Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

Author:James Barrat [Barrat, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-09-30T20:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

A Hard Takeoff

Day by day, however, the machines are gaining ground upon us; day by day we are becoming more subservient to them; more men are daily bound down as slaves to tend them, more men are daily devoting the energies of their whole lives to the development of mechanical life. The upshot is simply a question of time, but that the time will come when the machines will hold the real supremacy over the world and its inhabitants is what no person of a truly philosophic mind can for a moment question.

—Samuel Butler, nineteenth-century English poet and author

More than any other time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

—Woody Allen

I. J. Good didn’t invent the intelligence explosion any more than Sir Isaac Newton invented gravity. All he did was observe that an event he considered both inevitable and a net positive for mankind was certain to yield the kind of “ultraintelligence” we humans need to solve problems that are too difficult for us. Then, after he’d lived three more decades, Good changed his mind. We’ll make superintelligent machines in our image, he said, and they will destroy us. Why? For the same reason we’d never agree to a ban on AI research, and the same reason we’d likely give the Busy Child its freedom. For the same reason the thoroughly rational AI maker Steve Omohundro, and every other AI expert I’ve met, believe that stopping development of AGI until we know more about its dangers just won’t fly.

We won’t stop developing AGI because more than dangerous AI we fear that other nations in the world will persist with AGI research no matter what the international community says or does about it. We will believe it is wiser to beat them to the punch. We are in the middle of an intelligence race, and to the dismay of many, it’s shaping up to be a more threatening global competition than the one we seem to have just escaped, the nuclear arms race. We’ll follow policy makers and technology’s cheerleaders to our doom, in Good’s phrase, “like lemmings.”

Ray Kurzweil’s positive Singularity doesn’t require an intelligence explosion—the Law of Accelerating Returns guarantees the continued exponential growth of information technologies, including world-changing ones like AGI, and later ASI. Recall that AGI is required for a Goodian intelligence explosion. The explosion yields smarter-than-human intelligence or ASI. Kurzweil claims that AGI will be conquered, slowly at first, then all at once, by the powers of LOAR.

Kurzweil isn’t concerned about roadblocks to AGI since his preferred route is to reverse engineer the brain. He believes there’s nothing about brains, and even consciousness, that cannot be computed. In fact, every expert I’ve spoken with believes that intelligence is computable. Few believe an intelligence explosion in Good’s sense is necessary to achieve ASI after AGI is reached. Slow steady progress should do it, but, as Kurzweil insists, it probably won’t be slow or steady, but fast and accelerating.

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