Realistically, how far away are we from human level AI?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Realistically, how far away are we from human level AI?

Senor Tron: May 26, 2006

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

Let's first define what you mean by "human level AI," and by this I think you mean AI that causes a mind in the same way that a human brain causes a mind. I am going by this definition because no AI could truly be said to be "human-level" if it was incapable of semantic understanding.

What do I mean by this? John Searle's Chinese Room example is highly controversial these days but I think it still holds water. In part:

Note, however, that Searle is dealing with the method by which we program AI today: with formal syntactic rules in a programming language. But within these bounds, I do agree that it seems impossible to create a "strong AI."

This does leave open the potential for another process to create a strong AI: for instance, some method for simulating the processes of a human brain on a silicon chip. We are far, far away from this possibility, both in terms of processing power and in terms of our understanding of the human brain, and how it causes a mind.

But even if we get to this point, there is no real way to know if what we have created truly is a mind in the same way that we experience it. Everyone knows the famous line from Descartes' first Meditation: "I think, therefore I am," in other words, the only thing we can truly trust is our own mind as we experience it. This is in part because we experience our minds in a fundamentally different way from everything around us. If you buy Descartes' analysis, we don't even know if our brains really do cause our minds: we can look at a CT scan and see areas of the brain light up as we think and feel different things, but from a formal, epistemological perspective, that doesn't necessarily tell us that our brains cause our minds, our consciousness, our "souls." Similarly, we may create some things that emulate or simulate humanity but we may never know whether we have truly created a "mind" in the same way that we experience it, precisely because we can't experience other "minds," even those we presume to be genuine other minds like those of the people around us.

For further reading start with this wikipedia article on Hubert Dreyfus's critique of AI. He focuses more on the failed promises of AI in the past and some of the false assumptions strong AI proponents make about minds. The caveat here is that like Searle, he is really talking about our contemporary conception of AI, as syntactic programs being run on silicon chips, and not really talking about potential developments in the future that really could duplicate the internal processes of a brain, were we to ever understand those processes. But this is all very, very far away from where we are now and would still operate on some quite tenuous assumptions about brains and minds, which is my answer to your original question.

The follow on from that is to imagine systems where a group of humans simulates a living creatures brain.

For example a house cat is estimated to have 760,000,000 neurons.

So lets imagine we got the entire population of Earth to simulate a cats brain. We have developed some amazing future scanning technology that allows us to take a snapshot, and we build a perfect model using 760,000,000 people who have access to some kind of email/pager system that they use to receive and send signals to their other connections. The remaining 5+ billion people act as error checkers, fixing holes in the network as they arrive, bringing food and water to the participants and so on.

It seems widely well accepted that many other animals have consciousness. In this situation, where our 760,000,000 people are replicating the behaviour of a cats brain, does that replica have consciousness? If so where does it reside?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2016 14:58

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Senor Tron: May 26, 2006

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

You are making several of the bad assumptions here which Dreyfus describes, or at minimum the biological and psychological assumptions.

In engineering terms I'm sure it's extremely difficult/practically impossible, but is there any theoretical reason that assuming we could scan the current state of an animals brain exactly that we couldn't simulate it in such a way?

# ¿ Nov 28, 2016 16:27

Senor Tron: May 26, 2006

Blue Star posted:

2016 is basically 1986 except we got tablets and cellphones and social media.

Industrial scale cloning is becoming a thing, genetically engineered crops are a fact of life rather than a terrifying novelty, We have had a continually manned outpost in orbit for fifteen years. While manned spaceflight has regressed beyond the space station, in terms of probes technology has made a leap forward. Rather than short lived landers there are mobile robotic rovers on Mars, one of which has been operating continuously for over a decade. Dismissing tablets and cellphones like that is a mistake, in the first world almost every individual has easy and cheap access to the sum total of human knowledge.

Communication is a magnitude easier. Twenty years ago, international calls were expensive, I remember my mum having to ration herself to one Sunday evening call home to her sisters each week. Now you can contact someone on the other side of the planet as much as you want for no more than the cost of your monthly internet bill, or just use one of the widespread free wifi spots.

Remember science fiction with videophones on the wall? They are now a mundane fact of life.

3d printing is rapidly becoming a serious technology, school students have access to industrial prototyping tools that would have been unimaginable thirty years ago, and then when they want to do something with that work they can with pocket change buy something as powerful as a 1980's supercomputer to be the brains for it.

Electric vehicles have become big business. In many areas, house roofs are covered with cheap solar panels.

While not cured, cancer treatment and survival rates have drastically increased. If caught early, HIV can be controlled to the point where it isn't the death sentence it once was.

Virtual reality is now a consumer technology. Never mind the high end, cheap smartphone headsets give an experience better than that available at any cost in the 1980's. Those same supercomputers in our pockets have AR capabilities unimaginable in the 1980's. Ever used Google Translate? You can point your device at text in almost any language, and see it instantly changed to the language of your choice. Not just translated, actually visually changed to become something you can read.

While living through the changes it's easy to overlook everything that is happening in the world, but I would argue the 1986 to 2016 difference is much larger than the 1956 to 1986 one. I mean what changed for the average person between 1956 and 1986 in terms of new technology? Televisions got better, audio players got smaller, phones got a bit better and computers shrank to where people could have them in their homes for only a few hundred dollars, but if you are talking about day to day life that period was more of an evolution whereas the information age has been a revolution.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2016 00:46

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