Artificial Intelligence and the year 2047

[ciphergoth]

Clarification: By "smart" I mean general smarts: the sort of smarts that allow you to do things like pass a Turing test or solve open problems in nanotechnology. Obviously computers are ahead of humans in narrow domains like playing chess.

NB: your guess as to what will happen should also be one of your guesses about what might happen - thanks! This applies to wriggler, ablueskyboy, thekumquat, redcountess, thehalibutkid, henry_the_cow and cillygirl. If you tick only one option (which is not the last) in the first poll, it means you think it's the only possible outcome.

[Poll #1103617]

And of course, I'm fascinated to know why you make those guesses. In particular - I'm surprised how many people think it's likely that machines as smart as humans might emerge while nothing smarter comes of it, and I'd love to hear more about that position.

Comments

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

it depends what you mean by 'smart'

Yes! Absolutely my position. And we could argue about what it means for a human or a machine to be smart, but one thing I do feel confident in predicting is that people in 40 years' time will come to a very different set of answers. 40 years ago takes us back to perhaps the heyday of AI, and our ideas now about artificial and human intelligence are quite different.

My main problem with the options: I'd say that machines are already smarter than people, and this has already transformed everything in the world.

Leaving aside the abstract stuff, none of the physical developments that enable our current world to happen - agriculture, production, travel, communications - are possible at anything like the current scale without smart machines to do the required thinking for us. The C19th clerical revolution enabled the industrial revolution; the C20th IT revolution has enabled an even more profound transformation of society.

The rate of change is increasing. (I'd guess it's still positive down to third differentials.) I'm not a Singularity person, but any trend that can't continue won't. That can't. At least, I can't think it can - but maybe we can invent machines that will enable us to do that thinking.

I didn't predict how profoundly the world has changed in the last twenty years. I wasn't a lot better at predicting what was going to happen over the course of the last year. (I wasn't quite so wrong, but only because things can't change so substantially over just a single year.) I don't think I'll do any better over a longer timescale.

Except ... ask me again in 39 years, and machines will have got smarter so that I can give a much better answer!