Tag: The Singularity

Signs of the Singularity

By James Wallace Harris, Thursday, January 22, 2015

Futurists and science fiction writers talk about The Singularity – the moment when Artificial Intelligence (AI) catches up with human intelligence. Of course, they also assume, right after AI minds will blow past us – humans will feel like we’re standing still.

I think it will look something like Deepmind in this video, which is a program that knows how to learn. Google bought DeepMind last year. DeepMind is part of Deep Learning, which used to be called Neural Networks, one of the many branches of AI.

You really should take the time to watch this video – it will be worth it.

At 60 minutes of practice it does pretty good, returning the breakout ball 30% of the time, a human could still beat it. At 120 minutes DeepMind is better than any human. Then they let it practice 240 minutes. At 120 minutes DeepMind was freakishly fast. At 240 it was freakishly clever. Then watch the algorithm play other Atari games. It’s not programmed to play each of these games, but to study the pixels for patterns.

Here’s another approach, but the video is longer, explaining how it’s done. This is a grad student inventing his own system. It’s doesn’t have the WOW factor of the first video unless you watch it all the way through. This video is more about thinking how to develop a learning algorithm.

If you’re thinking this is only video games, think again. Watch this TED Talk with Jeremy Howard. It’s about how Deep Learning can be applied to many fields of study.

There are other approaches to learning. Here’s an example of Adaptive Learning.

What happens when Mario becomes self-aware? Will he develop his own ontological theories about his video game world?

Many futurists are predicting The Singularity will arrive in the late 2020s or 2030s. That’s not far away. And, if you look at what’s happening now, we’re nowhere close to having a self-aware artificial mind. What we do have is a lot of pieces. Robots that imitate various kinds of animals and human bodies, self-driving cars, speech recognition, text recognition, artificial sight, and so on. As we put these things together, and add programs like Deep Learning and other pattern recognition systems, it’s not hard to believe The Singularity isn’t around the corner.

There are folks like Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking who are preaching the sky is falling warnings about AI. I don’t feel that paranoia, but AI will transform society like the Industrial Revolution or our present Digital Revolution. The thing is, we never stop progress. That’s why I think The Singularity will happen no matter what.

JWH

Faith in Science

I am reading The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, an overview of the men and women who brought about the age of computers. At other times during the day I’m listening to The Glass Cage by Nicholas Carr, a book about how automation is making humans dumber. Isaacson gives the history of computers starting when they were first imagined as mechanical devices, but really came into being as electronic devices using vacuum tubes, and finally evolving into solid state devices we know today after the invention of the transistor.

Here’s my problem. I can sort of visualize how a mechanical calculator works, at least for adding and subtraction, but beyond that my brain explodes. I especially can’t conceive of how vacuum tubes were used to make a digital computer. I started taking computer programming classes in 1971, and even passed two semesters of assembly language. I used to be pretty good at binary and hexadecimal arithmetic.  But it’s extremely hard for me to imagine how a computer actually works. Essentially, it’s all magic, and I just accept that it’s possible to build a computer according to the laws of science – but my acceptance is really faith in science.

Nicholas Carr believes the more work we give to computers the dumber humans will become. Watch these two videos, and tell me if you understand them. The first is from 1943 and is about the basics of a vacuum tube, obviously a device essential to most of industrial progress at the time, but a forgotten tech today.

This is the technology that scientists used to build the first electronic programmable computers. Can you in any way conceive of how they get from vacuum tube to data processing? How much would I have to know to understand how the first computers were assembled? I keep reading about vacuum tubes, and even though I get a slight glimpse into their nature, I cannot for the life of me imagine how they were used to create a machine to do arithmetic, and show the results – much less understand the commands of a programming language, no matter how primitive that language.

I then thought maybe I’d understand vacuum tubes better if I could understand how they were made.  I found this film.

This film makes me mightily impressed with scientists of the late 19th and early 20th century. If civilization collapsed it would be a very long time before we could ever reinvent the vacuum tube, much less a computer.

What these two short films show me is human knowledge is divvied up so everyone learns extremely tiny pieces of total knowledge, but collectively we can create magical machines like an iPhone 6. A smartphone represents countless forms of expertise I will never understand, or even fathom with any kind of analogous modeling. An iPhone 6 probably has the equivalent of billions of vacuum tubes as transistors shrunk down into a solid state that are only individually visible with an electron microscope. It’s fucking magic. There’s no way around it. I know it’s science, but to my mind any mumbo jumbo I come up with to explain the miracle of a smartphone is no better than the incantations in a Harry Potter novel.

Wouldn’t it be great if we all were Renaissance beings that knew everything the entire human race had learned up to this point? Would we all have more respect for science if our K-12 education had been about recreating how we got to our current level of technology? What kind of curriculum would be required so that each graduating class had to build an ENIAC to earn their high school diplomas? That would only put them 70 years behind the times.

I don’t want to live by faith in science, I want my brain to comprehend science.

I think Carr might be right. I think we’re passing our knowledge off to machines and slacking off ourselves. One day we’ll have intelligent machines that can actually do anything any scientist in history has every done. And all we’ll know how to do is double-tap an app icon to get it started.

JWH