will machines outsmart man

8/3/2019 Will Machines Outsmart Man

1/3


2/3

Intel and they were able to reinvent the CMOS transistor using new materials." Intel is

now looking beyond 2020 at photonics and quantum effects such as spin. "The arc of

Moore's law brings the singularity ever closer."

Judgment day

Belief in an approaching singularity is not solely American. Peter Cochrane, the former

head of BT's research labs, says for machines to outsmart humans it "depends on almost

one factor alone - the number of networked sensors. Intelligence is more to do with

sensory ability than memory and computing power." The internet, he adds, overtook the

capacity of a single human brain in 2006. "I reckon we're looking at the 2020 timeframe

for a significant machine intelligence to emerge." And, he said: "By 2030 it really should

be game over."

Predictions like this flew at the summit. Imagine when a human-scale brain costs $1 -

you could have a pocket full of them. The web will wake up, like Gaia. Nova Spivack,

founder of EarthWeb and, more recently, Radar Networks (creator of Twine.com),

quoted Freeman Dyson: "God is what mind becomes when it has passed beyond the

scale of our comprehension."

Listening, you'd never guess that artificial intelligence has been about 20 years away for

a long time now. John McCarthy, one of AI's fathers, thought when he convened the

first conference on the subject in 1956, that they'd be able to wrap the whole thing up in

six months. McCarthy calls the singularity, bluntly, "nonsense".

Even so, there are many current technologies, such as speech recognition, machine

translation, and IBM's human-beating chess grandmaster Deep Blue, that would have

seemed like AI at the beginning. "It's incredible how intelligent a human being in front

of a connected computer is," observed the CNBC reporter Bob Pisani, marvelling at how

clever Google makes him sound to viewers phoning in. Such advances are reminders

that there may be valuable discoveries that make attempts at even the wildest ideas

worthwhile.

Dharmendra Modha, head of the cognitive computing group at IBM's Almaden researchlab, is leading a "quest" to "understand and build a brain as cheaply and quickly as

possible". Last year, his group succeeded in simulating a rat-scale cortical model - 55m

neurons, 442bn synapses - in 8TB memory of a 32,768-processor IBM Blue Gene

supercomputer. The key, he says, is not the neurons but the synapses, the electrical-

chemical-electrical connections between those neurons. Biological microcircuits are

roughly essentially the same in all mammals. "An individual human being is stored in

the strength of the synapses."

Smarter than smart

Modha doesn't suggest that the team has made a rat brain. "Philosophically," he writeson the subject, "any simulation is always an approximation (a kind of 'cartoon') based

on certain assumptions. A biophysically realistic simulation is not the focus of our

work." His team is using the simulation to try to understand the brain's high-level

computational principles.

But computational power is nothing without software. "Would the neural code that

powers human reasoning run on a different substrate?" the sceptical science writer John

Horgan asked Kurzweil, who replied: "The key to the singularity is amplifying

intelligence. The prediction is that an entity that passes the Turing test and has

emotional intelligence ... will convince us that it's conscious. But that's not a


3/3

2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

philosophical demonstration."

For intelligence to be effective, it has to be able to change the physical world. The MIT

physicist Neil Gershenfeld was therefore at the summit to talk about programmable

matter. It's a neat trick: computer science talks in ones and zeros, but these are

abstractions representing the flow or interruption of electric current, a physical

phenomenon. Gershenfeld, noting that maintaining that abstraction requires increasing

amounts of power and complex programmning, wants to turn this on its head. What if,

he asked, you could buy computing cells by the pound, coat them on a surface, and run

programs that assemble them like proteins to solve problems?

Gershenfeld is always difficult for non-physicists to understand, and his video of cells

sorting was no exception. Two things he said were clear. First: "We aim to create life."

Second: "We have a 20-year road map to make the Star Trek replicator."

Twenty years: 2028. Vernor Vinge began talking about the singularity in the early 80s

(naming it after the gravitational phenomenon around a black hole), and has always put

the date at 2030. Kurzweil likes 2045; Rattner, before 2050.

Turning back time

These dates may be personally significant. Rattner is 59; Vinge is 64. Kurzweil is 60,

takes 250 vitamins and other supplements a day, and believes some of them can turn

back ageing. If curing all human ills will be a piece of cake for a superhuman

intelligence, then the singularity carries with it the promise of immortality - as long as

you're still alive when it happens.

It is in this connection between the singularity and immortality, along with the idea that

sufficiently advanced technology can solve every problem from climate change to the

exhaustion of oil reserves, that gives the summit the feel of a religious movement.

Certainly, James Miller, assistant professor of economics at Smith College, sounded

evangelical when he reviewed how best to prepare financially. He was optimistic,

reviewing investment strategies and assuming retirement funds won't be needed.

HowStuffWorks founder Marshall Brain, by contrast, explained why 50 million people

will lose their jobs when they can be replaced by robots. "In the whole universe, there is

one intelligent species," he said. "We're in the process of creating the second intelligent

species."

The anthropologist Jane Goodall may disagree. She sees a different kind of singularity -

the growing ecological devastation of Africa - and worries about the disconnection

between human minds and hearts. "If we're the most intellectual animal," she said,

"why are we destroying our only home?"

If Goodall's singularity comes first, the other one might never happen at all - one of

those catastrophes that Vinge admits as the only thing he can imagine that could stop it.

will machines outsmart man

Documents