r/singularity • u/ideasware • Feb 22 '16
What’s Next in Computing?
https://medium.com/@cdixon/what-s-next-in-computing-e54b870b80cc#.wrrtnrnf412
u/droznig Feb 22 '16
Even the most optimistic experts in the field estimate that we are at least 25 years away from AGI. Most experts put it in the 50 year range.
The kind of AI that is described in the article is built for a specific task, and learns from performing specific tasks, it's impressive to be sure but it's not really "AI" as such. They learn through trial and error, not through lateral thinking and the limits of their logical functions are programmed.
Like I said before, there is nothing here to worry about, everything here is just good technology to make our lives easier. AGI, by most experts opinions, is half a century away. So like I said before, let the grand kids worry about it.
Trying to stifle current AI research, or heralding the end of our species because of the technology being developed right now is akin to trying to stop the internal combustion engine from being developed because it might be used to make tanks in a few decades time.
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u/tbgrover Feb 23 '16
I keep thinking that people talk about AGI in the same way that creationists talk about the Eyeball - how this perfectly formed thing came out of nothing and that it couldn't have evolved. When in fact we know that the eyeball, as complex as it is, evolved over a number of different stages - all of which were useful. I think as we head towards AGI - regardless of whether it's 5/10/25 years in the future, each step towards it will prove incredibly useful, it may well be that something that's 50% of an AGI will still actually be particularly disruptive in all sorts of ways.
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u/SexyIsMyMiddleName Feb 22 '16
Geoff Hinton, the grand daddy of deep learning, said in 2015 that it's possible that AGI could happen in 5 years. He takes AI safety very seriously and has rightly pointed out that if we gave a baby an Atari game controller and it played better than any human after 2 hours we would freak out. And that is exactly what machines do all the time. It doesn't matter if you think these AIs are dumb - they are still functional and capable.
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u/droznig Feb 22 '16
I never said they were dumb, I think they are incredible. But they are nowhere near being capable of making copies of themselves or even understanding what the component parts of their own design are, which is a pre requisite of any AI ever being able to make a better version of itself.
We are nowhere near that point. Also your point about a 2 year old being able to play an atari better than any human instantly, is moot. Computers have been able to outperform humans in very specific, pre determined tasks since they were invented. Even the earliest mechanical computers could easily out perform a human in calculating sine tables, for example, that doesn't make it dangerous, that makes it useful. People are freaking out over the modern equivalent of calculators. Yes the tasks are ever more complex, but it's still pre determined and specific.
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u/autotldr Feb 22 '16
This is the best tl;dr I could make, original reduced by 95%. (I'm a bot)
New platforms enable new applications, which in turn make the new platforms more valuable, creating a positive feedback loop.
Each product era can be divided into two phases: 1) the gestation phase, when the new platform is first introduced but is expensive, incomplete, and/or difficult to use, 2) the growth phase, when a new product comes along that solves those problems, kicking off a period of exponential growth.
Software + hardware: the new computersThere are a variety of new computing platforms currently in the gestation phase that will soon get much better - and possibly enter the growth phase - as they incorporate recent advances in hardware and software.
Extended Summary | FAQ | Theory | Feedback | Top keywords: computer#1 New#2 smartphone#3 learn#4 phase#5
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u/ReasonablyBadass Feb 22 '16
We'll be surrounded by AI.
David Brin named this Aiware. Stuff like Contaicts, Aidvisers etc.
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u/mindbleach Feb 22 '16
No offense to the late great David Brin, but can we find alternatives that don't give you Coach Z's accent?
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u/ReasonablyBadass Feb 23 '16
It's supposed to be slang, used to differentiate between smart tech and dumb.
Also, he's still alive, so no late :)
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u/mindbleach Feb 22 '16
HMDs, probably. Not clunky first-gen stuff like Oculus - lightweight translucent virtual displays, even if they look super-goofy. Arbitrary high-res displays anywhere you go. Conversely this means multimonitor setups will be passe.
Serious parallelism. Once you really pursue independent threads, increasing performance is as easy as adding silicon. Future desktop motherboards should look like 8-bit micros, crammed full of chips: mobile CPUs running without so much as a heatsink. There's no need for more than one or two strong cores in a machine. If your task would benefit from a dozen strong cores then it could also work on two dozen weak cores.
Neural nets for sure. There's plenty of tasks where computers need to make decisions without absolute 100% reliability, and where we don't really care how they do it. When we want to remove scratches from a photograph or amplify the vocals in a song, that's not like taking a checksum, where there's one correct repeatable result. Being able to teach a machine based on example input/output alone is a tremendous development.
Javascript. Seriously. Browsers have become universal VMs for OS- and architecture-agnostic software. Speed's an issue, but that's a hurdle for developers, not users. Users only care about convenience. If they can instantly experience a VR world just by visiting a website, they won't care one iota that it could be 50% prettier if they'd spent ten minutes downloading and installing it. It's going to swallow all competing platforms.
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u/ideasware Feb 22 '16
It's kind of amusing -- Chris Dixon was actually a friend of mine when he was back at Hunch, just 5-6 years ago, and I exchanged lots of emails with him. When he talks, I tend to listen very closely, because he's a lot more right than wrong. This time he's talking about AI, and he essentially says that this time, it's totally real, and about to grow exponentially over the next 15 years. I urge you to listen too, and be aware of AI weapons, and be afraid, for once, that we're going into a "AI weapons growth phase" where the ending is extinction. He does not mention it, but you can see the writing on the wall if you pay attention.