The Singularity by Uziel Awret

Author:Uziel Awret
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Singularity, AI, artificial intelligence, robots, philosophy of science, consciousness, artificial consciousness, technology, Chalmers, science fiction, mind, brain, futurology, futurism, mind uploading
ISBN: 9781845409166
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-11-23T00:00:00+00:00

Performance per subjective unit of agent time from agent’s perspective:

slow down environment = increases cognition and intelligence but decisions become less informed

speed up environment = more informed but less reasoned decisions

Performance per environment time from environment perspective:

speed up agent = more intelligent decisions

slow down agent = less intelligent decisions

I have argued that more comp, i.e. speeding up hardware, does not necessarily correspond to more intelligence. But then the same could be said of software speedups, i.e. more efficient ways of computing the same function. If two agent algorithms have the same I/O behavior, just one is faster than the other, is the faster one more intelligent?

An interesting related question is whether progress in AI has been mainly due to improved hardware or improved software. If we believe in the former, and we accept that speed is orthogonal to intelligence, and we believe that humans are ‘truly’ intelligent (a lot of ifs), then building AGIs may still be far distant.

As detailed in Section 7, if intelligence is upper-bounded (like playing optimal minimax chess), then past this bound, intelligences can only differ by speed and available information to process. In this case, and if humans are not too far below this upper bound (which seems unlikely), outsiders could, as long as their technology permits, record and play a virtual world in slow motion and be able to grasp what is going on inside.

In this sense, a singularity may be more interesting for outsiders than for insiders. On the other hand, insiders actively ‘live’ potential societal changes, while outsiders only passively observe them.

Of course, more comp only leads to more intelligent decisions if the decision algorithm puts it to good use. Many algorithms in AI are so-called anytime algorithms that indeed produce better results if given more comp. In the limit of infinite comp, in simple and well-defined settings (usually search and planning problems), some algorithms can produce optimal results, but for more realistic complex situations (usually learning problems), they saturate and remain sub-optimal (Russell & Norvig, 2010). But there is one algorithm, namely AIXI described in Section 7, that is able to make optimal decisions in arbitrary situations given infinite comp.

Together this shows that it is non-trivial to draw a clear boundary between speed and intelligence.

6. What is Intelligence

There have been numerous attempts to define intelligence; see e.g. Legg & Hutter (2007a) for a collection of 70+ definitions from the philosophy, psychology, and AI literature, by individual researchers as well as collective attempts.

If/since intelligence is not (just) speed, what is it then? What will superintelligences actually do?

Historically-biologically, higher intelligence, via some correlated practical cognitive capacity, increased the chance of survival and number of offspring of an individual and the success of a species. At least for primates leading to homo sapiens this was the case until recently. Within the human race, intelligence is now positively correlated with power and/or economic success (Geary, 2007) and actually negatively with number of children (Kanazawa, 2007). Genetic evolution has been largely replaced by memetic evolution (Dawkins, 1976), the replication, variation, selection, and spreading of ideas causing cultural evolution.

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