I.J. Good

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“The First Ultraintelligent Machine Is The Last Invention That Man Need Ever Make”

March 22, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Yuval Noah Harari writes this in his great book Sapiens:

Were, say, Spanish peasant to have fallen asleep in A.D. 1000 and woken up 500 years later, to the din of Columbus’ sailors boarding the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the world would have seemed to him quite familiar. Despite many changes in technology, manners and political boundaries, this medieval Rip Van Winkle would have felt at home. But had one of Columbus’ sailors fallen into a similar slumber and woken up to the ringtone of a twenty-first century iPhone, he would have found himself in a world strange beyond comprehension. ‘Is this heaven?’ he might well have asked himself. ‘Or perhaps — hell?’

What kind of peasants will we be? Is the road forward a high-speed one that will render tomorrow unrecognizable? It would seem so, except if calamity were to sideswipe us and delay (or permanently make impossible) the next phase. But if we are fortunate enough to have a safe travel, will a ruin of our own making await us in the form of Strong AI? I doubt it’s right around the bend as some feel, but it can’t hurt to consider such a scenario. From philosopher Stephen Cave’s Financial Times review of a slate of recent books about the perils of superintelligence:

It is tempting to suppose that AI would be a tool like any other; like the wheel or the laptop, an invention that we could use to further our interests. But the brilliant British mathematician IJ Good, who worked with Alan Turing both on breaking the Nazis’ secret codes and subsequently in developing the first computers, realised 50 years ago why this would not be so. Once we had a machine that was even slightly more intelligent than us, he pointed out, it would naturally take over the intellectual task of designing further intelligent machines. Because it was cleverer than us, it would be able to design even cleverer machines, which could in turn design even cleverer machines, and so on. In Good’s words: “There would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.”

Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.

Following Good, Barrat then shows how artificial intelligence could become super-intelligence within a matter of days, as it starts fixing its own bugs, rewriting its own software and drawing on the wealth of knowledge now available online. Once this “intelligence explosion” happens, we will no longer be able to understand or predict the machine, any more than a mouse can understand or predict the actions of a human.Good’s prophecy is at the heart of the book Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, in which writer and film-maker James Barrat interviews leading figures in the development of super-clever machines and makes a clear case for why we should be worried. It is true that progress towards human-level AI has been slower than many predicted — pundits joke that it has been 20 years away for the past half-century. But it has, nonetheless, achieved some impressive milestones, such as the IBM computers that beat grandmaster Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997 and won the US quiz show Jeopardy! in 2011. In response to Barrat’s survey, more than 40 per cent of experts in the field expected the invention of intelligent machines within 15 years from now and the great majority expected it by mid-century at the latest.•

 

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“Who Wants All These Cheap Computers Anyway, And What Possible Good Can They Do For Me?”

December 26, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Posting the Christopher Evans interview with J.G. Ballard earlier reminded me that I watched an excellent 1979 TV show a couple of years ago which was presented by the British computer scientist. A six-part series about how microprocessors were going to change the world, it was based on Evans’ book, The Mighty Micro (retitled The Micro Millennium in the United States). It succinctly journeys from Blaise Pascal to ATMs, aptly calling the coming epoch the “Second Industrial Revolution.” It never explicitly discusses the advent of the Internet but suggests many of its successes and perils. 

There are just two things that the show seemed naive about: 1) That paper money disappearing would lead to the end of theft, and 2) That powerful technology would make war unappealing (which is a mistake that Nikola Tesla began making at the end of the 1800s).

But there’s so much that’s prescient: robots ending drudgery but causing unease about employment, online shopping, telecommuting and potential transformations in education. (It’s odd and unfortunate that this decades-old show reminds that we still haven’t taken advantage of gaming’s capacity for revolutionizing learning.)

It’s a future, the host asserts, that no country can afford to abstain from, even with all its disruption: “Those who lag back will become steadily less competitive, just the way that those countries that missed out on the Industrial Revolution remain locked in medieval standards of living.”

All six are embedded below, but if you only have time for a couple, Parts 4 (“The Introverted Society”) and 6 (“All Our Tomorrows”) are my two favorites. In 4, there’s a stunning prototype of what we recognize today as a Kindle. Part 6 presents four scientists (I.J. Good, James Martin, Barrie Sherman, Tom Stonier) discussing the promise and problems of the future as if they had just read 2013 newspapers (online versions, of course).

Final note: Evans was battling cancer while filming this series and passed away before it was completed, so the producer Lawrence Moore and his guests handle the finale.

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