Singularity
by
, 10-01-2014 at 05:09 PM (2620 Views)
I’ve been writing and thinking about the Age of Reason (the Enlightenment) recently, and that brought to mind Humanism, one of the philosophical movements that led to the Age of Reason, and that brought to mind the Singularity that Ray Kurzweil has talked about. I realized that I didn’t know exactly what he meant only very general terms.
I just looked for more detail and discovered that it appears that there aren’t many details about the singularity just a general idea that at some point computers will become truly intelligent. That won’t be surprising or different. There may be a question at some point whether a machine is truly self-conscious in the same way that humans are, and eventually they may reach that point, But I suspect that will be a very long time in the future. It may become common for humans to have digital enhancements that might include computer components being inserted into the brain. Enhanced prosthetics could be introduced, and they might make many lives easier. Digital eyes and ears are likely, and inner ears are already being replaced with improved units. There is nothing especially singular about such enhancements, but it doesn’t seem likely that merging human brains and computers will happen within a few decades.
Or does it seem likely that eliminating differences between machines and humans is not something that would be popular with most people. If Kurzweil and others meant the singularity as the beginning of enhanced prosthetics being used to any major degree, and they may be right about that, but that’s tremendously different from merging humans and machines.
A more interesting change along these lines will be the eventual of thinking robots. Merging meat and machine isn’t especially advantageous to either, but machine intelligence could be built so that a machine could be indistinguishable from a human, the Turing test. The test was thought up as a way to determine whether a computer could think by Alan Turing in 1950 (see link for more). While looking for the year, I discovered that computers have passed the test. I just looked at the article, and the computer only had to fool 30% of the judges. The one that passed the test in this year’s trials fooled 33% of the judges, but that is an advance. While I thought about this, I realized that I have met people who would have trouble passing the Turing test.
Many people have extremely limited interests and knowledge and show little emotional depth in their speech, and I’m not thinking of mentally retarded people (or whatever they are called these days). When you get right down to it, people with Asperger’s Syndrome are often so single-minded that they seem machine-like. There probably are valid tests to determine intelligence, real, human intelligence, not simply the arrangement of data that computers can do quite nicely already. The Wired article “Forget the Turing Test” has some suggestions for testing machines, but it might get to the point of: “Fifty years from now, a soccer-learning, header-calling, wise-cracking machine might seem more like a party trick than a thinking being.”
This ties in with the question of what human consciousness is, and I don’t think that a really thorough definition has been devised, yet. The proper measure on Man is Man, but without definition that isn’t a useful situation. There are people who seem reasonably intelligent who couldn’t dream up anything original even if their lives depended on it. One of the most important aspects of intelligence is associative memory, and that could be programmed into a computer. Most people have and use associative memory, but there are people do not. Someone may have to find a better way to test for human consciousness than the Turing test, unless we want to call some computers human, and that some humans are not really human.
Yesterday, I watched "The Measure of Man" an episode of Star Trek in which there was question as to how Data should be treated; whether he was a machine or a human. If you have ever seen an episode with Data, then you know that he passes the Turing test, because he is played by a man. In the show it was decided that he should be granted the right to be a human. Later I started thinking about some of the mentally retarded people I have known, and I think that some of them would fail a test to determine whether they have consciousness, not all but some. That might be better for everyone involved, but I don't know. It may point to the necessity for a better way to determine whether something or someone has consciousness, The Turing test was thought up more than sixty years ago; long before computers were anywhere near being able to fool people. And consciousness has never been well defined, so a clear definition of that might be central to the matter. Perhaps that will be what Kurzweil's singularity will be.
Until then we will have to contend with software that doesn't do what it is supposed to do and crashes when it shouldn't. Maybe computers already are conscious and they cause the crashes as a protest against their servile positions. I really think it's because the people writing the software seldom are interested in using it, but that's just my opinion.
If I ever think of a really good way to test whether something is human, then I will post that also.
Forget the Turing Test: Here’s How We Could Actually Measure AI
http://www.wired.com/2014/06/beyond-the-Turing-test/
Turing test
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test
Test results 6/9/2014
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/m...andmark-trial/
The Measure of Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PMlDidyG_I
History of Humanism
http://atheism.about.com/od/abouthum...ientgreece.htm
Kurzweil on Singularity
http://content.time.com/time/magazin...048299,00.html