On Sat, Jan 17, 2015 at 6:37 PM, Tim Tyler via AGI <[email protected]> wrote: >> de Gray is arguing against the scenario where a recursively self >> improving AI in a box goes FOOM! > > It seems like a straw man scenario. Has anyone seriously proposed it?
There are some old proposals, for example Corwin's experiments on containing AI in 2002. http://www.sl4.org/archive/0207/4935.html Yudkowsky's Coherent Extrapolated Volition in 2004. https://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf Of course this was before Google and Facebook got good at recognizing images and natural language text. It was not so apparent then as now that the internet is becoming AGI. Of course you cannot contain it or turn it off. In order for AGI to gain human knowledge, it has to interact with humans. Also, the internet looks like much less of a threat than a paperclip maximizer. We understand that AGI is not a powerful optimization process with a simple goal. We don't tell computers what to do. We tell them how to do it because it is faster to share our own knowledge than for it to figure it out on its own. There is simply no such thing as a general purpose learning algorithm that you can give an arbitrary goal to. Mathematically, there never will be. >> Most of what AI in general already knows comes from humans. AI cannot >> learn human knowledge faster than humans can communicate, about 5-10 >> bits per second, but that is faster than anything else. > > Machines can easily learn about all the images and videos freely available on > the > internet. They can slurp that information up over as many T1 lines as you have > going into your data center. There's no 5-10 bits per second limit. Machines can only learn rapidly the things we already know. There are some important questions that even very powerful computers cannot answer quickly. Among the most important are how we can live longer. Ray Kurzweil takes 100 pills a day, hoping to live to see the singularity in 2045 and be immortal. But there is a problem. There is not a single pill of any kind that is known to increase life expectancy. It would take decades to find out. Sure, we have in-vitro and animal models. We can learn very quickly that calorie restriction extends the life spans of fruit flies and mice. We don't know if it works on monkeys. After decades of experiments, it worked on one group but not another. There have been no experiments on humans. We know that children reach puberty at a younger age now than 100 years ago, probably due to more calories, but people are also living longer. Calorie restriction probably works by slowing growth. Fish convert 90% of what they eat into growth and 10% to energy. Cattle convert 15% of their food to growth. Humans convert 0.3%. We suspect that rapamycin and sirtuins mimic calorie restriction, but the results are not conclusive and these drugs can have serious side effects. Rapamycin suppresses the immune system. Some studies say that light drinking increases life expectancy. Others say that any alcohol increases the risk of cancer. We once thought that vitamin supplements helped, but later studies proved that false. We thought that low fat diets helped, but later studies found they did more harm than good. We thought that a low salt diet helped, but later studies refuted that. We thought that sunscreens helped, but skin cancer rates have been increasing in tandem with sunscreen use. It turns out that sunscreens block UVB but not UVA, and actually increase exposure to UVA (95-99% of UV depending on angle of sun) because it is UVB that gives you a tan, and a tan blocks UVA. SPF is rated by UVB blockage only. My point is that all of this knowledge took decades to learn, and the problem is getting worse. New drugs now cost $2 billion to develop. The cost doubles every 9 years. The rate of increase of life expectancy has peaked at 0.2 years per year in the 1990's and is declining. It peaked in the 1970's in developed countries. One would hope that we could build computer models of the human body that would allow us to answer these questions faster. But we do not have computer models of even simple chemistry. There is no program that inputs a formula like H2O and calculates the freezing point of water. The reason is that modeling the movement of atoms requires solving Schrodinger's equation, which has exponential time complexity except on a quantum computer. But even a quantum computer is no faster than doing the actual experiment because all you have is an exponential speedup of an exponentially slowed down algorithm. A simulation always requires more computation and is less accurate than the actual experiment. And of course, the human body is much more complex than H2O. The brain executes 10^16 synapse operations per second on 10^14 synapses. The body executes 10^20 DNA, RNA, and amino acid operations per second on 10^23 bits of DNA. Even if Kurzweil's prediction of computing capacity catching up with the brain in 2045, we will still be a long way from simulating the body. After robots automate everything that humans can do with their brains, senses, and muscles, there will still be plenty of jobs testing experimental drugs. -- -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
