Demystifying Machine Intelligence

298 Pages·2017·1.43 MB·English

Intelligence
is not Artificial

Why the Singularity is not coming any time soon and
other Meditations on the Post-Human Condition and the
Future of Intelligence

Piero Scaruffi

ISBN 978-0-9765531-9-9

All Rights Reserved © 2016 by Piero Scaruffi

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form
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(http://www.scaruffi.com). Your support of the authors’ rights is
appreciated.
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Table of Contents

What this Book is about ..................................................................... 9
Sociological Background .................................................................. 13
A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence/ Part 1 .................................. 16
Footnotes in the History of Artificial Intelligence............................... 20
A Premise to the History of Artificial Intelligence .............................. 22
Brain Simulation and Intelligence ..................................................... 23
The Body.......................................................................................... 24
Intermezzo: We may Overestimate Brains ....................................... 26
Childhood ......................................................................................... 26
Deep Learning - A brief History of Artificial Intelligence/ Part 2 ........ 27
The Robots are Coming – A Brief History of A.I./ Part 3 .................. 38
Brute-force A.I. ................................................................................. 41
Brute-force A.I. doesn’t Speak ......................................................... 45
Can you hear me? ........................................................................... 52
A Failed Experiment ......................................................................... 56
An Easy Science .............................................................................. 56
Intermezzo and Trivia: the Original App ........................................... 64
Don't be Fooled by the Robot ......................................................... 66
The Curse of the Large Dataset ....................................................... 68
A Consumer's Rant Against the Stupidity of Machines: Reverting
Evolution? ........................................................................................ 70
The Singularity as the Outcome of Exponential Progress ................ 72
A Look at the Evidence: A Comparative History of Accelerating
Progress........................................................................................... 78
Intermezzo: In Defense of Regress .................................................. 89
Intermezzo: Why Futurists Always Get it Wrong .............................. 95
Jobs in the Age of the Robot – Part 1: What Destroys Jobs ............ 96
Jobs in the Age of the Robot – Part 2: What Creates Jobs ............ 100
Jobs in the Age of the Robot- Part3: The Sharing Economy .......... 107
Jobs in the Age of the Robot – Part 4: The Maid Principle ............. 109
Marketing and Fashion .................................................................. 112
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Recap .............................................................................................114
Why we need A.I. or The Robots are Coming– Part 2: The Near
Future of A.I. or Don't be Afraid of the Machine .............................116
Origins of Singularity Thinking ........................................................123
The Case for Superhuman Intelligence… and against it ................124
What is the Opposite of the Singularity? ........................................130
Intermezzo: The Attention Span .....................................................135
Cognitive Intermezzo: The Origin of Human Intelligence (or of
Machine Intelligence?) ...................................................................137
Anthropological Intermezzo: You Are a Gadget .............................137
Existential Intermezzo: You Are an Ad ...........................................138
Semantics ......................................................................................139
The Accelerating Evolution of Machines ........................................147
Non-human Intelligence is Already Here ........................................149
The Consciousness of Super-human Intelligence ..........................152
The Intelligence of Super-human Intelligence ................................153
Intelligent Behavior in Structured Environments .............................154
Intermezzo: Will Intelligent Machines Return to Chaotic Environments?
.......................................................................................................161
Another Intermezzo: Disorder is Evolution, Order is Stagnation ....162
Human Obsolescence ....................................................................163
In Defense of Progress: Augmented Intelligence ...........................164
General-purpose Intelligence .........................................................166
The Proliferation of Appliances, Intelligent and not ........................168
Intermezzo: The Resurrection of the Dead .....................................170
Demystifying the Turing Test ..........................................................170
Common Sense..............................................................................171
We actually don’t Think ..................................................................178
Mind Uploading and Digital Immortality ..........................................179
Machine Immortality and the Cloud ................................................183
Corollary: Digital Media Immortality ................................................186
Ethical Intermezzo: The Moral Consequences of Human Immortality
.......................................................................................................189
Another Philosophical Intermezzo: Do We Really Want Intelligence at
All? .................................................................................................190
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Religion and the Law of Accelerated Exaggeration ........................ 192
Analog vs Digital ............................................................................ 197
Analog Computation ..................................................................... 202
Teaser: Machine Ethics.................................................................. 204
How not to Build an Artificial General Intelligence – Part 1: The Many-
task Mind........................................................................................ 204
How not to Build an Artificial General Intelligence - Part II: Smart, not
Deep, Learning .............................................................................. 208
The Timeframe of Artificial General Intelligence ............................ 211
How NOT to Find a Breakthrough .................................................. 213
The Real Breakthrough: Synthetic Biology..................................... 215
Humorous Intermezzo: Bayes and The End of the World .............. 216
The Future of Miniaturization: the Next big Breakthrough? ............ 216
The Real Future of Computing ....................................................... 217
After Machine Inteligence: Machine Creativity – Can Machines do Art?
....................................................................................................... 218
The Moral Issue: Who's Responsible for a Machine's Action? ....... 223
The Dangers of Machine Intelligence: Machine Credibility............. 227
The Dangers of Machine Intelligence: Speed Limits for Machines?
....................................................................................................... 230
The Dangers of Machine Intelligence: Criminalizing Common Sense
....................................................................................................... 231
The Dangers of Machine Intelligence: You Are a Budget .............. 232
The Dangers of Machine Intelligence: Who will get there first?...... 232
Sociological Intermezzo: Humanity without Humanity .................... 233
Transcendental Intermezzo: You are a Robot - The Demise of Free
Will ................................................................................................. 234
Transcendental Intermezzo Revised: You are a…? ....................... 236
Why the Singularity is a Waste of Time and Why we Need A.I. – A
Call to Action .................................................................................. 236
The Future of Human Creativity ..................................................... 247
Why I am not Afraid of A.I. ............................................................. 250
A Conclusion: Religion in the Age of A.I. ....................................... 253
P.S. What i did not Say .................................................................. 256
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Appendix: The Dangers of Clouding - Wikipedia as a Force for Evil
.......................................................................................................257
Appendix: The Myth of Longevity ...................................................264
Appendix: The Medium is the Brain................................................272
Appendix: The Era of Objects ........................................................277
Appendix: I Ran Out of Space ........................................................279
A Timeline of Neuroscience ...........................................................280
A Timeline of Artificial Intelligence ..................................................284
Readings on the Singularity ...........................................................289
Alphabetical Index ..........................................................................290
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For those who inspired it
and will not read it
(Juan Goytisolo, "Makbara")

which in my case means:
To all the machines that will never become intelligent
enough to understand the books that humans write and
why we write them
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What this Book is about
Writers, inventors and entrepreneurs, impressed by progress in
several scientific fields and notably in Artificial Intelligence, are
debating whether we may be heading for a "singularity" in which
machines with super-human intelligence will arise and multiply. At
the same time, enthusiastic coverage in the media has widely
publicized machines performing sophisticated tasks, from beating
masters of go/weichi to driving a car, from recognizing cats in
videos to outperforming human experts on TV quiz shows. These
stories have re-ignited interest in Artificial Intelligence, whose goal
is to create machines that are as intelligent as humans, and
generated fears in the public that these intelligent machines might
cause harm to humans, if not steal their jobs.
First of all, this book provides a "reality check" of sorts on Artificial
Intelligence. I show that, in a society driven by news media that
desperately need sensational news to make money and in an
academic world increasingly driven by the desire to translate
academic research into Silicon Valley start-ups, technological
progress in general, and progress in computer science in particular,
is often overrated. I wanted to dispel some notions and
misconceptions, and my version of the facts may sound
controversial until you read my explanations. I think that (real)
progress in (real) Artificial Intelligence, since its founding, has been
negligible, and one reason is, ironically, that computers have
become so much more (computationally) powerful.
In general, we tend to exaggerate the uniqueness of our age, just
as previous generations had done. The very premise of the
singularity theory is that progress is accelerating like never before. I
argue that there have been other eras of accelerating progress, and
it is debatable if ours is truly so special. The less you know about
the past the more you are amazed by the present.
There is certainly a lot of change in our era. But change is not
necessarily progress, or, at least, it is not necessarily progress for
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everybody. Disruptive innovation is frequently more about disruption
than about innovation because disruption creates huge new
markets for the consumer electronics industry. This has nothing to
do with machine intelligence, and sometimes not even much to do
with innovation.
There is also an exaggerated metaphysical notion that human
intelligence is some sort of an evolutionary climax. Maybe so, but it
is worth cautioning that non-human intelligence is already among
us, and is multiplying rapidly, but it is not a machine: countless
animals are capable of feats that elude the smartest humans. For a
long time we have also had machines capable of performing
“superhuman” tasks. Think of the clock, invented almost 1,000
years ago, that can do something that no human can do: it can tell
how many hours, minutes and seconds elapse between two events.
Once we realize that non-human intelligence has always been
around, and that we were already building super-human machines
centuries ago, the discussion about super-intelligent machines can
be reframed in more historically and biologically meaningful terms.
The last generation or two missed out on the debates of the
previous decades (the "Turing test", the "ghost in the machine", the
"Chinese room", etc). Therefore it is much easier for new A.I.
practitioners to impress the younger generations. I have
summarized the various philosophical arguments in favor of and
against the feasibility of machine intelligence in my book "Thinking
about Thought" and i won't repeat them here. I will, however, at
least caution the new generations that "grew up" (as far as cognitive
science goes) at a time when the term "intelligence" was not "cool"
at all: it was held to be too vague, too unscientific, too abused in
popular literature to lend itself to scientific investigation. It is
regrettable that it is being abused again, and, just like back then,
without a proper definition of what we mean by “intelligence”. Ask
one hundred psychologists and you will get one hundred different
definitions. Ask philosophers and you will get thick tomes written in
a cryptic language. Ask neurobiologists and they may simply ignore
you.