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timtyler comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong
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Wow good stuff. Especially liked yours not linked above:
http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_intelligence_explosion_is_happening_now/
I called the bluff on the exponential itself, but I was willing to believe that crossing the brain-equivalent threshold and the rise of machine intelligence could produce some kind of sudden acceleration or event. I felt The Singularity wasn't going to happen because of exponential growth itself, but might still happen because of where exponential growth takes us.
But you make a very good case that the whole thing is bunk. I especially like the "different levels of intelligence" point, had not heard that before re: AI.
But I find it still tempting though to say there is just something special about machines that can design other machines. That like pointing a camcorder at a TV screen it leads to some kind of instant recursion. But maybe it is similar, a neat trick but not something which changes everything all of a sudden.
I wonder if someone 50 years ago said "some day computers will display high quality video and everyone will watch computers instead of TV or film". Sure it is happening, but it's a rather long slow transition which in fact might never 100% complete. Maybe AI is more like that.
Machines designing machines will indeed be a massive change to the way phenotypes evolve. However it is already going on today - to some extent.
I expect machine intelligence won't surpass human intelligence rapidly - but rather gradually, one faculty at a time. Memory and much calculation have already gone.
The extent to which machines design and build other machines has been gradually increasing for decades - in a process known as "automation". That process may pick up speed, and perhaps by the time machines are doing more cognitive work than humans it might be going at a reasonable rate.
Automation takes over jobs gradually - partly because the skills needed for those jobs are not really human-level. Many cleaners and bank tellers were not using their brain to its full capacity in their work - and simple machines could do their jobs for them.
However, this bunches together the remaining human workers somewhat - likely increasing the rate at which their jobs will eventually go.
So: possibly relatively rapid and dramatic changes - but most of the ideas used to justify using the "singularity" term seem wrong. Here is some more orthodox terminology:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Revolution
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Revolution
I discussed this terminology in a recent video/essay:
http://alife.co.uk/essays/engineering_revolution/