Thursday, July 06, 2006

of Ultraintelligence and technological singularities!

From wiki...

In 1965, statistician I. J. Good described a scenario more like the Singularity in that it emphasized the effects of superhuman intelligence:

"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
My Take: In refn to the last statement, if man was capable of making an ultraintelligent machine at all, then MAN himself was the ultraintelligent machine of the previous iteration. So we are already in a technological singularity!!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Einstein had said that imagination is more important than knowledge. Intelligence is infact the value addition that you do to knowledge. One can make an ultra knowledgeable machine but not an ultra intelligent machine in my humble opinion.

Epiphany said...

@Hiren - agreed....but then the point you are making is that a technological singularity CANNOT happen since you will never hit the threshold of making an ultraintelligent machine....my argument holds under the assumption that an ultraintelligent m/c IS made....

Twisted DNA said...

I agree with Ian. We are probably not too far from creating a machine that is more intelligent than humans. But intelligence is not the only thing that makes humans what they are. It's the emotions, it's the senses, our collective unconscious and so on. So we may not see a Matrix anytime soon. But, who knows?

On the other hand, it is possible that there already is an ultra-intelligent being which created stupid humands just for fun and is laughing it's ass off looking at us :)