-to-date (not to mention an atheist), but I don't necessarily agree with your premises...

a) Far beyond human intelligence (mainly because it will have access to the digitalized data of all human scientific endeavor, and the computational power to sift through and understand it all)

I see no evidence that this is the case. A human brain contains a staggering amount of data, all accessed by trillions of connections between hundreds of billions of neurons. I can't see how we're going to build, store, and power that kind of computational capacity.

b) It will be conscious, like us -- or, if you cannot believe that, it will certainly exhibit the kind of behaviors we attribute to conscious, self-aware beings.

IF...and that's a big "if"...we can overcome the physical limitations as detailed above, then I can see consciousness as an emergent property of the complexity of the "AI Brain".

However, it most certainly doesn't have to be like us at all, unless it was built in some kind of mimicry of our minds. Case in point are various animals that show differing levels of intelligence: the only ones that show "similar" consciousness to us are higher primates, no doubt because we all evolved from a common ancestor and thus have similarly-constructed brains.

An octopus, however, displays intelligence, tool use, problem-solving behaviour, etc - but nothing like the consciousness of, say, an elephant.

It may be that "consciousness" (as we define it) is a trait which only develops in more complex mammalian brains.

We simply don't know. I'm certainly not going to agree that a machine intelligence "similar" to ours is virtually a certainty.

So, the question is; besides the above factors, what will the actual nature of Machine Intelligence be like? How will it behave towards us? Will it have a moral code? Will it be a singular intelligence or will it diversify? What will its historical trajectory and evolution be like, once it has become conscious?

Well, I don't know. I would like to think it wouldn't go all Skynet on our arses, which would require some level of empathy. Unfortunately, empathy seems to be largely a mammalian trait which leads to altruism in more intelligent mammals (primates, cetaceans, elephants, rodents).

We might regret making Skynet after all...

[I_FH]

Any technological restriction on space right now will be overcome. To quote Clarke's Laws, specifically the first.

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Heavier than air flight was impossible. The sound barrier was unbreakable. No human could survive space flight. The speed of light may have been broken a few weeks back (there are still questions on the accuracy of those tests.)

To claim something is impossible nearly always leaves you looking like a fool.

[Aldaron]

Originally Posted by In_Foxhole

Any technological restriction on space right now will be overcome.

Says who? That's a pretty dogmatic sort of statement, methinks.

While we're quoting sci-fi luminaries, allow me to quote Montgomery Scott...

"Ye cannot change the laws of physics!"

I've never said it was impossible...I simply pointed out that it would be exceedingly difficult. It would require fundamental changes in the way we construct computers (and by the standards we currently use, yes, it will be bloody-well impossible), including completely new methods of storing and retrieving data, not to mention a new way of actually performing calculations (I don't think binary will cut it)

But Clarke is a good one to quote for this...because, at the moment, any discussion of a human-like (or superhuman) A.I. can't be done without invoking that "magic". Or, to put it another way, we can postulate super-advanced technology that will fix the problem, but it has no more bearing on reality than postulating an Alcubierre warp drive will work when we discover dilithium/element zero/applied phlebotium/balonium of some kind...

[I_FH]

My previous edit satisfies my need to answer your last post

[Aldaron]

Originally Posted by In_Foxhole

My previous edit satisfies my need to answer your last post

It might satisfy your need, but it doesn't satisfy anything else, since (as I said) I never claimed it was impossible.

Claiming "x" is possible because "y" has been achieved could well leave one looking foolish, too.

Heavier than air flight is certainly possible...but no matter how much wishful thinking is involved, you are never going to fly by flapping your arms.

[Aldaron]

The speed of light may have been broken a few weeks back (there are still questions on the accuracy of those tests.)

Incidentally, the speed of light wasn't broken. The tests were inaccurate.

[curious]

Originally Posted by The Irreverent Mr Black

Has this become about a belief, then?

Sure. Do you think you are free of beliefs? I'm sure it depends on how we're defining belief. If you define it as a rigid conviction in a given truth, then no, it is not about belief. If you define belief as a form of opinion, then sure, it's that.