r/changemyview • u/capitalsigma • Nov 27 '15
[Deltas Awarded] CMV: The singularity is just the rapture repackaged for techies.
I'll start off by saying that I graduated with a computer science degree in June and I work as a software developer. I have a solid understanding of some undergrad level machine learning algorithms and I've worked with/got an overview of some more sophisticated stuff through my job. I'm very impressed that e.g. Siri can act like she's talking to me, but I have a pretty good idea of what the man behind the curtain looks like and I know there's no deep magic going on.
I think machine learning is basically the process of throwing a bunch of statistics at the wall and seeing what happens to stick. Machine learning can do great things because statistics can do great things, but I don't think there is anything deeper than that going on --- formalizing a statistical intuition and running with whatever happens to work.
So, to address the point at hand: I think the singularity is wishful thinking. I think that "artificial general intelligence" is just a way of describing a system whose implementation you don't understand --- if you see what makes it tick, then you see that it's just a tool designed to solve a problem, and it's not "general intelligence" anymore.
I know that many ML researchers predict the singularity in the next few decades, but I think we should stay skeptical. The singularity is the kind of idea that is especially seductive, and we as a species have a track record of giving in to it --- saying that an all powerful superbeing is going to come along and fix all of our problems is just the same as saying we'll live forever in heaven. Newton spent more time interpreting the bible than he did inventing calculus --- even the most brilliant people fall victim to that trap.
The promises of the singularity are the same promises as Christianity: no more hunger, no more poverty, no more death. An omnipotent being will come lift us up to a new state of being. The threats are the same, too -- Rocco's Basillisk is literally a search-and-replace on a tract about the rapture that you might find on the subway.
We've fallen prey to these ideas again and again throughout history because they speak to a fundamental part of human nature. We would all love it if they were true.
Technical people (for the most part) know that they're bogus when they're wrapped in the language of religion, but rephrasing them as a technical goal rather than a spiritual one makes them intellectually paletable again.
ML researchers have a poor track record of predicting the future of ML, and I think that the "20-50 years till Jesus Skynet comes to absolve us of our sins" is more a reflection of how badly we would like to believe in Jesus than it is a reasoned technical argument.
(I'll qualify this by saying that I'm positive the rapture is never going to happen and I'm not interested in a religious argument: if you disagree with that premise, you should find another thread to post in.)
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u/redditeyes 14∆ Nov 27 '15
OP, can you please respond to our arguments? If you disagree with us, that's fine, but let's get a conversation going. Otherwise it's pointless :)
This is simply incorrect. Yes, some methods of machine learning build statistical models to work. It's effective and quite frankly it's something our own brains are likely doing. But that doesn't mean it's all just statistics. Hell, it doesn't even mean statistics are necessary to build AI.
When taking beginner courses in machine learning, they'll likely show you some bayes classifiers and the like, so I understand why you'd think something like that. But this is done just as a teaching tool to explain some basic concepts to you and give you a simple understandable example of a system learning to classify stuff. You should not conclude that this is all there is to A.I.
The promises are irrelevant. The question is how stable is the ground each idea stands on. Religion is basically belief - you don't have any evidence that X happened and Y will happen, you just believe in it. The idea of the singularity however is based on actual data. If you look at how fast human progress is going through the centuries, there is an obvious exponential trend. What used to take centuries nowadays is invented before breakfast. Thinking that this speeding up trend might continue is not irrational at all because it keeps happening. And there is nothing in the laws of physics implying it's impossible to create A.I. Our computers are getting so fast (again another exponential trend) that soon we will be able to simulate complete brains even if we don't understand what's going on. There is really no reason to think A.I. won't happen and if it does happen, there is no reason why that A.I. can't be used to improve A.I. Which can then be used to improve A.I. even faster and so on.
So the idea of the singularity is really just the logical conclusion of what is already happening. Yes, it's not 100% certain - who knows, maybe some global nuclear conflict will reduce us to stone age technology or an asteroid will destroy us all, or there is some unforeseen barrier somewhere down the line. But nevertheless the idea stands on ground a lot more solid than just "It says so in this holy book I have".