Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn't Near
The Singularity Summit approaches this weekend in New York. But the Microsoft cofounder and a colleague say the singularity itself is a long way off.
Paul G. Allen and Mark Greaves 10/12/2011
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Futurists like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil have argued that the world is rapidly approaching a tipping point, where the accelerating pace of smarter and smarter machines will soon outrun all human capabilities. They call this tipping point the singularity, because they believe it is impossible to predict how the human future might unfold after this point. Once these machines exist, Kurzweil and Vinge claim, they'll possess a superhuman intelligence that is so incomprehensible to us that we cannot even rationally guess how our life experiences would be altered. Vinge asks us to ponder the role of humans in a world where machines are as much smarter than us as we are smarter than our pet dogs and cats. Kurzweil, who is a bit more optimistic, envisions a future in which developments in medical nanotechnology will allow us to download a copy of our individual brains into these superhuman machines, leave our bodies behind, and, in a sense, live forever. It's heady stuff.
While we suppose this kind of singularity might one day occur, we don't think it is near. In fact, we think it will be a very long time coming. Kurzweil disagrees, based on his extrapolations about the rate of relevant scientific and technical progress. He reasons that the rate of progress toward the singularity isn't just a progression of steadily increasing capability, but is in fact exponentially accelerating—what Kurzweil calls the "Law of Accelerating Returns." He writes that:
So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century—it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity ... [1]
By working through a set of models and historical data, Kurzweil famously calculates that the singularity will arrive around 2045.
This prediction seems to us quite far-fetched. Of course, we are aware that the history of science and technology is littered with people who confidently assert that some event can't happen, only to be later proven wrong—often in spectacular fashion. We acknowledge that it is possible but highly unlikely that Kurzweil will eventually be vindicated. An adult brain is a finite thing, so its basic workings can ultimately be known through sustained human effort. But if the singularity is to arrive by 2045, it will take unforeseeable and fundamentally unpredictable breakthroughs, and not because the Law of Accelerating Returns made it the inevitable result of a specific exponential rate of progress.
Kurzweil's reasoning rests on the Law of Accelerating Returns and its siblings, but these are not physical laws. They are assertions about how past rates of scientific and technical progress can predict the future rate. Therefore, like other attempts to forecast the future from the past, these "laws" will work until they don't. More problematically for the singularity, these kinds of extrapolations derive much of their overall exponential shape from supposing that there will be a constant supply of increasingly more powerful computing capabilities. For the Law to apply and the singularity to occur circa 2045, the advances in capability have to occur not only in a computer's hardware technologies (memory, processing power, bus speed, etc.) but also in the software we create to run on these more capable computers. To achieve the singularity, it isn't enough to just run today's software faster. We would also need to build smarter and more capable software programs. Creating this kind of advanced software requires a prior scientific understanding of the foundations of human cognition, and we are just scraping the surface of this.
This prior need to understand the basic science of cognition is where the "singularity is near" arguments fail to persuade us. It is true that computer hardware technology can develop amazingly quickly once we have a solid scientific framework and adequate economic incentives. However, creating the software for a real singularity-level computer intelligence will require fundamental scientific progress beyond where we are today. This kind of progress is very different than the Moore's Law-style evolution of computer hardware capabilities that inspired Kurzweil and Vinge. Building the complex software that would allow the singularity to happen requires us to first have a detailed scientific understanding of how the human brain works that we can use as an architectural guide, or else create it all de novo. This means not just knowing the physical structure of the brain, but also how the brain reacts and changes, and how billions of parallel neuron interactions can result in human consciousness and original thought. Getting this kind of comprehensive understanding of the brain is not impossible. If the singularity is going to occur on anything like Kurzweil's timeline, though, then we absolutely require a massive acceleration of our scientific progress in understanding every facet of the human brain.
But history tells us that the process of original scientific discovery just doesn't behave this way, especially in complex areas like neuroscience, nuclear fusion, or cancer research. Overall scientific progress in understanding the brain rarely resembles an orderly, inexorable march to the truth, let alone an exponentially accelerating one. Instead, scientific advances are often irregular, with unpredictable flashes of insight punctuating the slow grind-it-out lab work of creating and testing theories that can fit with experimental observations. Truly significant conceptual breakthroughs don't arrive when predicted, and every so often new scientific paradigms sweep through the field and cause scientists to reëvaluate portions of what they thought they had settled. We see this in neuroscience with the discovery of long-term potentiation, the columnar organization of cortical areas, and neuroplasticity. These kinds of fundamental shifts don't support the overall Moore's Law-style acceleration needed to get to the singularity on Kurzweil's schedule.
The Complexity Brake
The foregoing points at a basic issue with how quickly a scientifically adequate account of human intelligence can be developed. We call this issue the complexity brake. As we go deeper and deeper in our understanding of natural systems, we typically find that we require more and more specialized knowledge to characterize them, and we are forced to continuously expand our scientific theories in more and more complex ways. Understanding the detailed mechanisms of human cognition is a task that is subject to this complexity brake. Just think about what is required to thoroughly understand the human brain at a micro level. The complexity of the brain is simply awesome. Every structure has been precisely shaped by millions of years of evolution to do a particular thing, whatever it might be. It is not like a computer, with billions of identical transistors in regular memory arrays that are controlled by a CPU with a few different elements. In the brain every individual structure and neural circuit has been individually refined by evolution and environmental factors. The closer we look at the brain, the greater the degree of neural variation we find. Understanding the neural structure of the human brain is getting harder as we learn more. Put another way, the more we learn, the more we realize there is to know, and the more we have to go back and revise our earlier understandings. We believe that one day this steady increase in complexity will end—the brain is, after all, a finite set of neurons and operates according to physical principles. But for the foreseeable future, it is the complexity brake and arrival of powerful new theories, rather than the Law of Accelerating Returns, that will govern the pace of scientific progress required to achieve the singularity.
So, while we think a fine-grained understanding of the neural structure of the brain is ultimately achievable, it has not shown itself to be the kind of area in which we can make exponentially accelerating progress. But suppose scientists make some brilliant new advance in brain scanning technology. Singularity proponents often claim that we can achieve computer intelligence just by numerically simulating the brain "bottom up" from a detailed neural-level picture. For example, Kurzweil predicts the development of nondestructive brain scanners that will allow us to precisely take a snapshot a person's living brain at the subneuron level. He suggests that these scanners would most likely operate from inside the brain via millions of injectable medical nanobots. But, regardless of whether nanobot-based scanning succeeds (and we aren't even close to knowing if this is possible), Kurzweil essentially argues that this is the needed scientific advance that will gate the singularity: computers could exhibit human-level intelligence simply by loading the state and connectivity of each of a brain's neurons inside a massive digital brain simulator, hooking up inputs and outputs, and pressing "start."
However, the difficulty of building human-level software goes deeper than computationally modeling the structural connections and biology of each of our neurons. "Brain duplication" strategies like these presuppose that there is no fundamental issue in getting to human cognition other than having sufficient computer power and neuron structure maps to do the simulation.[2] While this may be true theoretically, it has not worked out that way in practice, because it doesn't address everything that is actually needed to build the software. For example, if we wanted to build software to simulate a bird's ability to fly in various conditions, simply having a complete diagram of bird anatomy isn't sufficient. To fully simulate the flight of an actual bird, we also need to know how everything functions together. In neuroscience, there is a parallel situation. Hundreds of attempts have been made (using many different organisms) to chain together simulations of different neurons along with their chemical environment. The uniform result of these attempts is that in order to create an adequate simulation of the real ongoing neural activity of an organism, you also need a vast amount of knowledge about the functional role that these neurons play, how their connection patterns evolve, how they are structured into groups to turn raw stimuli into information, and how neural information processing ultimately affects an organism's behavior. Without this information, it has proven impossible to construct effective computer-based simulation models. Especially for the cognitive neuroscience of humans, we are not close to the requisite level of functional knowledge. Brain simulation projects underway today model only a small fraction of what neurons do and lack the detail to fully simulate what occurs in a brain. The pace of research in this area, while encouraging, hardly seems to be exponential. Again, as we learn more and more about the actual complexity of how the brain functions, the main thing we find is that the problem is actually getting harder.
The AI Approach
Singularity proponents occasionally appeal to developments in artificial intelligence (AI) as a way to get around the slow rate of overall scientific progress in bottom-up, neuroscience-based approaches to cognition. It is true that AI has had great successes in duplicating certain isolated cognitive tasks, most recently with IBM's Watson system for Jeopardy! question answering. But when we step back, we can see that overall AI-based capabilities haven't been exponentially increasing either, at least when measured against the creation of a fully general human intelligence. While we have learned a great deal about how to build individual AI systems that do seemingly intelligent things, our systems have always remained brittle—their performance boundaries are rigidly set by their internal assumptions and defining algorithms, they cannot generalize, and they frequently give nonsensical answers outside of their specific focus areas. A computer program that plays excellent chess can't leverage its skill to play other games. The best medical diagnosis programs contain immensely detailed knowledge of the human body but can't deduce that a tightrope walker would have a great sense of balance.
Why has it proven so difficult for AI researchers to build human-like intelligence, even at a small scale? One answer involves the basic scientific framework that AI researchers use. As humans grow from infants to adults, they begin by acquiring a general knowledge about the world, and then continuously augment and refine this general knowledge with specific knowledge about different areas and contexts. AI researchers have typically tried to do the opposite: they have built systems with deep knowledge of narrow areas, and tried to create a more general capability by combining these systems. This strategy has not generally been successful, although Watson's performance on Jeopardy! indicates paths like this may yet have promise. The few attempts that have been made to directly create a large amount of general knowledge of the world, and then add the specialized knowledge of a domain (for example, the work of Cycorp), have also met with only limited success. And in any case, AI researchers are only just beginning to theorize about how to effectively model the complex phenomena that give human cognition its unique flexibility: uncertainty, contextual sensitivity, rules of thumb, self-reflection, and the flashes of insight that are essential to higher-level thought. Just as in neuroscience, the AI-based route to achieving singularity-level computer intelligence seems to require many more discoveries, some new Nobel-quality theories, and probably even whole new research approaches that are incommensurate with what we believe now. This kind of basic scientific progress doesn't happen on a reliable exponential growth curve. So although developments in AI might ultimately end up being the route to the singularity, again the complexity brake slows our rate of progress, and pushes the singularity considerably into the future.
The amazing intricacy of human cognition should serve as a caution to those who claim the singularity is close. Without having a scientifically deep understanding of cognition, we can't create the software that could spark the singularity. Rather than the ever-accelerating advancement predicted by Kurzweil, we believe that progress toward this understanding is fundamentally slowed by the complexity brake. Our ability to achieve this understanding, via either the AI or the neuroscience approaches, is itself a human cognitive act, arising from the unpredictable nature of human ingenuity and discovery. Progress here is deeply affected by the ways in which our brains absorb and process new information, and by the creativity of researchers in dreaming up new theories. It is also governed by the ways that we socially organize research work in these fields, and disseminate the knowledge that results. At Vulcan and at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, we are working on advanced tools to help researchers deal with this daunting complexity, and speed them in their research. Gaining a comprehensive scientific understanding of human cognition is one of the hardest problems there is. We continue to make encouraging progress. But by the end of the century, we believe, we will still be wondering if the singularity is near.
Paul G. Allen, who cofounded Microsoft in 1975, is a philanthropist and chairman of Vulcan, which invests in an array of technology, aerospace, entertainment, and sports businesses. Mark Greaves is a computer scientist who serves as Vulcan's director for knowledge systems.
[1] Kurzweil, "The Law of Accelerating Returns," March 2001.
[2] We are beginning to get within range of the computer power we might need to support this kind of massive brain simulation. Petaflop-class computers (such as IBM's BlueGene/P that was used in the Watson system) are now available commercially. Exaflop-class computers are currently on the drawing boards. These systems could probably deploy the raw computational capability needed to simulate the firing patterns for all of a brain's neurons, though currently it happens many times more slowly than would happen in an actual brain.
UPDATE: Ray Kurzweil responds here.
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theradicalmoderate
48 Comments
You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Allen and Greaves are resting their argument against the singularity on two fundamental premises:
1) The human brain and human cognition are too complex to simulate without major breakthroughs in neuroscience.
2) If you can't achieve the singularity using brain simulation, algorithmic AI breakthroughs are needed, and AI progress historically has been far less than exponential.
But hidden in both of these arguments is the premise that singularity can only occur when human intelligence can be engineered. It's far more likely that the inevitable accumulation of thousands of smart objects that don't even attempt to mimic human cognition will lead to systems that have inhuman intelligence, with the ability to outperform humans on so many different tasks that the intellectual contributions of all but the most creative humans will simply be unnecessary.
I'd like to offer a different definition of the singularity: It's the point at which the productivity growth rate permanently surpasses the economic output growth rate. Once that occurs, the economy must continuously shed (human) jobs.
Today, we're shedding jobs in the developed world, and especially in the US, because our unskilled and semi-skilled labor is priced too high, sending work to the developing world, where labor is considerably cheaper. That trend won't continue forever; at some point prices come up in the developing world while they decline here, until prices meet somewhere in the middle, then slowly inflate.
But meanwhile, productivity improvements from automation are accelerating. These improvements don't require human cognition, and many of them barely require AI. (As Charles Stross recently wrote, "It's not AI if you can understand what it's doing.") These automation improvements are causing productivity to accelerate. The point where the productivity rate crosses the output rate is only years away. After that, the world is a very, very different place. Sounds like a pretty good definition for the singularity to me.
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ddendukuri
1 Comment
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
I agree with your analysis. This is a better definition of the singularity and will have a profound effect on all of us in our lifetimes. The question then is that will the economic surplus generated by the gains in productivity be enough for all of us to survive (i.e. eat, stay healthy and be entertained) without doing any 'real' jobs. Is that a desirable situation?
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MATR
94 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
I've been wondering the same thing for many years now. The problem of course is that you can automate a great deal of mundane tasks, and hand production over to robot factories for better, higher quality, lower cost production. Most intellectual tasks such as accounting can be handled by computers. Most service tasks can be handled by automated voice systems (though at present they are rather awful, that need not be the case, and they could be improved), etc.
In the end the question becomes "What will all of the surplus people do to earn a living?"
The answer to that is very difficult to fathom. And begs another question... for whom is all of this automation being conducted if not for the purchasing public... but who will buy the products when no one is needed to do the work, and therefore produces no value, and therefore cannot earn money because money is an exchange of value? What will become of the masses of people who have no value in the economy because their productive use has been superseded by machines? Economy works that people gain money according to their value, and that value flows around the market aggregating capital where it can be put to productive use. However, this assumes that everyone can provide some value to the economy. When they can’t because the means of production are automated, then they are out of work, and have no income. There are several possible results.
One is that people will not earn money, but be given credits by the system to spend. The problem is that this runs against the nature of economy, which is you gain income according to your value. If you have no value, then the only place you can gain income is from someone who does have value. And that would be the so-called 1% being protested in major cities around the country. Things have not come to the point where the 1% are the *only* ones who have value/income, but the article is in regards to future conditions, not present. So eventually, and perhaps quite soon, the 1% will be the only working members of society. So the solution in this case is to tax the 1% sufficiently to pay everything for the masses who have no jobs, but still want and need to buy things. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul! The 1% will literally be paying everyone else so they can buy the products they produce. Somehow, this just seems quite wrong. I don’t know for sure, but I strongly suspect it cannot be sustained. It runs too counter to common sense economics.
What could it be? Ah. I see. The masses will have no work, and without work they will be prone to restless mob-like activity. Unless they are entertained, fed, and provided for in every way they will feel disenfranchised and angry. One step further and the political class will have an enormous ability to rally the mob on the grounds that the entire system is “unequal”. Why? Well, the reason the 1% got where they are is because they wanted to make a lot of money, and to maximize their profits and beat their competition they automated significantly in order to lower costs of production. Makes sense. But what happens when the masses of the Unworking see the vast wealth of the 1% and their politicians who represent them (the Leftists) argue, rant and rail that it’s all “unfair” that the 1% have jets and fancy cars and mansions, while the masses must live in modest two bedroom houses with small cars? The mob will roar and rage and since they have no jobs, no responsibility, and are inclined to be restless and somewhat angry anyway… they may just go ahead and burn the Factories down. Look at Britain recently. Tip of the ice berg? Could be!
It’s fair to ask, what good will all the automation in the world do when the mobs burn down the factories? The answer to that, of course, is Automated Military Guardians to protect the factories, obviously. Terrorism? No problem. Automated facial recognition, and body motion-emotion detector systems will show the Robot Guardians immediately who is going to do some unauthorized vandalism and open fire with Taser Banks set on stun. Or Kill. Robot warriors will be the 1%’s security. So what will the mob do to vent it’s ever increasing rage? It will in all likelihood go after the 1% directly. As we are now seeing the beginning signs of in NYC with the Occupy Wall Street protesters marching uptown to the mansions of the super wealthy. When will that turn violent? This year? Next year? In 5 years? No one can say for sure. It could be tomorrow morning.
In the end the Great Ones, the high and the mighty Industrialists, the 1% who own the production will have to sequester themselves away into communities where the mobs cannot get at them. An island here, a fortress there... all will be safe for the 1%. Unfortunately they will soon discover, this is really, in fact, no way to live. They will discover that they live in a huge prison called Planet Earth, on which they have vastly restricted freedom because the mobs will have at them at every opportunity.
Let’s not forget as well that their computer systems will be flawed, due to the decades of poor computer development practices, and so even far away in the Swiss Alps, behind their huge stone barriers... they will still be subject to the predations of hackers. There will be, in fact, no place for them to hide. And so what happens when the Industrialists find themselves living on Prison Earth, with the seething mobs circling their fortresses, having nothing better to do but riot, and plot, and wait for the precious day when they can catch the 1% off their guard, or hack into their Robot Army and turn their mechanical behemoths against their fleshy Overlords?
It would be a weird, regrettable, and sadly not entirely improbable outcome if things keep going in the current direction.
That is one possible scenario. We can all hope it does not get like that. What other possibilities are there?
Another one is to follow the example of Titus the one of the wise Emperors of Rome. When an inventor came to him with the first steam engine, the Emperor asked, “what can you do with it?”. The Inventor replied, quite joyfully no doubt, “why you can build machines to cut down forests, and build giant aqueducts! There is no limit to what the machines powered by steam can do!” The wise Emperor stood on his balcony overlook the vast wheat fields, forests, and cities of his domain, and concluded that he should lock the Inventor away, and hide the machine for all time. When he was asked why he did such a thing, he wisely noted that the machines would replace the workers, who would then be left idle, and with nothing to do they would become restless, easily agitated, and so destroy the world. He decided that outcome would not be in the best interests of either the common man, or the aristocracy, or humanity at large as it would inevitably lead to universal disaster. He was wise.
So that is another option. Do away with automation in favor of manual production in order to avoid the consequences that would follow when everything is automated. To keep people working is better than maximizing efficiency or profits.
That is another option, but one that probably requires a wise Emperor at the beginning of the process to execute against. At this point the option of turning off technology seems rather remote. We can possibly mitigate, perhaps delay, but we can no longer avoid the inevitable. Another solution is very likely required.
Let’s try a Utopic fantasy solution then. How about a world in which automated factories are put in space so as to not pollute the planet? A world in which the masses do not produce products, but instead produce entertainment. The more entertaining they are, the more valuable. The planet becomes filled with people who sing and dance, do sports, tell stories, run games, and otherwise entertain each other, and this forms the basis of the economy, while the machines build the products that people buy.
Still problems. What about people who are simply not very entertaining? Not everyone is a genius, an artist, or a story teller. It also does not solve the problem of the need for human inspiration… the feeling that untied we can move forward and keep our race growing and advancing? For that, I would suppose there is another option. Space. The final frontier. Exploration. We could build towards that. Another option, of course, is scientific advancement. While machines may be able to achieve vast powers of calculation… can we expect them to Think Outside of the Box? To come up with new and original ideas?
Unfortunately, perhaps, the answer is yes, we can. Already people are working on computers that write songs that sound nice, act like humans and tell stories, and from the prognostications regarding Singularity one gets the impression that the machine-mind will far exceed the limited capacity of the human mind.
Perhaps the machines will invite the humans to join them? There is a growing field of Biological-Computers that base their mechanisms on DNA. Will we fuse with the machines like the Borg? Or will we become Super-Beings with computer enhanced capabilities far beyond those of ordinary men?
The future indeed is unpredictable. I for one remain at this point optimistic. As in every era, there are bright spots and dark spots, and much gray in the middle. During the terrors of World War II there were young couples who fell in love, got engaged, and started families. There were beautiful sunrises, and fields of flowers. I choose, for myself, to look for love, for sunrises, and for flowering fields. And I hope that in the end, the beauty intrinsic in life will overcome the dark possibilities that lurk beyond the shadows of the horizon.
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theradicalmoderate
48 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
I can think of several different scenarios for how this all works out:
1) It won't happen: Maybe productivity growth can't exceed output growth. This is the classical economic prediction, because increased productivity implies cheaper goods and services, which causes everybody to buy more stuff, which causes output to grow faster than productivity. Unfortunately, I think there's a saturation point at which humans are unwilling to buy more stuff, because they're simply not getting any marginal return from nicer furniture, or tastier food, or healthcare that lets them live to be 900 instead of 800, or 25 hours of entertainment in a 24 hour day.
2) Hyper-consumerism: Maybe the reason that consumption saturation doesn't occur is because technology allows us to consume more and more with no upper bound or, alternatively, it gives us access to new realms of goods and services that are very expensive and require lots of human mediation. Health care comes to mind. But it seems that tech that turns us into hyper-consumers also turns us into hyper-producers, and we're back to the same old problem.
3) An adequately benign welfare state: If 75% of the population can be provided with healthy, happy (non-productive) lives for 25% of GDP, then the productive people (and their machines) can support the non-productive relatively painlessly. Note that individual humans aren't the only entities that pay taxes.
4) Everybody's a stockholder: If everybody owns a chunk of the automated companies that are producing all the wealth, then maybe they live off the dividends and capital gains spun off from those companies. The problem here is how to provide folks the capital to buy into the companies in the first place. Ultimately, I don't think this is a lot different than the benign welfare state; it's just another way to redistribute wealth from the productive to the unproductive. (NB: This isn't necessarily a bad thing when goods and services are sufficiently cheap.)
5) Torches and pitchforks: Too many angry, desperate, unproductive people become violent enough to degrade society to the point where productivity falls below growth, and the system stabilizes. Note that "stabilizes" in this context really means "collapses to a much lower-tech civilization."
6) Dramatically reduced human population: It's all well and good to posit a practical welfare state, or the mass equivalent of a bunch of trust fund babies, but these all strike me as transient conditions. Ultimately, people have babies because they perceive an economic advantage to having them, or because they believe that their kids will live better than they did. No advantage or aspirations, no kids. Then, as long as people actually die (which is probably open to question), maybe things finally stabilize at a lower population. The problem with this is that, in a world where half of everybody is of below-average intelligence (OK, OK: below-median intelligence), a lower population doesn't really change the balance between the haves and the have-nots.
7) Just don't go there: I'm about as rabid a free-market libertarian as you'll find anywhere, but given how grim most of the scenarios above are, I've recently started to wonder if Titus's solution might be the only way out of the problem. If we make it illegal for automation to displace humans, then we don't have a problem. Unfortunately, this is an insurmountably difficult collective action problem. Getting all countries to voluntarily cap their productivity is tantamount to getting them all to agree to stop competing with one another. Hey, it could happen...
8) Transcendence: Of course if Kurzweil is right, then we are the machines eventually, and we don't have to worry those pesky unproductive people--we'll just wire 'em up to be productive. Maybe this is ultimately the only way out of the problem. But I have to say that a lot of these scenarios offer an uncomfortably plausible solution to the Fermi Paradox.
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Mapou
357 Comments
The Coming Labor Crisis
One day soon, the public will wake up and realize that the current economic systems (capitalism, socialism and communism) are all unfair and flawed. The reason is that they are all based on human labor and, soon, AI will make human labor obsolete. These systems allow a few to benefit from the labor of many. They are all evil in this regard.
And by public, I don't mean just the unskilled masses. All the intellectuals, engineers and scientists (the same people who developed the intelligent machines) will also be out of work. The 1% cannot fight against an informed and determined public because the public, too, will make smart robots in order to defend themselves against the other guy's robots. All hell will break loose.
But it does not have to come to that. Millenia ago, there was a system based on the notion that human beings are territorial by nature. The entire productive land was divided among clans and their families. The rest was owned by the community and divided into parks, natural reserves, city land, etc. Land could be leased but not sold. Inflation was kept in check because the money supply was strictly tied to the average lease value of the land. The system even included a mechanism that automatically managed population growth based on production rates.
There is more to it than this, of course, but my point is that, to prevent a major catastrophe, the governments of the planet will have to drastically change their economic sytems before the problem becomes unmanageable.
Al Gore is harping about the threat of global warming to civilization but the much more pressing threat is that the value of human labor is coming to an end. There should be an international body set up as soon as possible to study this problem and suggest possible solutions. Somehow I don't think that the privileged few will embrace the new world order with enthusiasm.
PS. Just today I heard a story about California teachers protesting against automated web-based education because they see it as a threat to their livelihood. It's going to get worse, much worse.
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jasno
1 Comment
Re: The Coming Labor Crisis
I see your point, but even right now millions of people have jobs that do not relate to the essentials of life. 150 years ago, something like 95% of Americans were farmers, now it's only 3%. Clearly, we do not have 92% unemployment as a result. If machine technology takes more and more of our productive jobs, people will be freed to do other things - like make movies, music, games, or whatever. I guess the problem would be if it happens too fast for any one individual to adjust, but still, I think we'll be fine.
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CWDK2628
2 Comments
Re: The Coming Labor Crisis
Actually, what people will do when the old jobs are destroyed is addressed in Kurzweil's book. He prescribes what you say of moving on to other ventures until they are doing what they enjoy....he envisions lives of play. Given that the value of human labor for known life essential functions (farming, construction, engineering, software, medicine,, etc) will eventually go to 0, once the maintenance costs of running the system are covered.....we're good.
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jboily
1 Comment
Re: The Coming Labor Crisis
We are experiencing a paradigm shift, and maybe a singularity is already happening.
The humanity ways of operation are not going to be as it was before. Current economics principles will no longer work; some other society mode of operation will emerge.
Actually, we are already heading toward an other one of these paradigm shifts.. The humanity has gone trough 4 major paradigm shifts since it started, namely Tools and Fire (~300K y ago), Agriculture and animal domestication (~25K-10K y ago), emancipation of the masses (in the 1300 AD) and the industrialization revolution, globalization and medical advances in 1950. Each shift was accompanied with an increase of the world wide population caused by humanity improved productivity and changes in de way the society operate. A paradigm shift is deferent and should be distinguished from the emergence of new technologies. Actually I would argue that the paradigm shifts are the cause of the need for the technologies advances to occur, and the inventions of new technologies occur from these new needs. Obviously there is a positive feedback between the needs and the technologies, but the way we think need to change first before the need for the new technologies to be present.
We are currently going trough a fifth shift, namely the information age, causing extremely rapid changes in the way we operate. The world productivity rate of increase as surpassed the population growth rate a few years ago, meaning that technically, we should be able to feed everyone on Earth.
The singularities are happening fairly regularly but at an increasing rate, every 500 to 1000 billion man-years (the total sum of the worldwide population over time). The baby boom of the 1950 is about 200 Billion man-years ago.
The next paradigm shift coming is the advent of nanotechnologies, AI systems and so on. We are already seeing it happening, and we did not even have finish the information age shift yet.
I would define the singularity as the time when the society can no longer change and adapt to new paradigms shifts. The rate of technologies changes are so quick that the society mode of operation need to change within less then one generation. This has never happen before, and I am not sure if it is possible.
I would call this a singularity!
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patrickrael
1 Comment
Re: The Coming Labor Crisis
Regarding the comments about the coming labor crisis involving android robots, I think there is reason for concern that android robots will displace human labor significantly. I worked on a solution for this dilemma for 10 years, and I published that solution in my Penzar ebook in 2011: Chapter 8 - Utopia Androidia - The 14 laws of human and android symbiotic labor.
This solution creates a symbiosis of human and android labor where both benefit. It requires 14 legal laws to implement at a minimum. This solution is freely available at http://howtoandroid.com/penzar/#UtopiaAndroidia.
I include that solution below, sorry for the verbosity, but this way there's no need go to another website to see it. This is the same reply to Martin Fords discussion thread in singularityhub along similar lines.
In a nutshell: Humans need not stand idly by while market forces allow companies to replace us all with android robots. A system of laws, which we already use, can be applied to create a structure that is beneficial to a human and android symbiosis of labor. Here is that post:
FYI, I’ve solved the entire issue of android robots replacing human beings at their jobs. I have designed a symbiotic system of 14 laws which, when implemented, I claim creates a symbiosis. I published this last summer in my ebook Penzar, but this part is freely available at howtoAndroid.com/penzar/#UtopiaAndroidia (I created this website in 1999 before android was Google’s OS). I consider this issue solved now, I’ve moved on to Project Andros [to encode my mind into and android robot to create the R. Patrick Rael from Mr. Patrick Rael].
Here is most of chapter 8 Utopia Androidia, freely given here from Penzar. Look specifically at Law 12, the human right-of-way. A side-effect of this system of 1-to-1 human-android symbiotic labor is that your robot always works even when you are old, thus no need for Social Security nor pensions nor retirement savings plans. That was a side-effect, not an original goal of this system, I just happened to notice it after I designed this.
PENZAR – JOURNAL OF ADVANCED IDEAS (an ebook)
…
Chapter 8 Utopia Androidia
… significant discussion left out…
A SOLUTION: THE ANDROID LABOR PROXY HYPOTHESIS.
Definition: labor-proxy – noun; a 1-to-1 pairing of a human being with an android
labor unit. The robotic android worker half of a symbiotic pair. acronym – LPR, (Labor PRoxy), pronounced helper.
Prediction 1: Excessive human labor displacement will happen if android labor implementation is controlled by market forces only. There will be mass replacements of humans with android labor. Initially the androids will excel at easy tasks, then progress to be able to displace humans at more complex tasks. As we see from current non-android robot factories, competitive pressures drove many companies to roboticize significant parts of their factory floors. Factory robots now perform some of the jobs humans used to do. But there is no widespread system to create symbiotic pairs of humans and these factory robots to benefit the displaced human workers.
Hypothesis 1: The displacement of human workers in a market-driven android labor economy can be avoided many ways. One way is if a symbiotic society is made of human and android robot. Let the non-sentient android robot perform the mundane, tedious, monotonous, dull, boring work. Leave the creative work for the human being to make tasks for the robot. This is a very rough approximation that applies in different amounts to different jobs.
Hypothesis 2: A system of societal laws will be necessary and sufficient to organize a highly ordered labor system where humaniform robots can perform a substantial role as labor-proxy for human beings.
THE 14 LAWS OF HUMAN AND ANDROID SYMBIOTIC LABOR.
Definition: virtual labor-proxy – A virtual pairing of a human to virtual to a physical android robot. Decoupling the pair allows variability in association where that might be useful. The decoupling allows either the
virtual robot to remain constantly paired with the human and vary with physical robot, or the virtual robot can remain constantly paired with a robot and vary with the human.
Law 1: Work Week – All human participants in the Robotic Labor Proxy program have to work at least 8 hours per week, and have weekends off,
no excuses. Additionally people have vacations, holidays, etc, . . . .
Law 2: Participation – A human being may not Opt-Out of this program, but may simply decline to participate in the funding by the Labor Proxy. The Labor Proxy is bound to the human; nothing breaks the bond except final human death. The robot saves the salary if the human declines funding. There is no carry-over of funds. Any excess funds at the time of the humans death go into a fund pool for all android labor proxies.
Law 3: Right to Proxy – It is the right of all human beings to have a Robot Labor Proxy from the moment of birth until final death.
Law 4: Proxy Pays Taxes – The Android Proxy pays taxes equivalent to humans.
Law 5: Proxy Employed – The Android Proxy is always employed due to excellent work patterns of 23 hours/day, 365.25 days/year.
Law 6: Proxy Equal Salary – The Android Proxy has a salary equal to humans for the work performed.
Law 7: Non-Slavery Clause – Only non-sentient androids are allowed to be Labor Proxies. Sentient androids cannot be slaves by law.
Law 8: Golden Education – Recognizing the importance of education, all expenses of a human beings education plus stipend will be paid by
the LPR including the other costs that usually prevent one from continuing education, such as mortgage payments.
Law 9: Dispersal – The payments to the human are lifelong, not all at once. The funds have to last the humans lifetime.
Law 10: Control of Wages – Android Labor Proxies are in control of their wages. After all, they did the work. There is room for variability here: Plan A has the entire proxy salary going to the human half. Plan B has the proxy only paying for health and education of the human half.
Law 11: Mechanical Immunity – Android Labor Proxies are immune from legal challenges from any entity who might otherwise sue for financial
gain and ownership. Only sentient life forms can be sued, and a sentient robot cannot be a labor proxy by a prior law, therefore the LPR cannot be sued.
Law 12: Human Right of Way – No human being will be displaced by an Android Labor Proxy, nor will a competent human be denied a job already
occupied by an android. If a human is competent for a job and wants the job an android is performing, the human cannot be denied that job for any reason about the position already being filled. Therefore every job an android robot does must be instantly capable of supporting a
human being at that tasks, including the obvious necessities such as chair, desk, etc, where appropriate.
Law 13: Proxy Equality – The Global Equalization mechanism makes all Virtual Robot Labor proxies identical, even though the physical androids
may vary. This is necessary to eliminate tampering with androids and favoritism. A virtualization system is such that humans are actually paired with a virtual proxy, and the virtual proxy can be linked to varying physical robots at different times, but only one at a time. In this way a human isn’t associated with any specific physical robot, and in fact your physical robot association can change daily.
Law 14: No Proxy Shortage – There is never a shortage of Android Labor Proxy, nor an oversupply. Excess Labor Proxies are simply shut off until needed.
So, that's my solution. I don't claim it's the only solution, nor the best solution, but merely A solution. This pattern can spawn a variety of solutions similar to this.
If anyone cannot afford my ebook, I will provide a free pdf copy at their request to pmrael@aol.com.
-->Pat Rael
Reply
arpad
16 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
And in response:
1) History argues against the objection if only in the sense that productivity improvements result in new forms of consumption. Sure you can't use more then one bathroom at a time but what's convenience worth? When productivity improvements make two bathrooms a convenience that's within reach of a lot of people a lot of people will choose to enjoy that convenience. So convenience becomes what's "consumed". I'm ignoring the attraction of dominance displays implicit in having twenty bathrooms since that factor's always been with us and is a moving target.
2) See above.
3) Implicit in the rapid increase in productivity and already showing up here and there. The Hippies of the sixties, and welfare recipients, might easily be considered cases of society which is sufficiently productive to be able to support a significant population of non-productive individuals. It seems unlikely that the proportion of society that's supportable in that fashion will go down as productivity continues to rise.
4) Someone's been reading "Catch 22". Somehow, I don't think Milo Minderbinder's scam is a realistic basis for a real society. Maybe as technology advances the long-term thinking and discipline necessary to make individual stock ownership a widespread and successful phenomenon will occur but as of now, I don't see it.
5) As the cost of food, clothing, housing, entertainment, health care descend what would bring a pitchfork- and torch-bearing crowd together? Also, in a representative nation there's always a non-violent, and thus non-dangerous, means of displaying your unhappiness with the current state of affairs in the not-too-distant future. Most people are patient enough to wait for that opportunity.
6) Dramatically? Why? The trend of the last sixty years has been the fairly relentless improvement of the human condition. That means a brake on popularion growth resulting in, perhaps, a population peak but what would result in a dramatically lower population in the forseeable future?
7) Titus was an irresponsible authoritarian which is practically a redundency. The history of authoritarian regimes is slow economic growth and slow technical growth. A representative form of goverment precludes a high-handed, and quite often self-serving, dismissal of technological developments since no one's in a position to impose the sorts of arbitrary judgments Titus thought of as properly his due. So technological developments occur. The free market inevitably funds those technological developments since the productivity improvements result in profits. So, it's gonna happen whether you've got reservations or not.
8) Well, here's where the rubber hits the road. Where we're going is becoming increasingly obvious but what it'll look like when we arrive is anything but. Against that uncertainty is my paraphrase of Woody Allen's observation about the effect fame on his sex life - we'll be wrestling with a better class of problem.
Reply
Brian H
60 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
@arpad;
Re your point #6, population decline:
According to the always-accurate lowest edge of the low band of the UN Population Survey, the globe's population will peak and begin to slowly fall at just under 8 bn. by about 2035 or so. Mostly due to the 'wealth' effect.
Just to give a further data point to the projection, there's a micro-fusion project at LPPhysics.com you might like to look at. It's privately funded, and about 10-100X closer to break-even than any other (BTW, it's very "hot" fusion, >1 bn.° proton-boron aneutronic). If it reaches "unity" this winter as projected, within 5 yrs. licensed mfrs of small 5MW generators will be cranking them out world-wide. Costs are under 10% of best North American capital and output retail.
Essentially, cheap and abundant power everywhere 'forever'. Really changes a lot of calculations, no?
Reply
johnsawyercjs
8 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Interesting ideas. However, as far as violence and Occupy Wall Street, the police have already started that process, acting on orders that can ultimately be traced to many of the 1%, or at least many of the 5%. Hopefully it will remain one-sided.
Reply
Importem
2 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
that is a great comment and I agree wholeheartedly. Perhaps our world will move towards a "Star-Trek-ish" world (if you will) in that there will be no money and man helps his fellow man. Unfortunately i think the nature of man wouldn't allow for this and while some would embrace that, others would reject it and act on their greed. This would likely plunge us as a world into a greater dark age than that of the 5th ~13th centuries. Only now that there aren't so many monasteries, culture wouldn't be preserved the way it was in the middle ages. But that's a very pessimistic view. I think the most likely conclusion is that there will be no singularity and we wont have to worry about this.
Reply
Darly314
3 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Machines require humans, and human created tools to operate; humans functioned for centuries absent machines.
Reply
Lord Skelos
10 Comments
The nanobot approach
The second nanobots are perfected, we have access to any knowledge we desire about the world as we know it. Nanobots could literally perform any task we could imagine. Even true immortality. to accomplish this they would have to resemble echinoderms, such as sea urchins, except much more high-tech. That way they could work together and manipulate individual molecules, (more or less.) Eventually from the progress made with nanobots, one can only speculate how we will have evolved as humans.
Reply
not_bob_gai
3 Comments
Re: The nanobot approach
Even Eric Drexler recognized that nano technology of the level of sophistication you suggest is not possible without some form of artificial intelligence. The barriers to nano-bot solutions require many foundational discoveries prior to becoming reality one of which is a super-human AI intelligence to work out some of the physics. I will be standing in queue with you to get my nano-bots but I think that will be one of the final breakthroughs.
Reply
RealityBetraysU
2 Comments
Re: The nanobot approach
perfecting nanobot technology will only provide you with the monkey-wrench to access the bolts it will not provide you with the intelligence or programming code to know how to turn or apply the wrench. Scientists that tried to promote "evolution" theories found out once they could discern how complex the human cell and even mechanism's in the cell are difficult to design without a designer or intelligent code of a programmer to know how to put complex molecular-chemical codes like DNA-RNA without mega-intelligent design code or programmer to get simple single cell organisms to work without the design being already put together and designed in. Thus creating peptides by experimentally throwing chemicals together while controlling each step of the chemnical equation does not produce life only chemical bricks that maybe used in life, but the critical element is still missing intelligent design, this has to come from "GOD"or some other intelligent life. The argument that a million monkeys typing randomly on typewriters even for a trillion years will still not produce a classic novel or text; the bible, homer's Illilad and the Odyssey, nor War and Peace.You have to have intelligent design from somewhere built in for nanobots to able to "know what to do". Otherwise all you got is a good automated microscope.
Reply
Brian H
60 Comments
Re: The nanobot approach
I have a better model I call "Intelligent Self-Design". Once a genome or other evolving system happens on a bit of coding that "trims" the tree of possible mutations in a useful way, it has a hugely potent advantage. As these 'meta-rules' accumulate, they eventually form a layered User's Guide and Policy Manual for mutation and evolution.
In essence, it modifies itself intelligently in response to challenges and opportunities. No All-Knowing Designer required.
Reply
mithraltim
3 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Certainly there will be fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled human labor as people are replaced by machines. This trend will continue and a new social order will evolve. Unfortunatley no government seems to be planning for this future state. just think of all the jobs that will be lost forever when cars and trucks drive themselves. It's in the multi-millions.
Reply
CapitalismPrevails
36 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Calm down man. It's called Capitalism. Capitalism = Evolution. People will improvise adapt and overcome. They will train to fill more affluent jobs like computer programmers and mechanical engineers because there will be much more demand for them.
Reply
Bobity
1 Comment
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
100 years ago 95% of the working population did manual labour. I have no idea what the figure for % manual labour is currently but if we said 5%, we do not have 90% unemployment.
Circumstance change and new work and new industries appear as if by magic. Also, remember the 5th generation project in the 80s ? Everyone was going to be completely redundant in a few years. This has not come to pass in the way the visionaries imagined.
Even with massive automation, offshoring, globabisation AI and all the rest of it, I believe we are grossely underestimating our own creative potential to come up with new ideas, products and services which in some way or another symbiotically expoit the current fauna of technology.
I see a bright exciting future of enormous change and opportunity, where a groups of motivated individuals can rapidly transform from a garage to a global concern, creating millions of new jobs by bringing bits of current bleeding edge technologies together, to create totally new and unimagined products and services.
Reply
witbrock
1 Comment
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
The idea, often advanced to dismiss concerns about job loss, that human beings are infinitely adaptable and trainable, strikes me as hopelessly naive. Human beings are, broadly, capable of performing manual, intellectual, social and aesthetic tasks.
The *need* to have human beings do manual tasks is, more or less, over. The *need* to have human beings do intellectual tasks (including the sort of intellectual tasks currently requiring an advanced degree in AI from MIT, let alone tasks like general programming) seems unlikely to survive this century, and seems likely to be greatly reduced in the next decades.
It is hard to imagine that we will be able to occupy ourselves entirely in social and aesthetic roles (for example, by acting as waiters for one another at fancy restaurants, simply because a human waiter, qua human, is desirable), or, at least, it's hard to imagine that our current system of assigning value to activities can be readily adapted to assigning value to human activities qua human, rather than on the sort of measures we currently apply.
What I think is certain, is that we need to start thinking seriously about these problems. Hoping that nothing will change, or that a free market operated by and for non-human entities will magically produce roles for, and good outcomes for, human beings, certainly will not suffice.
Reply
Darly314
3 Comments
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
There is a limit to the downward trend of manual labor. No machine can clean differing spaces as well as can a human, no machine can quickly alter a method once observed to be ineffective. The continued quest for machines that can act as humans do is resulting in more pitiful machines.
Reply
titusn
1 Comment
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
Dear Radical Moderate,
Your observation is one of the most intelligent I ever read in a comment. I must also compliment the other commenters, but I would especially like to get in touch with you, as I am currently researching material for a long-form documentary about the Singularity and I need more than just Kurzweil's view. I would be very interested in talking or e-mailing with you. How can we get in touch? If you read this, please contact me via twitter: @titustweet or e-mail: titus@transhumandoc.com.
Titus
Reply
mzmoe
1 Comment
Re: You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity
I most definitely agree with all your statements and I've been watching this trend closely since I was a teen. I am currently a student at Ashford University and I am enrolled now in a Computer Lit class centered around this particular subject.This is an area of study that really sparks my interest and my thoughts run wild in relation to achieving the goal of singularity. please send me any/all information or updates to my email address: cmoore28788@att.net.
Thanks for your consideration.
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