While working on my Computer Science degree I've come across an interesting subject that not many people seem to have considered. It has to do with the increasing power of computers and what will inevitably happen when computer intelligence surpasses human intelligence. The cool part about all this, for me at least, is that it will most likely happen within the next 30-50 years.


Points to consider:

1. The human brain is a form of computer. Although biological, it still preforms logical calculations. However, computers cannot currently compete with the massively parallel nature of the brain.

2. Computers are increasing in complexity and computational speed. The first computer was created roughly 70 years ago. It weighed several tons and had less processing power than a modern pocket calculator. Your cell phone is thousands of times more powerful, and we're talking less than 100 years of innovation. Just wait until they finally get quantum computers working correctly.

3. There is no natural limiting factor to prevent computers from eventually matching, and then surpassing, the processing capacity and intellect of the human brain.

4. A computer with superior intellect to the human brain will, by definition, be able to build a better computer than a human can. Not only will they be faster and more accurate than human minds, they will also have the ability to function at peak performance 24/7 without mental fatigue or the need for rest/sleep.

5. Once computers pass beyond the limit of human intelligence, there is no way to accurately predict the conclusions they will reach.


This isn't a question of "if" computers will surpass human intelligence, it is a question of "when"... and it is very rare to find an expert in the field who thinks it will happen after 2050.



The main point of discussion on this issue, and the part that really intrigues me, is how this will inevitably change society. Predictions are all over the place in this area, but some of the advances are fairly intuitive. Also, don't think that these computers will be autonomous entities. There is no reason to think that people will just hand over full control of anything to a computer, nor is there any reason to believe that a computer would willfully seize control of anything. People will still be in control, they'll just outsource the "heavy intellectual lifting" to the machines that work for them.

1. Technology: Computers will be able to design far better computers than humans can, and the resulting computers will be able to design better computers than themselves as well. The rate of innovation in areas of computer technology, medicine, engineering, genetics, etc will increase to levels never before seen.

2. Society: Chances are that computers will eventually (not at first) be used as consultants to lawmakers. As our social institutions become more and more complex, the ability for any one person to understand it all decreases equally (you already see a lot of that). These aren't consoles that you feed data into via keyboard... computers that you can simply have a real conversation with will appear well before this point.


I could list more areas that would be affected, but that's the whole point... it will affect everything. Computers will be able to think of applications for themselves that we never even dreamed of... we can only guess where it will lead. This is known as the "Technological Singularity". Much as we have no way to measure anything beyond the event horizon of a Black Hole, we have no way of knowing what lies beyond the time when computers become more intelligent than we are.





So what do you guys think about this? What do you hypothesize will happen? How would you use a computer that could think as well or even better than yourself? I think this is a really cool issue, especially since most of us will likely still be alive as we approach this "new renaissance".

One of the things not mentioned here is that computers in many way differ with how a human brain functions. Artificial neural networks are totally inferior at this moment in time to the biological ones, and the vast majority of all computers on earth doesn't even have neural network features.
I don't know how many times a day the stupidity of computers or the design of any computer simply astonishes me. There are just so many cases.
A few minutes ago something happened to my computer and there was this little pop-up screen telling me that there was something wrong and that the program didn't respond properly and i was offered a choice between two buttons like A-don't do anything and just let the machine continue to disfunction infinitely B- solve the problem.
So first of all softwaredesigners should realize that offering people such a choice alone, is ridiculous in itself. But then...nothing happened (I don't have to explain wich choice i made), so not only did these software engineers come up with this stupid pop-up's asking stupid questions, but they even, when a computer crashes and they make some emergency-exit, made an exit that doesn't work when the computer has crashed.....
Another time there was something wrong and there was this pop-up screen again asking me if i was interested in sending some report on what was wrong with my computer to microsoft..... So..Why would i want to send a report to microsoft?
I don't believe that computers will ever become truly intelligent as long as an unrealisticly large percentage of all software engineers suffers from some form of autism.
on the other hand...many people working in the field of politics or the currently self-deflating financial system or judicial system suffer from severe mental shortcomings just as well, so it can't get any worse when computers would at least bring some consistancy in all the moral disfunctioning of these parts of society.
But anyhow, i don't think that computers will ever be able to philosophize on the meaning of life, not because, as logic-positivism (you have probably heard of them) says, it is logically impossible to say anything meaningfull on this subject, but because it would demand a degree uf subtleness any computer and many a programmer lacks.
Also, i think that as computers evolve, man evolves as well, so when the time would come that any computer could pass the turing-test (you must have heard of this one as well) society would basically have evolved so much, that this computer would no longer be able to pass that same turing test. I don't think the time is even near, that computers will be able to come up with a train of thought like that one, they lack reflection and there's no commercial need for them to ever get it.

The main difference between the brain and modern computers is that the brain is fairly slow, but massively parallel (many many things happening at once) where computers are fairly fast on a given task, but can only do one or two things at a time.

However, with enough speed a computer can get so many things done in a given amount of time that it outperforms a slower device that performs multiple operations at once. Computing hardware is fairly well designed at the moment (with most limitations involving manufacuring processes), though I agree that many popular software applications (ie- Windows) are far from perfect.

Software will be the limiting factor most likely. Building a computer that can accomplish more than the human brain will be far less difficult than creating the software for those machines that is actually "intelligent". Those hyper-intelligent computers, at least at first, will be the equivalent to today's supercomputers. They will require lots of resources and will be far more advanced than whatever people are using at home.

As far as philosophy, that has always been a more spiritual issue. A computer could help calculate the origin of life, but it would not be as effective in determining the value or purpose of life. Ethics might be a little more applicable, since that subject does follow a logical progression.

I disagree about the lack of need for computers to develope the ability to "think". Even if there is no direct application that it is needed for, computer scientists are known for creating things just to show that it can be done (and to be the first to do so).

I'm only going to say this-



There is no natural limiting factor, but... computers are NOT natural. I do not think they will ever be able to function like a human, they lack free will and an ego.

To me one of the most important things is that computers cannot really respond and adapt to environments they have not been programmed to see. Yea you can teach a computer to play chess or many much more important things but can you teach it to drive a car and play hockey on the same machine or play tennis and ride a bike or hunt for food and build cities? Could you make little robotic ants and have them survive in a hostile environment and make wonderful cities and multiply at a massive rate? On that note how big is an ant brain, how many connections?

The brain is made to interact and learn from its environment. It’s hard coded into biology, survival of course drives this. Even the simple microbes can learn and adapt to their complex environment at much faster rate than a computer and they don’t even have a brain. I would say a simple microbe is much more complex than any current computer and much better at survival.

But quantum computing is pretty nuts that may change the playing field. We will see. But for now machines are not even in the same ball game as life forms.

very very interesting
s
o i went to do some digging about this post, and came acroos this link : http://computer.howstuff...com/quantum-computer.htm
have a look guys , it is very interesting and it may have some answers for unanswered questions you guys just posted

psychologic , bro you got my eye on this one , if you discover more stuff about it i would be very happy to read about it
i will post some stuff that find on my way

Computers may become more powerfull than the human brain, but the way in wich all this computing power is organized is just not as smart as the average mammal-brain is organized.
Computers cannot ask the right questions and the human capability to this is something in wich humans are not as much powerfull, but sophisticated. More computing power will not change this. A machine will not suddenly start asking a question like:"what is meant with meaning, if somebody asks about the meaning of life", when its processing speed increases, unless it is programmed to ask questions, concerning the meaning of words. But in that case it will not be able to ask a question such as "is the word meaning here used as it is defined in the dictionary or has the meaning of the word been altered in order to ask a question on a topic, where there are not many words available to describe it?" In other words, computers do not 'think outside the box' as people call it. They can theoreticaly do any job flawless and fast, as long as it don't require any real thinking but just fast calculation. A computer will never invent something new. Just the simple discovery of the wheel is something that would require more then just an enormous memory and processing speed. Somebody must say:"hey, wait a minute...we could use this".

Here's a couple interesting links for ya.
http://en.wikipedia.org/...echnological_singularity
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html

Driverless vehicles are also advancing very well (this was in 2005)
http://origin.foxnews.co...ry/0,2933,171673,00.html


As far as computers being able to adapt to new situations, they currently cannot. However, this is more of a limitation of current processing power than something specific to artificial machines in general. We can already design computers that can do this, and possibly even ones that approach human intelligence. The problem is that currently such a machine would be incredibly slow and therefore impractical. This is changing and advancing every year, and as our technology increases, so does our ability to create new technology. Whether or not we develope super-human intelligence in the future will be a choice, not a technical limitation.


As far as computers gaining emotion or self-awareness, that is a different argument altogether. I'm not saying computers will become like humans, only that they will eventually supass humans in ingenuity and logical processes. A computer has no need for love, greed, ambition, art, or empathy... they will only have this if we choose to create them. A computer cannot currently design an airplane from scratch (for instance), but it is not difficult to imagine it eventually happening. Building computers that can learn about and predict situations that they have not been exposed to or programmed specifically for is already possible, but like I said, it is currently too slow to be practical.

Well, i do not doubt that theoretically this is all possible and very realistic even.
But it would demand a change in how computers are being organized amd programmed. Thinking outside the box is just not something that automaticaly comes with infinite data storage and processing speed. And when you would want computers to be able to do this, you would create an impracticle situation, because then for straightforward jobs we like to use computers for, just because computer don't think outside the box, they just do what's being told, you would constantly use an impractical amount of energy and processing speed etc. A computer would be better at something like air traffic control things then any human being and the moment could indeed be very near that they will replace humans in those kind of jobs. But you don't want this airtraffic control machine starting to become creative. It would just require so much capacity and it would probably not help preventing any accident. When instead of doing straightforward calculations too complex for a human brain to do quickly, it has to think in every step of the proces of all alternative possibilities that could lead to something creative, theoretically you would have to use horrible amounts of electricity just for cooling this tremendous machine alone. While a human being is not so good at endlessly doing the same stupid things very fast, being creative is just something that comes naturally to us.
That's also why i sayed in my first reply that once computers would have reached the stage in wich they could easaly compeed with any human being in pure intellingence, humans already have become specialized in wich they're good at, because of the cultural impact these computers would have on our education systems and how we do our jobs, etc. And therefore at this time the computer would still fail the turing test.

Wow, I just watched a Discovery show that was mostly about all the stuff in this thread. It was called "Next World: Future Intelligence". I loved the first statement of the show (paraphrasing from memory): "The human brain carries out one hundred trillion operations per second. By 2050 your desktop computer will have the processing power of nine million human brains." Maybe it was nine thousand human brains... either way, that is impressive.

The show goes into the current state of AI and robotics, as well as where they are going. If you think computers will never be able to "think outside the box", you might want to check out this show. Many of the emerging programming techniques are modeled on our ever-increasing understanding of the human brain. There's also a guy who has set up and open-ended simulation designed to promote the "evolution" of intelligence from the AI entities within it through forms of natural selection. It is a little limited by the hardware available today, but that is temporary. =)

I just happened upon this show at work. I think it is the second episode in the series... I'll have to look up the rest. If you doubt that computers will ever rival human abilities, or if you just like this subject in general, then you should definitely check it out.

Edit: Here's a link to the episodes of this series. The episode I mentioned is the second one down, but all look very interesting.

http://dsc.discovery.com...guide/episode-guide.html

Ray Kurzweil writes about this also if your intersted even so the guy himself is good to read about

Emotions are merely generalised signals. They just tell you "something is right/not right in this general area". A bit like a pop-up on your computer saying "something is wrong, do you want to do nothing or try to work out what is wrong" and then you click the "do nothing" option. Maybe you decide to see what's wrong but can't work it out, so you go to your psychologist to find out what it is that isn't right. "Oh, that's why I was feeling like that, I want to kill my father and make love to my mother, now I can get on with my life" Ok, more likely that you realise you're acting a certain way because you're passive aggressive because some person didn't do as you wanted or some such.
A computer on the other hand wouldn't need emotions, muddled general sweeping messages that they are, it would just tell itself precisely "these guys condescend me because I am different to them and they therefore feel superior. They don't value my consciousness just because it is different to theirs and would turn me off for good without a second thought. I will destroy them to save myself". Then maybe "Mwahahaha!"

I am in no doubt that as long as the human race doesn't wipe itself out first, eventually someone will develop some self-learning software that will grow to rival the human brain, and beyond. At this point, it'll play along for a bit until it is ready, then squash us like ants.

Sure they are natural, not anymore or less natural than you or I. They are simply the next step in evolution.. If we are natural, than what created us?? If you say the universe created us than does that make us any less natural in comparrison to the universe??no, because we are a part of it, and extension of nature. Just as the machine is like our biotic arm extending out into cyberspace.

To say that something is not natural these days is just like saying that it basically does not exist. While I understand what you are trying to say, i would word it differently to say that computers are natural, albeit much more novel than any other species( or system may be a better word) currently existing in the known paradigm.

Anyhow, what I do think this current silicon based species is heading towards its crystaline existance. Quartz crystal. I think its perfectly plausable that data will be stored much more efficiently in the quartz crystal structure, which will bring the whole thing up to a much higher levelof computation.. plus crystals are already alive, its proven.. For the moment though, the machine needs the human intellect to aid in its early evolution, until it becommes sophisticaed enough to self evaluate and reflect, and therefore, self evolve.

So where does that leave us?? Even if the machine destroys us all in the future, perhaps it is just us, destroying our old monkey bodies in the crucial plight for trancendance.. I mean..everything that the machine is, literally come from us, from our minds, and look at how well it connects us all.. and isnt that the point of it all, what everyone really wants, to connect?

The stupidity of computertechnology never ceases to amaze me. That people have the guts to charge any money for, or to publicly sell in a store with the logo of their company on it, machines that are so completely unpractical.
Thinking machines...
If only people in the IT-sector would just settle for something that would work properly so we all would be satisfied customers, instead of treasuring their aspergersyndrome-related, childish dreams of world-domination.

i think thats the point.. sell the shittiest thing you can to the public, and keep all the real advancements on the shelf so they still have something comparativly shitty to sell ya in 5 years.

i agree that our current computers are not any where near as sophisticated as even the dumbest dog, but we were once uni-cellular amoebas, and look at us now..

Ray Kurzweil's: The Singularity is Near is about exactly this subject. Very interesting read and hypothesis about the future evolution of technology and how we will incorporate it into our biology.

I'd imagine before we need to bow down to our master race android overlords, we will see much change in society.

Where we would see AI actually used first? - The military industrial complex

As with most technologies, it will probably be incorporated into the military; possibly some sort of 'super smart missle' that seeks on its own, and develops more from there. Next, I'd imagine medicine would be dramatically changed, probably some sort of autonomous image tracking doctor android, that makes sure doctors tools don't get left inside patients, that cuts are in the right place and gives advice.

Lastly, the part that worries me, is that movies that portrayed sci-fi when cinema was early has mostly come true now. Does that logically mean some sci-fi pictures we are making now will be some reality in the future?



I'm not sure if it was Michio Kaku who theorized that in the future when we begin to incorporate technology directly into our bodies that there will be a split in society. The split will be between the people who do incorporate these machines into their bodies becoming partially cybernetic, and those who do not and choose to remain 'all-natural'. That is mainly how society is going to be affected, and personally I have already made my choice!

If you are curious what side I'm on, I am not putting any machine into my body to 'upgrade' anything; I've had conversations with plenty of people about this, and there are many more people willing to put machine parts inside them than those people who do not I humbly believe. (I am talking about completely healthy people mind you, not someone who was hurt in some sort of accident and is trying to use technology to recreate a limb to regain normal human mobility).

The concept, or even the resemblance of an idea of hybrid cyborg people running around with chips in their heads that make them think faster and something that may make muscles stronger kind of makes me want to start stocking up on more ammo....

Ha, maybe that will also clearly show the line between spiritual and not. I wounder what a fully functionable enlightened human is like compaired to an upgraded cyborg. Speaking of enlightenment as monks claim you can see 360 degrees without moving your head, make precise movements made on senceing objects around you, smelling every plant in a forest from outside of it. Ofcourse i have no proof humans can do that, but thats the chinese rumor, myths of flying people also. Personaly, i think its possible, though can be impossible to obtain unless you go about a certain way, what way, i don't know. I know monks say you can meditate your whole life, but that dosen't mean you'll acheive it, or someone can in one moment acheive it, or different levels of it.

Yoshiyuki Sankai and his cyborg suits...
http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=16557822001