When Will The Singularity Happen
This is a much discussed topic. Some people look to rates of AcceleratingChange to guess when The Singularity will happen. Others think that The Singularity will have to be engineered and it will happen when they program AGI or develop IA. Still others forsee a BiologicalSingularity or a NanotechSingularity. Most people, though, agree that it will happen, by some method, between tomorrow and 2100. For example, proponents of AcceleratingChange claim that the Singularity will happen around 2040 or 2050, while AGI developers predict a date of 2025 or sooner.
My report of Singularity speculation neglects my distate for it. People are excited to debate the question of when the Singularity will happen, but they could instead be using that time to make the Singularity happen. Also, the speculation is largely pointless, since the range of possible dates admitted by anyone giving serious thought to the question is so wide as to provide almost no useful information other than that particular person's desired Singularity arrival date.
The following is copied from Wiki Interview With Eliezer/The Singularity:
I believe your target date for achieving the Singularity is 2010, with a lower bound of 2005 and an upper bound of 2020. Most predictions place the date considerably higher than this. Why do you believe it can be achieved so quickly? What do you know or claim to know that others do not? What are others not factoring into their estimates?
Well, making predictions about the Singularity is always going to be a wild guess. For example, there's an interesting little set of investigations quoted in Tversky and Kahneman's famous paper on decision theory. (in the section on Anchoring, near the end) It's pretty horrifying stuff. This is why I'm reluctant to put too much weight on Singularity ETAs. The upshot is that in some studies, 30% of the actual realizations of a variable will fall outside of the 98% confidence intervals of the experts. The way this happens is that people pick what seems to them like a reasonable figure, and then revise it downwards to get a lower bound, and upwards to get an upper bound. It turns out that this does not work very well as a method. I produced my so-called "90% confidence interval" for the Singularity, 2005-2020, before I'd read about this particular study. Guess how I produced it. Now, if you'd asked me for a *98%* confidence interval on the Singularity; then after I was done laughing, I would have said "Sometime between now and the rest of eternity", and apparently, 30% of the actual realizations of this variable would have fallen outside of this estimate even so. Anyway, while it may be nice to have nice, concrete-sounding figures like 2005-2020, one should not put too much confidence on this. It doesn't disturb me much that the range I cite is out of the range cited by others. After all, one way of viewing the results of this experiment is that if you are *truly* well-calibrated, then at least 30% of your estimates should lie outside of other people's 98% confidence bounds, though I doubt that would work very well as a pragmatic heuristic. Anyway, what does remain true is that my wild guesses are, on the whole, somewhat earlier than other people's wild guesses. The reason for this is that I see certain technologies as having synergetic interactions with other technologies, or synergetic interactions internally. I think that most of the long-range estimates are based on seeing "civilization" as driving "technological progress", and not enough of seeing "technological progress" driving "technological progress". I think that there are some technologies which, once developed, make other things happen faster. For example, Kurzweil looks at Moore's Law and says, "Human-equivalent AIs get developed in 2030... then in 2040 they'll be 1000 times as fast" - I may be misquoting him on dates - while I say, "Human-equivalent AIs get developed... everything goes out the window", so the reason I tend to place the Singularity at an earlier timeframe is that I see a lot of interactions between technologies, and I think that the technologies which first trigger the subsequent rapid sequences of cause and effect are likely to be developed in this time range. The other reason to put the Singularity in this period is because that's around how long I think it may take to finish an AI project if SIAI does it, taking into account the range of how much work there is to be done, the range of how difficult it might be, and the range for how much Moore's Law will make things easier, but in the end, the moral is that if you try to put nice little brackets on the Singularity, Tversky and Kahneman will be laughing at you from the sidelines. (Actually, I think the specific reference cited by Tversky and Kahneman is Alpert & Raiffa 1969.)
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I'm of the belief that the Singularity will occur much later than is widely believed. Can Human-Equivelant AI be developed within the next few years? Of course it will. Will it be developed within the next several years? Probably. Will it be used to build better human-equivelant AI? I doubt it. Why? Because that HEAI is probably going to be developed by Microsoft for usage in the XBox 360 2. Perhaps that particular scenario is improbable, but the Average Joe would probably call the Singularity improbable. In either case, HEAI very well might be developed by non-Singularity affiliated orginizations or, worse, corporations. If that happens, Singulitarians will probably have to wait their turn, due to laws and such, until HEAI becomes widespread enough that it can be used. Or, on the other side of the coin, what if HEAI doesn't get developed for several years? What if technology reaches a certain level and general humanity is satisfied, and decides to spend the next few decades doing all of the things they can with the computing power that they have, rather than expend resources on development? Simple; no Singularity. For a really long time. Or, from the point of view of the bored person sitting at the table flipping the coin, (please pardon my penchant for metaphors), who cares about whether or not some dude invents HEAI when there's Claytronics and personal jet planes to worry about? Does the Average Joe care if that sort of merchandise will be as easy as a fax machine to produce when Singularity hits? Of course not. Does the Average Joe care that sitting around reading Business 2.0 will only result in brilliant minds spending more time arguing about whether hovercars are plausible than just inventing a hovercar already? Nope. So... yeah. That's just about it. I'm going off to read the rest of the SL4 Lexicon.
--Angelica Klosky
I don't follow your reasoning.
Assuming that you are correct about Microsoft developing HEAI for the next XBOX, why do you claim that they would not use this AI to help develop even better AI? Is it because "designing a better AI" is not an ability that this AI was designed to have?
Also, why do you believe that laws would be put in place to prevent anyone else from developing their own AI, once the first HEAI is developed? Why do you believe that these laws would actually succeed in preventing everyone in the whole world from secretly trying to develop their own AI?
The part about Singularitarians having to "wait their turn until HEAI becomes more widespread that it can be used" also doesn't make sense. What do you mean by "waiting their turn"? What do you mean by "becomes more widespread that it can be used"?
There's also the problem that the term "Human-Equivalent" is misleading. See Human Equivalent General Intelligence.
About your next point, even if technology does reach a level where humanity is satisfied, this will not change the mission of the Singularity Institute. As long as there is the threat of someone developing an unFriendly AI, either accidentally or on purpose, it will still be critically important for humanity to protect itself from this threat. The best way, and perhaps the only way, to protect against the threat of unFriendly AI is by creating a Friendly AI. I realize that this claim requires proof. There really should be a Wiki Page or webpage somewhere devoted entirely to proving this point, but I currently don't know of any such page.
Of all the things you just said, the only part that seemed plausible to me was your claim that most of humanity won't care about the Singularity, and that this will cause the Singularity to happen later than is widely believed. Still, in order for the Singularity to happen, all that needs to happen is for one person or one group to create a self-improving AI, and there is no shortage of people who are trying to do so. Currently, the only group that is spending any significant amount of effort in ensuring that the AI that they create is Friendly, and that the Singularity that they cause is a good one, is SIAI, but that is a separate issue. I do agree that the Singularity would happen sooner if more people were interested in making it happen, but I don't see why the fact that most people aren't paying attention to the Singularity would cause it to occur much later than is widely believed.
--observer
I.... am also confused. What I wrote made more sense to me while I was writing it...
And... I suddenly realize that a lot of what I was saying was incoherent garbage, after all.
And... I suddenly feel guilty about disrespecting SIAI.
And... I wouldn't be surprised if somebody deleted all the stuff I just said.
But it still seems likely to me that the Singularity is farther off than we think. Although I no longer feel like examining why. Angelica Has Spoken.
--Angelica Klosky
That's okay, no harm was done. One major advantage of posting to the Wiki, instead of posting to the mailing list, is that if you say something that you want to take back, you can just change it or delete it at any time.
I don't think you disrespected SIAI, and I don't see any reason for you to feel guilty. You may feel embarrassed by having written nonsense, but I don't think you need to feel too guilty about it.
For now, I don't plan to delete what you wrote, but you are of course welcome to delete it or rewrite it. In fact, I even give you my permission to erase what I wrote here, in case you want to remove all traces of what you wrote.
You're still new at this. Most of the stuff I wrote when I first started posting to this Wiki was incoherent garbage, and I ended up deleting or rewriting most of it. In fact, I still rarely write anything that I don't find myself wanting to delete a year later.
You may want to check out Singularity Writing Advice, Learn How To Write, and Tips For Writing Productivity.
I prefer not to make any guess as to when the Singularity will happen, by the way.
--observer
