Will human's still be relevant in 2500?

Ryan_m_b

You think you know the rules better than a moderator?

DiracPool

Well, I wouldn't really call it nonsense, there's a good deal of evidence for it, but that's almost beside the point, because admittedly, this thread really works best with more of a philosophical or perhaps teleological flavor, which is ok, isn't it?

Sorry, this quote is by Ryan m b (I can't figure out how to do multiple quotes in one response yet). I got the single ones down. In any case, no, its not standard AI, it's more related to a field that may be referred to as cognitive neurodynamics, looking at information less as that of software-themed and more as layered "frames" of itinerant chaotic states in masses of neural tissue. It's speculative but not "nonsense," a researcher named Jose Principe and co. have recently built a functioning analog VLSI chip based on the technology.

However, again, the point I was trying to make was more in reference to the expensiveness, or perhaps better stated "vestigalness" of the energy expense of biological tissue to accomplish the important features of what we cherish to be human. Evolution has labored blindly for hundreds of millions of years to find a mechanism for how our brains work to carry on this conversation we're having right now. But the mechanism is grossly ineffecient and hampered/slowed down by the sloppiness of the way evolution works. I mean, can't we all at least agree on that? The obvious comparisons are vacuum tubes vs solid state transistors vs integrated circuits. "In the year 2525..." (sing it with me people) we are not gonna still build the equivalent of "vacuum tube humans" in the same way we don't build vacuum tube iPhones today. But we probably will keep them (humans) around as a novelty just as Marshall Brain keeps some vacuum tubes in his museum.

The whole thing about the Terminator effect or why would we want to create something better than ourselves I think is a non-starter. It is simply going to happen, IMO, because they will just be better "us's", only much, much, more efficient, and we will think that is OK but they actually ARE just better us's, just as todays iPads are better than that Laptop Roy Scheider was using in the film 2010. Who'd wanna go back to that? And BTW, they don't even publish OMNI anymore, Roy, so you tell me!

Now, I think the situation might be different is someone decided to build a platform that wasn't based on ours. That would be FOREIGN. And we don't like foreign, we like to talk to things that think like us. So my guess is that the robots that are our keepers in the future will be built on our platform and we will avoid thorny problems like having to deal with Arnold and his cronies.

Ryan_m_b

Click the multiquote button on all the posts you want to quote. Ths will turn the button to blue. Then click quote on the last one.
In which case it's still hyperbole to claim the technology exists isn't it?
No, I disagree that the brain is inefficient at what it does. Direct comparisons to computers are pointless but as the human body uses ~10kj a day and the brain accounts for ~20% of energy usage that simplistically means the brain uses ~20 watts to run. Unless you can point to something better I'm not sure where this idea of inefficiency comes from.
This is bad reasoning: even if Moore's law continues ad infinitum that says nothing about what those computers will be running. You can't point to past progress and use it as a basis for future progress in a different field
Again you're just wildly asserting its going to happen with no evidence that it will, your not even acknowledging there's a possibility it won't which sets off ideological warning bells in my mind. Also building tools better at doing tasks by hand is nothing new, to build intelligent software must it be conscious with agency? As I brought up in my first post I don't see why.
What do you mean by platform?

Johninch

Is there an evolutionary biologist in the room?

I’m not one, but I think that this is a reasonable way to look at it, with the additional benefit that it helps to keep the discussion in the scientific arena.

Perhaps the evolutionary biologist will say that humans will still be around in 2500 because 500 years is only a short time evolutionary speaking. One problem with this argument is that our rate of scientific, social and technological progress is developing exponentially, so we can’t be compared with other species. And we are changing our environment, which few if any species have ever done alone. Several genetically related life forms have done it together.

The argument of running out of resources is not valid if we can get through the looming energy bottleneck. With enough energy one can do everything possible, if I have correctly learned from the teachings in these columns.

I would like to know how the evolutionary biologist would define human. If we are the subspecies homo sapiens sapiens, I suppose the next subspecies will be homo sapiens sapiens sapiens. To whom will it matter, whether we are ‘still’ around or have been replaced by something similar or not so similar? I guess it matters to the evolutionary biologists.

If there are no catastrophes but only further progress of our species or subspecies, I would foresee at some point that we might start to do some route planning with goals. Would be nice.

In the meantime, since nobody has a plan, evolution will surely result in continued competition amongst the existing gene pools. In that case, I don’t see any prospect of one gene pool restricting the activities of another. The fittest is the one who survives or produces a successor. The production of a non-human successor is what is mostly being discussed here, which I think is the right way to go because our flesh and blood biology does seem to be so inefficient.

I don’t see any good answer to the question whether we will be relevant in 2500, unless we first know what we mean by relevant and what our goals are.

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jim hardy

I dont think computers will make it. They never forget.

Recall Robert Burns' poem about plowing up the mouse's den --

The curse of contemplativeness combined with perfect memory will drive them insane.

old jim

Timewalker6

The problem here is that society will not allow that to happen. First robots (even if they are intelligent) will never be given equal rights to that of a human being. Honestly do you expect society to treat the first successful AI (a thinking box maybe or a stationary computer) as a person? Besides based on said society's fears of a robot apocalypse of some kind there would most likely be protective measures against said robots pushing us aside.

zoobyshoe

Contribute to what?

Inefficient for what?

FreeMitya

For becoming quasi-gods/masters of time and space and preventing the end of the universe etc., etc.

Or so Ray Kurzweil would say.

Johninch

The discussion does not depend on equal rights or pushing us aside. You are over-dramatising the scenario.

It’s already pretty obvious that robotics is being developed by certain countries such as the USA to gain advantages in industry and in the military, in order to achieve competitive advantage in peacetime and power in the event of a war. The development of robotics will continue and robots will become capable of more and more sophisticated tasks. This requires robots to take decisions, for example: you have a submarine crewed by robots asking for permission to launch a pre-emptive attack. Or you have a robot controller asking for permission to make changes in a nuclear power plant for safety reasons.

Neither men nor machines have rights, they just do things, for various reasons. The question is, for what reasons. It is logical to delegate decision taking, when the delegate has sufficient competence. And when the delegate is lacking in competence, you give him more training. Thus you have the scenario of a robot population becoming more and more competent, because the sponsoring human gene pool wants to get an advantage over other human gene pools. If you don’t agree with this argument, do you mean that humans are changing the rules of evolution? I don’t see any sign of that in human relations today.

I have often wondered why people always assume that visiting ETs are organic life forms. It doesn’t make sense for humans or similar beings to explore space, considering their inefficient and vulnerable physique. So I assume that, if we have been visited at all, it has been by an inorganic life form. Maybe they have been ‘sent’, but what does that matter when we are outside the sender’s travelling range?

We are always assuming that we are the greatest life form ever, and that's how it's going to stay. Pure egotism.

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mfb

And what do you do if the AI does not care about its rights?
This is no problem for simple tasks - a transportation robot needs no general intelligence, just clever pathfinding algorithms. But if you want an AI which can solve problems for humans, how do you implement its goals? If the AI calculates that "rule the world" is the best way to achieve its programmed aims (very likely for arbitrary goals), it will not care about "rights", or find ways to satisfy them, but in not the way you like.

If you want to use the output of the AI in some way (otherwise, why did you build it at all?), the AI has some way to go around your protective measures. Remember: It is more intelligent than you (otherwise, why did you build it at all?).

I think it is possible to build an AI which does not want to rule the world, but this is not an easy task.

FreeMitya

How many tasks would we be expecting them to do for which they'd need human-level intelligence (or greater), a growing, learning, independent mind (complete with ambitions, introspection, emotion, etc.)*, and not just sophisticated programming? It seems so frivolous and excessive to me. I'm starting to get apprehensive, though, as this is becoming very philosophical.

*These are some of the things which I consider to be crucial to "human-level intelligence". If we didn't have them, I don't think we would have gotten very far. I don't believe that intelligence is merely reasoning ability, and that, I guess, is the fundamental problem: what is intelligence?

mfb

- science
- giving access to water/food/... for all and other things which make humans happy

Johninch

If we are expecting them to do tasks and use greater than human level intelligence, I think you can cross out “emotion” straight away. You are right that we wouldn’t be here without our emotions, which are necessary for our survival and replication (fear, love, hunger, etc.) but I don’t see that this is relevant.

If a robot sees that he may lose his arm, the mechanism for taking avoiding action or deciding to launch a counter attack would use electronics, I presume. It took billions of years to arrive at the biochemistry which produces the emotional responses that we have today. They are much too unreliable and you would never think of going this route in robotics.

If you rule out “sophisticated programming” I don’t know how you are going to create AI.

I don’t know what intelligence means either. Is it necessary to define it?

As already said, you have to program the robot’s goals, otherwise the whole exercise is pointless. That’s about where we are now.

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FreeMitya

Are all the things listed above really necessary for that? I understand the utilitarian position regarding robotics -- sophisticated robots would certainly be useful -- but would beings which could basically be considered synthetic humans (at least in terms of mental faculties) be required? If they were thinking and feeling just like us, why do we assume they would be so submissive?

mfb

I don't think this requires human-like AIs. But AIs which are more intelligent than humans (measured via their ability to solve those problems) would certainly help.
Human-like AIs ... well, that is tricky. If mind-uploading gets possible, this allows to extend the lifespan, and basically immortality (as long as our technology exists). And even without, I could imagine that some would see this as more advanced version of a human.

FreeMitya

I say "programming" because if we were to create a super-intelligent machine, in my view, at least, it would immediately transcend programming (in a sense) because it could, in theory, survive on its own. Obviously a lot of programming took place to get it there, but we immediately become unnecessary once the goal is reached. I propose, instead, to make "dumb" robots suited to specific tasks. That is, they can carry out their assigned tasks, but they lack an ability beyond that. We maintain them, therefore creating jobs, and everybody's happy. This is all key because a self-aware robot with any semblance of logical thought would immediately wonder why it is serving us, which could create problems.

Number Nine

In what sense? It wouldn't need Human oversight in order to run, but neither does the forward Euler method I've programmed in Python. It wouldn't be able to transcend the limitations of its hardware unless it had some form of mobility or access to manufacturing capabilities that would let it extend itself.

Human cognition is only quantitatively different from chimpanzee cognition, which is only quantitatively different from the cognition of their next closest cousins. There is a vast landscape of slight differences across species, and it's only when you look at 2 points separated by a great distance that you see great differences. There's no reason to expect that machine intelligence would be any different; there's not going to a be a point where machines immediately transition from being lifeless automatons to "transcending their programming".

Why? I don't often worry that other people "aren't serving me". Why would I worry about machines?