From: H C (lphege@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Oct 10 2005 - 23:32:07 MDT
******
One last thing: The shape of emergence of computer intelligence is not
going to be anything like our intuitions that we draw from the emergence of
biological intelligence. Our biological intelligence emerged very slowly
by incremental changes, methodically exploring not the whole space of
what's possible to compute, but rather the space of what computations are
sufficient to keep a monkey alive long enough to fuck. Electronic
intelligence is not going to emerge gradually through generations of whole
cohesive system. It's not a baby.
What the new intelligence is going to do is totally blast the roof off of
one domain after another. They beat us first at adding numbers; they
completely utterly crushed us. They didn't rest on their laurels, though;
they crush us more & more at adding numbers every year. They got better
than us at Chess, at first just barely, but they have gotten better every
year (faster, in fact, than the rate of hardware advances alone). Voice
recognition software is on track to become truly fluid over the next few
years, but it will not stop there; computers will be able to make out a
whisper from across the room, pick out one voice out of a chattering crowd
of thousands, understand the world's heaviest Scottish accent, etc. They
will be able to record every conversation they hear and index it against
every other conversation they have ever heard. They'll know exactly when
the last time they heard the word "mulberry" was.
On one side of the transition there are just humans who think in human
ways, and on the other side is the impossible-to-conceive strangeness of
true intelligence. What's interesting is what's inbetween; it's not, as
you might first guess, a being with intelligence which is uniformly
improved to half way between the Human and Power levels. Instead what's
between the two is a creature who has half of the Powers-- who can compute
fractals instantly, record sounds and play them back, use Bayesian spam
filters, communicate verbally over continental spans, access information
about essentially any subject on a moment's notice, etc-- a creature trying
to survive an astounding and unexpected metamorphosis, by which I mean, of
course, us.
*****
As far as computer intelligence goes, it appears to me you are drastically
underestimating the impact. (Yes, the rabbit hole goes much much deeper, in
fact- its something of black hole, or ... *cough* Singularity... hehe).
The fact that an intelligence is on a computer is much more than just
computer abilities being "added on" to human abilities. It isn't just
human+computer, but human^computer. Each bit of computer ability that is
added, also totally overhauls and modifies the human side. Intuitive
algorithms (like tying your shoe) could be modified to have independent
awareness (ie. information searching, processing, intelligent analyzing,
etc). You could transfer yourself into an "accelerated simulation" where
every 24 hours of subjective time is equal to a nanosecond- thus living
multiple lifetimes in the span of one second. Matrix-uploading of knowledge
will be possible. You could spend an entire simulated lifetime constructing
a single email, no harm no problem- especially because you could modifty
yourself to not get bored by the incredibly long journeys. Every tiny piece
of "real-time" empirical observation could be analyzed in a million
different ways for years at a time, and compared and analyzed against the
entirety of public human knowledge- all in less than a second- in fact, all
in less than one *subjective* second, because the entire process could be
both *really* intelligent and automated on a PURELY intuitive level.
Try to imagine a real-time conversation between two people with these
faculties, Alice, and you will see humans have barely even stuck their toe
into the rabbit hole.
--Th3Hegem0n
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