New Estimate for Human-Level Artificial Intelligence - 25 Years!

The Grid - 11.10.14 by Tom Randall

Computers are improving at an exponential rate. In many areas -- chess, for example -- machine skill is already superhuman. In others -- reason, emotional intelligence -- there’s still a long way to go. Whether human-level general intelligence is reached in 15 years or 150, it’s likely to be a little-observed mile marker on the road toward superintelligence.

We’ve been wrong about these robots before.

Soon after modern computers evolved in the 1940s, futurists started predicting that in just a few decades machines would be as smart as humans. Every year, the prediction seems to get pushed back another year. The consensus now is that it’s going to happen in ... you guessed it, just a few more decades.

There’s more reason to believe the predictions today. After research that’s produced everything from self-driving cars to Jeopardy!-winning supercomputers, scientists have a much better understanding of what they’re up against. And, perhaps, what we’re up against.

Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, lays out the best predictions of the artificial intelligence (AI) research community in his new book, “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.” Here are the combined results of four surveys of AI researchers, including a poll of the most-cited scientists in the field, totalling 170 respondents.

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How to Live Indefinitely with Proper Maintenance?

SingularityHUB - 8/3/14 by Jason Dorrier

“Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place,” says de Grey.

To Aubrey de Grey, the body is a machine. Just as a restored classic car can celebrate its hundredth birthday in peak condition, in the future, we’ll maintain our bodies’ cellular components to stave off the diseases of old age and live longer, healthier lives.

Dr. de Grey is cofounder and Chief Science Officer of the SENS Research Foundation and faculty at Singularity University’s November Exponential Medicine conference—an event exploring the healthcare impact of technologies like low-cost genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence, synthetic biology, gene therapy, and more.

Recently speaking to participants in Singularity University’s graduate studies program, de Grey said the greatest challenge in aging research today is less of a technical nature, more a misguided focus in the mainstream.

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Take A Look at 2045

CNNMoney

Futurists and technologists project a half century of biotech innovation and new technology -- even immortality.

"It's not so hard to predict the future, but it's sometimes hard to connect the dots." In the opening of his lecture to the Global Futures 2045 Congress, famed geneticist Dr. George Church neatly summed up what being a futurist is all about, though he was reminding the audience rather than the other speakers assembled at Alice Tully Hall in New York City this past weekend. Gathered there by a young Russian tech tycoon on a mission to do nothing less than achieve immortality through technology, a who's-who of renowned technologists, scientists, futurists, and entrepreneurs painted a sometimes terrifying, sometimes electrifying picture of what the world is going to look like in the decades to come, describing how technology is going to drastically alter economies, biologies, and perhaps even consciousness itself.

Global Futures 2045 is organized annually (this was the second) by the 2045 Initiative and its founder, Russian tech entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov, who at 32 years of age has turned his vast financial resources and dogged determination toward understanding and conquering some of the 21st century's most challenging and exciting frontiers, including human consciousness, brain-machine interfaces, and the integration of biology and technology. The ultimate goal of Itskov's Avatar Project (part of the 2045 Initiative) is to free humankind from the limitations imposed on it by the body, first by figuring out how to remove the brain (and the conscious self) from the body and keep it alive in a robotic surrogate, and ultimately how to upload the mind -- consciousness and all -- to a computer. The deadline for delivering this kind of digital immortality: 2045.

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Modern-Day Nostradamus - Kurzweil is Right 86%

bigthink - 12.13.12 by Dominic Basulto

It's that time of the year again when techno pundits are once again breathlessly telling us all about the technology and innovation trends that will be big in 2013. That's great, but many of those predictions will be hopelessly wrong by the end of March. That's why it's so fascinating that Ray Kurzweil, one of the leading thinkers when it comes to the future of technology, has had such a strong track record in making predictions about technology for nearly two decades. In fact, of the 147 predictions that Kurzweil has made since the 1990's, fully 115 of them have turned out to be correct, and another 12 have turned out to be "essentially correct" (off by a year or two), giving his predictions a stunning 86% accuracy rate. So how does he do it?



The fact is, Ray has a system and this system is called the Law of Accelerating Returns. In his new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed, Kurzweil points out that "every fundamental measure of information technology follows predictable and exponential trajectories." The most famous of these trajectories, of course, has been the price/performance path of computing power over more than 100 years. Thanks to paradigms such as Moore's Law, which reduces computing power to a problem of how many transistors you can cram on a chip, anyone can intuitively understand why computers are getting exponentially faster and cheaper over time.

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Is Kurzweil Right and is the Singularity Near?

reason.com - November 13, 2012 by Matthew Feeney

High-functioning artificial intelligence is the stuff of science fiction: the malicious HAL in 2001, the malevolent machines in Battlestar Galactica and The Matrix, the Butlerian Jihad in Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Charles Stross’ novel Accelerando describes the Matrioshka brain, an artificial mind that requires the energy of a star to function.

But the idea won't necessarily be science fiction forever, and we may have to take the concept of artificial intelligence (AI) seriously sooner than many expect. The ongoing acceleration in technology has prompted serious discussions of AI, including the possibility that the “Singularity”—the creation of a greater-than-human intelligence—might occur. In his 2005 book The Singularity is Near, the futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted that we can expect the Singularity by 2045 and that superintelligences will eventually colonize vast swathes of galaxies. In his latest book, How to Create a Mind, Kurzweil argues that reverse-engineering a human brain is the best route to creating high functioning AI.

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Machine Intelligence - Bane or Blessing?

Atlantic - October 25, 2012 by Moshe Y. Vardi

The question of what happens when machines get to be as intelligent as and even more intelligent than people seems to occupy many science-fiction writers. The Terminator movie trilogy, for example, featured Skynet, a self-aware artificial intelligence that served as the trilogy's main villain, battling humanity through its Terminator cyborgs. Among technologists, it is mostly "Singularitarians" who think about the day when machine will surpass humans in intelligence. The term "singularity" as a description for a phenomenon of technological acceleration leading to "machine-intelligence explosion" was coined by the mathematician Stanislaw Ulam in 1958, when he wrote of a conversation with John von Neumann concerning the "ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue." More recently, the concept has been popularized by the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who pinpointed 2045 as the year of singularity. Kurzweil has also founded Singularity University and the annual Singularity Summit.



It is fair to say, I believe, that Singularitarians are not quite in the mainstream. Perhaps it is due to their belief that by 2045 humans will also become immortal and be able to download their consciousness to computers. It was, therefore, quite surprising when in 2000, Bill Joy, a very mainstream technologist as co-founder of Sun Microsystems, wrote an article entitled "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" for Wired magazine. "Our most powerful 21st-century technologies -- robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech -- are threatening to make humans an endangered species," he wrote. Joy's article was widely noted when it appeared, but it seems to have made little impact.

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If the Singularity Comes, Then What?

The whole premise of the Singularity is that you can't predict what comes after. Just like we don't know what happened before the Big Bang or what's on the other side of a black hole. The math breaks down and we can't see beyond the point of a singularity. So anyway, that doesn't mean we can't try...

The Verge - October 22, 2012 by Ben Popper

Hundreds of the world’s brightest minds — engineers from Google and IBM, hedge funds quants, and Defense Department contractors building artificial intelligence — were gathered in rapt attention inside the auditorium of the San Francisco Masonic Temple atop Nob Hill. It was the first day of the seventh annual Singularity Summit, and Julia Galef, the President of the Center for Applied Rationality, was speaking onstage. On the screen behind her, Galef projected a giant image from the film Blade Runner: the replicant Roy, naked, his face stained with blood, cradling a white dove in his arms.

At this point in the movie, Roy is reaching the end of his short, pre-programmed life, “The poignancy of his death scene comes from the contrast between that bitter truth and the fact that he still feels his life has meaning, and for lack of a better word, he has a soul,” said Galef. “To me this is the situation we as humans have found ourselves in over the last century. Turns out we are survival machines created by ancient replicators, DNA, to produce as many copies of them as possible. This is the bitter pill that science has offered us in response to our questions about where we came from and what it all means.”



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Will you be able to upload your consciousness into an artificial body?

Popular Science - 3.2.12 by Clay Dillow

Bottled Consciousness? Gaetan Lee via Wikimedia

When Steve Jobs passed away last year, a joke bounced around--not that there was anything particularly funny about it--that the man who had done so much to shape modern technology hadn’t really died at all, but rather had figured out how to upload himself into the Mac OS so he could live on with us, and with his products, forever. The notion was ostensibly so far out as to be ridiculous. But not everyone sees it that way.

At the recent Global Future 2045 International Congress held in Moscow, 31-year-old media mogul Dmitry Itskov told attendees how he plans to create exactly that kind of immortality, first by creating a robot controlled by the human brain, then by actually transplanting a human brain into a humanoid robot, and then by replacing the surgical transplant with a method for simply uploading a person’s consciousness into a surrogate ‘bot. He thinks he can get beyond the first phase--to transplanting a working brain into a robot--in just ten years, putting him on course to achieve his ultimate goal--human consciousness completely disembodied and placed within a holographic host--within 30 years time.

Pushing aside all the extremely difficult technological challenges for a moment, there are a couple of important to considerations tied up in Itskov’s vision. First, while the later phases of his project are so far out as to seem ridiculous, phase one is totally feasible (in fact it’s already being done). From there, the leap to phase two--human brainpower transplanted into a mechanical robot--is a quite a leap. But if we are willing to allow that it might be possible even within the next 30 years, then we have to consider a further possibility: that many people alive today--like the twenty-something author of this piece--could be confronted with this kind of technology in their lifetimes.

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The coming programmable universe

New York Times - December 5, 2011 by Larry Smarr

Over the next 10 years, the physical world will become ever more overlaid with devices for sending and receiving information.

Already billions of processors are embedded in our smartphones, cars, appliances and buildings and the environment. These sensors can send out streams of data about their surroundings, and more and more it is anonymously transmitted to remote data centers — the “clouds” of Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Yahoo and Apple.

From these vast clouds, the companies can power apps that are “spatially aware.” For instance, Google Maps now draws on data in the cloud to sample the location and movement of cellphones in cars, producing a real-time picture of traffic congestion.

Smart electric grids are measuring our homes’ use of power; active people are tracking their heart rates; and hundreds of millions of us are uploading geo-tagged data to Flickr, Yelp, Facebook and Google Plus. As we look 10 years ahead, the fastest supercomputer (the “exascale” machine) will be composed of one billion processors, and the clouds will most likely grow to this scale as well, creating a distributed planetary computer of enormous power.

Such computational power, co-located with the gigantic storage that holds the data from all the incoming data streams, will enable faster-than-real-time simulations of many aspects of our physical world. As Mike Liebhold and his colleagues at the Institute for the Future have discussed, computing will have evolved from merely sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. In this evolution, the world gradually becomes programmable.

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The Singularity is Far?

technology review - Paul G. Allen and Mark Greaves 10/12/2011

Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they'll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It's heady stuff.

While we suppose this kind of singularity might one day occur, we don't think it is near. In fact, we think it will be a very long time coming. Kurzweil disagrees, based on his extrapolations about the rate of relevant scientific and technical progress. He reasons that the rate of progress toward the singularity isn't just a progression of steadily increasing capability, but is in fact exponentially accelerating—what Kurzweil calls the "Law of Accelerating Returns."

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Singularity and the changing job market

The essence of the Singularity idea is simple: accelerating technological change. That means technology is changing a lot faster today than it did 5 years ago, and it will be changing much faster still 5 years from today. I recently read an article that made me realize that this means that our jobs are changing faster, too, at least any jobs connected in any way to technology. And if you want to have a job, well, you need to be changing too. Here's that article:


NYT - July 12, 2011 by Thomas Friedman


The Start-Up of You


The rise in the unemployment rate last month to 9.2 percent has Democrats and Republicans reliably falling back on their respective cure-alls. It is evidence for liberals that we need more stimulus and for conservatives that we need more tax cuts to increase demand. I am sure there is truth in both, but I do not believe they are the whole story. I think something else, something new — something that will require our kids not so much to find their next job as to invent their next job — is also influencing today’s job market more than people realize.


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What would be so great about a Singularity?

Michael Anissimov has an excellent and easy to read post on this. Check out The Benefits of a Successful Singularity, posted July 6, 2011.


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Games becoming more real, faster than ever

Singularity, as a concept, is based on the premise of the accelerating pace of technological change. Since we humans are so adaptable, we get used to new things very quickly, so when you can see the pace of change speeding up for yourself, it's worth noting.

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Opie and Anthony Interview Ray Kurzweil

Informative and hilarious. (A bit of rough language in the first few minutes, NSFW.)



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2045: Dateline Immortality

Time - 2045: The Year Man Becomes Immortal (by Lev Grossman)

On Feb. 15, 1965, a diffident but self-possessed high school student named Raymond Kurzweil appeared as a guest on a game show called I've Got a Secret. He was introduced by the host, Steve Allen, then he played a short musical composition on a piano. The idea was that Kurzweil was hiding an unusual fact and the panelists — they included a comedian and a former Miss America — had to guess what it was.

On the show (see the clip on YouTube), the beauty queen did a good job of grilling Kurzweil, but the comedian got the win: the music was composed by a computer. Kurzweil got $200. (See TIME's photo-essay "Cyberdyne's Real Robot.")

Kurzweil then demonstrated the computer, which he built himself — a desk-size affair with loudly clacking relays, hooked up to a typewriter. The panelists were pretty blasé about it; they were more impressed by Kurzweil's age than by anything he'd actually done. They were ready to move on to Mrs. Chester Loney of Rough and Ready, Calif., whose secret was that she'd been President Lyndon Johnson's first-grade teacher.

But Kurzweil would spend much of the rest of his career working out what his demonstration meant. Creating a work of art is one of those activities we reserve for humans and humans only. It's an act of self-expression; you're not supposed to be able to do it if you don't have a self. To see creativity, the exclusive domain of humans, usurped by a computer built by a 17-year-old is to watch a line blur that cannot be unblurred, the line between organic intelligence and artificial intelligence.

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Will the Singularity be the End of Us?

NPR - 1.11.11 by Martin Kaste (All Things Considered)

It's been called "the rapture of the nerds." For some computer experts, the Singularity is the moment when an artificial intelligence learns how to improve itself in an exponential "intelligence explosion." They say it's a bigger threat to puny humans than global warming or nuclear war — and they're trying to figure out how to stop it.

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What Reasonable People Should Think about the Singularity

Michael Nielsen - 1.12.11

In 1993, the science fiction author Vernor Vinge wrote a short essay proposing what he called the Technological Singularity. Here’s the sequence of events Vinge outlines:

A: We will build computers of at least human intelligence at some time in the future, let’s say within 100 years.

B: Those computers will be able to rapidly and repeatedly increase their own intelligence, quickly resulting in computers that are far more intelligent than human beings.

C: This will cause an enormous transformation of the world, so much so that it will become utterly unrecognizable, a phase Vinge terms the “post-human era”. This event is the Singularity.

The basic idea is quite well known. Perhaps because the conclusion is so remarkable, almost outrageous, it’s an idea that evokes a strong emotional response in many people. I’ve had intelligent people tell me with utter certainty that the Singularity is complete tosh. I’ve had other intelligent people tell me with similar certainty that it should be one of the central concerns of humanity.

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Bring on the Singularity! (Video PSA)

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How we can eliminate suffering

HPlus Magazine - 10.21.10 by David Pearce

Reality is big. So our optimism must be confined to sentient beings in our forward light-cone. But I tentatively predict that the last experience below "hedonic zero" will be a precisely dateable event several hundred years hence.

Here are five grounds for cautious optimism:

1) We Shall Soon Be Able To Choose Our Own Level Of Pain-Sensitivity
2) We Can Soon Choose How Rewarding We Want Our Daily Life To Be
3) Steak Lovers and Vegans Alike Can Soon Eat Cruelty-Free Diets
4) Carnivorous Nonhuman Predators Can Be Phased Out Too
5) We May Be On The Eve Of An "Intelligence Explosion"

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Don't Fear the Singularity - An excellent talk by Michael Anissimov

Michael Anissimov: "Don't Fear the Singularity, but Be Careful: Friendly AI Design" at Foresight 2010 Conference from Foresight Institute on Vimeo.

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