2010 TheSingularityAPhilosophicalAna
- (Chalmers, 2010) ⇒ David Chalmers. (2010). “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis.” In: Journal of Consciousness Studies, 17(9-10).
Subject Headings: Technological Singularity.
Notes
Cited By
2011
- (McDermott, 2011) ⇒ Drew McDermott. (2011). “Response to “The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis”.” In: ...
- QUOTE: I agree with David Chalmers about one thing: it is useful to see the arguments for the singularity written down using the philosophers’ signature deductive framework, in which controversial premises are made explicit. If all concur that the form of the argument has been captured, then they can get down to the brass tacks of refuting or rebutting the numbered premises. To give away my inclinations up front, I tend to disagree with Chalmers about the prospects for the singularity, agree about uploading, and agree with some of his conclusions about controlling the singularity, and disagree with others. …
… And last, let me say why I think it would be a pity for too many sm art people to devote time and mental effort to thinking about the Singularity, which is that there are other possible events, unambiguous catastrophes, with higher probability. The most likely one, the one that re ally scares me, is an environmental collapse followed by a nuclear war as the survivors quarrel over the remaining resources. I can vividly picture this happening within the lifetime of some of the people reading this, and if not yours, then your and my children’s . I can picture them being refugees fighting for survival — or dead — amidst the ruins of civilization. So I think most of our resources and energy should be directed toward the problems of resource management and nuclear disarmament.
- QUOTE: I agree with David Chalmers about one thing: it is useful to see the arguments for the singularity written down using the philosophers’ signature deductive framework, in which controversial premises are made explicit. If all concur that the form of the argument has been captured, then they can get down to the brass tacks of refuting or rebutting the numbered premises. To give away my inclinations up front, I tend to disagree with Chalmers about the prospects for the singularity, agree about uploading, and agree with some of his conclusions about controlling the singularity, and disagree with others. …
Quotes
Abstract
What happens when machines become more intelligent than humans? One view is that this event will be followed by an explosion to ever-greater levels of intelligence, as each generation of machines creates more intelligent machines in turn. This intelligence explosion is now often known as the 'singularity'.
The basic argument here was set out by the statistician I. J. Good in his 1965 article “Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine”:
- Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. So if it is itself designed by humans, it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. By similar reasoning, this next machine will also be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than itself. If every machine in turn does what it is capable of, we should expect a sequence of ever more intelligent machines.[1]
This intelligence explosion is sometimes combined with another idea, which we might call the “speed explosion”. The argument for a speed explosion starts from the familiar observation that computer processing speed doubles at regular intervals. Suppose that speed doubles every two years and will do so indefinitely. Now suppose that we have human-level artificial intelligence designing new processors. Then faster processing will lead to faster designers and an ever-faster design cycle, leading to a limit point soon afterwards.
The argument for a speed explosion was set out by the artificial intelligence researcher Ray Solomonoff in his 1985 article “The Time Scale of Artificial Intelligence”.[2] Eliezer Yudkowsky gives a succinct version of the argument in his 1996 article “Staring at the Singularity”:
- “Computing speed doubles every two subjective years of work. Two years after Artificial Intelligences reach human equivalence, their speed doubles. One year later, their speed doubles again. Six months - three months - 1.5 months … Singularity.”
The intelligence explosion and the speed explosion are logically independent of each other. In principle there could be an intelligence explosion without a speed explosion and a speed explosion without an intelligence explosion. But the two ideas work particularly well together. Suppose that within two subjective years, a greater-than-human machine can produce another machine that is not only twice as fast but 10% more intelligent, and suppose that this principle is indefinitely extensible. Then within four objective years there will have been an infinite number of generations, with both speed and intelligence increasing beyond any finite level within a finite time. This process would truly deserve the name “singularity”.
Of course the laws of physics impose limitations here. If the currently accepted laws of relativity and quantum mechanics are correct — or even if energy is finite in a classical universe — then we cannot expect the principles above to be indefinitely extensible. But even with these physical limitations in place, the arguments give some reason to think that both speed and intelligence might be pushed to the limits of what is physically possible. And on the face of it, it is unlikely that human processing is even close to the limits of what is physically possible. So the arguments suggest that both speed and intelligence might be pushed far beyond human capacity in a relatively short time. This process might not qualify as a “singularity” in the strict sense from mathematics and physics, but it would be similar enough that the name is not altogether inappropriate.
The term “singularity” was introduced[3] by the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge in a 1983 opinion article. It was brought into wider circulation by Vinge’s influential 1993 article “The Coming Technological Singularity” and by the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s popular 2005 book The Singularity is Near. In practice, the term is used in a number of different ways. A loose sense refers to phenomena whereby ever-more-rapid technological change leads to unpredictable consequences.[4] A very strict sense refers to a point where speed and intelligence go to infinity, as in the hypothetical speed/intelligence explosion above. Perhaps the core sense of the term, though, is a moderate sense in which it refers to an intelligence explosion through the recursive mechanism set out by I. J. Good, whether or not this intelligence explosion goes along with a speed explosion or with divergence to infinity. I will always use the term “singularity” in this core sense in what follows.
One might think that the singularity would be of great interest to academic philosophers, cognitive scientists, and artificial intelligence researchers. In practice, this has not been the case.[5] Good was an eminent academic, but his article was largely unappreciated at the time. The subsequent discussion of the singularity has largely taken place in nonacademic circles, including Internet forums, popular media and books, and workshops organized by the independent Singularity Institute. Perhaps the highly speculative flavor of the singularity idea has been responsible for academic resistance.
I think this resistance is a shame, as the singularity idea is clearly an important one. The argument for a singularity is one that we should take seriously. And the questions surrounding the …
- ↑ Scenarios of this sort have antecedents in science fiction, perhaps most notably in John Campbell’s 1932 short story “The Last Evolution”.
- ↑ Solomonoff also discusses the effects of what we might call the “population explosion”: a rapidly increasing population of artificial AI researchers.
- ↑ As Vinge (1993) notes, Stanislaw Ulam (1958) describes a conversation with John von Neumann in which the term is used in a related way: “One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
- ↑ A useful taxonomy of uses of “singularity” is set out by Yudkowsky (2007). He distinguishes an “accelerating change” school, associated with Kurzweil, an “event horizon” school, associated with Vinge, and an “intelligence explosion” school, associated with Good. Smart (1999-2008) gives a detailed history of associated ideas, focusing especially on accelerating change.
- ↑ With some exceptions: discussions by academics include Bostrom (1998; 2003), Hanson (2008), Hofstadter (2005), and Moravec (1988; 1998). Hofstadter organized symposia on the prospect of superintelligent machines at Indiana University in 1999 and at Stanford University in 2000, and more recently, Bostrom’s Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford has organized a number of relevant activities.
References
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| Author | volume | Date Value | title | type | journal | titleUrl | doi | note | year | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 TheSingularityAPhilosophicalAna | David J. Chalmers | The Singularity: A Philosophical Analysis | 2010 |