From: http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artificial-intelligence-revolution-2.html
We
have what may be an extremely difficult problem with an unknown time to solve
it, on which quite possibly the entire future of humanity depends.
— Nick Bostrom
Before we dive into things, let’s remind ourselves what
it would mean for a machine to be superintelligent. A key distinction is the difference between
speed superintelligence and quality superintelligence. Often, someone’s first
thought when they imagine a super-smart computer is one that’s as intelligent as
a human but can think much, much faster. They might picture a machine that
thinks like a human, except a million times quicker, which means it could
figure out in five minutes what would take a human a decade.
That sounds impressive, and ASI would think much
faster than any human could—but the true separator would be its advantage in
intelligence quality, which is something completely different. What makes
humans so much more intellectually capable than chimps isn’t a difference in
thinking speed—it’s that human brains contain a number of sophisticated
cognitive modules that enable things like complex linguistic representations or
long term planning or abstract reasoning, that chimps’ brains do not. Speeding
up a chimp’s brain by thousands of times wouldn’t bring him to our level—even
with a decade’s time, he wouldn’t be able to figure out how to use a set of
custom tools to assemble an intricate model, something a human could knock out
in a few hours. There are worlds of human cognitive function a chimp will
simply never be capable of, no matter how much time he spends trying.
But it’s not just that a chimp can’t do what we do,
it’s that his brain is unable to grasp that those worlds even exist—a chimp can
become familiar with what a human is and what a skyscraper is, but he’ll never
be able to understand that the skyscraper was built by humans. In his world,
anything that huge is part of nature, period, and not only is it beyond him to
build a skyscraper, it’s beyond him to realize that anyone can build a skyscraper.
That’s the result of a small difference in intelligence quality.
And in the scheme of the intelligence range we’re
talking about today, or even the much smaller range among biological creatures,
the chimp-to-human quality intelligence gap is tiny. In an earlier post, I
depicted the range of biological cognitive capacity using a staircase:
To absorb
how big a deal a superintelligent machine would be, imagine one on the dark
green step two steps above humans on that staircase. This machine would be only
slightly superintelligent, but its increased cognitive ability over us would be
as vast as the chimp-human gap we just described. And like the chimp’s incapacity
to ever absorb that skyscrapers can be built, we will never be able to even
comprehend the things a machine on the dark green step can do, even if the
machine tried to explain it to us—let alone do it ourselves. And that’s only
two steps above us. A machine on the second-to-highest step on that staircase
would be to us as we are to ants—it could try for years to teach us the
simplest inkling of what it knows and the endeavor would be hopeless.
But the kind of superintelligence we’re talking
about today is something far beyond anything on this staircase. In an
intelligence explosion—where the smarter a machine gets, the quicker it’s able
to increase its own intelligence, until it begins to soar upwards—a machine
might take years to rise from the chimp step to the one above it, but perhaps
only hours to jump up a step once it’s on the dark green step two above us, and
by the time it’s ten steps above us, it might be jumping up in four-step leaps
every second that goes by. Which is why we need to realize that it’s distinctly
possible that very shortly after the big news story about the first machine
reaching human-level AGI, we might be facing the reality of coexisting on the
Earth with something that’s here on the staircase (or maybe a million times higher):
And since we just established that it’s a hopeless
activity to try to understand the power of a machine only two steps above us,
let’s very concretely state once and for all that there is no way to know what
ASI will do or what the consequences will be for us. Anyone who pretends
otherwise doesn’t understand what superintelligence means.
Evolution has advanced the biological brain slowly and
gradually over hundreds of millions of years, and in that sense, if humans
birth an ASI machine, we’ll be dramatically stomping on evolution. Or maybe
this is part of evolution—maybe the way evolution works is that intelligence
creeps up more and more until it hits the level where it’s capable of creating
machine superintelligence, and that level is like a tripwire that triggers a
worldwide game-changing explosion that determines a new future for all living
things:
And for reasons we’ll discuss later, a huge part of
the scientific community believes that it’s not a matter of whether we’ll hit
that tripwire, but when. Kind of a crazy piece of information. So where does that leave us? Well no one in the world, especially not I,
can tell you what will happen when we hit the tripwire. But Oxford philosopher
and lead AI thinker Nick Bostrom believes we can boil down all potential
outcomes into two broad categories.
First, looking at history, we can see that life works
like this: species pop up, exist for a while, and after some time, inevitably,
they fall off the existence balance beam and land on extinction. “All species eventually go extinct” has been almost as
reliable a rule through history as “All humans eventually die” has been. So
far, 99.9% of species have fallen off the balance beam, and it seems pretty
clear that if a species keeps wobbling along down the beam, it’s only a matter
of time before some other species, some gust of nature’s wind, or a sudden
beam-shaking asteroid knocks it off. Bostrom calls extinction an attractor
state—a place species are all teetering on falling into and from which no
species ever returns.
And while most scientists I’ve come across acknowledge
that ASI would have the ability to send humans to extinction, many also believe
that used beneficially, ASI’s abilities could be used to bring individual
humans, and the species as a whole, to a second attractor state—species
immortality. Bostrom believes species immortality is just as much of an
attractor state as species extinction, i.e. if we manage to get there, we’ll be
impervious to extinction forever—we’ll have conquered mortality and conquered
chance. So even though all species so far have fallen off the balance beam and
landed on extinction, Bostrom believes there are two sides to the beam and it’s
just that nothing on Earth has been intelligent enough yet to figure out how to
fall off on the other side.
If Bostrom and others are right, and from everything
I’ve read, it seems like they really might be, we have two pretty shocking
facts to absorb:
1) The advent of ASI will, for the first time, open up
the possibility for a species to land on the immortality side of the balance
beam.
2) The advent of ASI will make such an unimaginably
dramatic impact that it’s likely to knock the human race off the beam, in one
direction or the other.
It may very well be that when evolution hits the
tripwire, it permanently ends humans’ relationship with the beam and creates a
new world, with or without humans. Kind of seems like the only question any
human should currently be asking is: When are we going to hit the tripwire and
which side of the beam will we land on when that happens? No one in the world knows the answer to
either part of that question, but a lot of the very smartest people have put
decades of thought into it.
We’ll spend the next post exploring what they’ve
come up with. We’ll start with the first part of the question: When
are we going to hit the tripwire? How
long until the first machine reaches superintelligence?
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