Once again Kurzweil has hit the mainstream media: this time an article on the BBC. It’s currently the “most emailed” article on the website, so it’s getting a good share of attention. Although he influenced me strongly many years ago, I’m not a big fan of his writings since 2000. In my view his visions of the future are now so extreme that they actually create sceptics among those who didn’t really have much of an opinion previously. This is a problem because if society doesn’t take the possibility of relatively near term AGI seriously, then it’s not going to direct resources towards the extremely difficult issues that surround this.
That aside, this event provides another opportunity to sample the responses to these sorts of ideas among a wider audience. Slashdot is an interesting place to observe this because they are a group who are enthusiastic about technology, but otherwise seem pretty mixed. There are a few supportive comments, but also plenty of comments like this:
“It is not too much of an overstatement to say that the field of AI has not significantly progressed since the 1980’s.” [here]
The comment gets more positive as it goes on (he suggests evolution to be the solution), but still, it’s this often repeated statement that AI research isn’t making any progress.
I find this kind of weird, because as I read the journals and go to conferences what I see is a constant flow of new ideas and results, ranging from the philosophical and theoretical down to record breaking results on all kinds of practical problems. Of course some problems are not progressing as fast as others and you can always point to those that are not going anywhere fast. But that’s a bit like saying that medicine is not going anywhere because a cure to cancer, AIDS and the common cold still haven’t arrived at your local pharmacy.
Personally, I find the rate of progress in AI to be so fast that it leaves me feeling dizzy. I struggle to keep up with all the interesting new ideas. In my subjective judgement, my expected (in a statistical sense) date for human level AGI is 2025, and I put my standard deviation at about 7 years. This estimate has been consistent since I first started asking myself this question in 1999, shortly after joining Webmind. I expect basic AGI to exist 5 years prior to human level AGI, and a primitive proof of concept AGI to exist perhaps 5 years before that (though I think very few people will recognise it as such when it appears). It will be interesting to see whether my beliefs remain consistent over the next 5 years.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Stephen // Feb 18, 2008 at 6:43 am
I suspect very much that the comments are merely made from ignorance. Most of the Shashdotters have no contact with the AI research community, and at most perhaps a single AI class (in the 80’s), so their point of view is simply not informed.
I do tend to agree that AI has a publicity problem. It’s not making visible progress, in the public eye, and probably won’t do so until those AGI proof of concepts hit the media in 10 years or so.
2 Roko // May 6, 2008 at 12:25 am
“In my subjective judgement, my expected (in a statistical sense) date for human level AGI is 2025, and I put my standard deviation at about 7 years.”
- wow! That’s a very tight distribution. I’d personally have to put a much bigger standard deviation in there: it might be really difficult to build a computer program that passes the Turing Test…
presumably human level AGI in 2025 +- 10 years or so means a virtual certainty of superintelligence and all that by 2040. Well, we shall see!
3 Shane Legg // May 6, 2008 at 9:46 am
Well, if 2040 comes and goes I’ll stick to my mean and standard deviation and just claim that I was using a Student’s t-distribution with very few degrees of freedom
I don’t know about passing the Turing test. That could take 10 years longer as the machine would have to be very good at faking being a human. Once a machine can do this it will already have significantly greater than human intelligence.
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