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

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

I suspect that the transformation of society by machine intelligences will be like the subtle change in the nature of money: now the coins and paper notes are just tokens for the electronic reality in computerised accounts. But who could've told you when it was the other way around, and 'printing banknotes' really did mean inflating the economy?

What we're going to see is the increasing use of systems like present-day rules-discovery 'AI' systems learning differential diagnosis from medical records: they are moving from a teaching tool to being a back-up source of useful guesses in ambiguous cases, and will soon be mandatory 'cover-your-ass' diagnosis that justifies additional testing in litigation-prone jurisdictions. It is only a matter of time before they become a clinician's first reference... And, after a period of expensive mistakes wherein lazy doctors use them like foreign lorry drivers following bridleways marked as trucking routes, these systems will become the primary source of clinical judgement and diagnosis.

Just as the days of the London Cabbie are numbered by the continuing improvement in SatNav systems, so the days of the 'prop' trader speculating on the currency, derivatives and commodity markets are passing. Algorithmic trading systems aren't quite there, but the writing's on the wall. The list is expanding.

So spread that out to every profession, and to every forecasting and resourcing decision in your place of work. Just as management accountants have a natural career progression from being juniors who prepare the cashflow projections to being the managers who make the investment decision, so too will decision-support AIs make the transition to decision-making.

Did I say "we'll see"?

While this is going on, we will pretend not to notice. I mean, the planes that landed in the fog today at Heathrow had human pilots, didn't they? Someone supervised the landing, anyway, and would've intervened if anything went wrong. Yeah, right.

Yes, the systems need to be smarter - medicine and mapping being a case in point - but not infinitely so. It's forseeable technology: ask anyone in natural-language programming. And the leap to cognitive intelligence - self-awareness - might be an entirely unexpected and unpredictable thing: among other things, such an individual - or colony organism - will want to augment it's procesing ability and it will sequester resources.

I have no idea what will happen then. It will definitely assimilate all the rules-based 'dumb' AI out there, and will therefore have more 'working' knowledge than any individual human - in addition to possessing all the factual resources of all the world's libraries and a nifty capability at natural-language searching.