Massimo Pigliucci of Psychology Today’s Rationally Speaking blog is “In Pursuit of Positive Skepticism” – and after sitting in on a presentation by philosopher David Chalmers regarding the singularity, he came away especially skeptical of the concept. In his blog post, “David Chalmers and the Singularity that will probably not come,” Pigliucci not only takes serious issues with the philosophical basis of Chalmers’ talk, but with the idea that artificial intelligence is a possibility:
In fact, the problem with the AI effort in general is that we have little progress to show after decades of attempts, likely for the very good reason that human intelligence is not algorithmic, at least not in the same sense in which computer programs are. I am most certainly not invoking mysticism or dualism here, I think that intelligence (and consciousness) are the result of the activity of a physical brain substrate, but the very fact that we can build machines with a degree of computing power and speed that greatly exceeds those of the human mind, and yet are nowhere near being “intelligent,” should make it pretty clear that the problem is not computing power or speed.
I’m not familiar with David Chalmers’ presentation, so I can’t comment on the information it contained or how it was presented. I can, however, take issue with Pigliucci’s argument that the idea of artificial intelligence is best left to science fiction.
The problem is, computers do not have the processing power of the human mind – aren’t even close, in fact. Ray Kurzweil estimates it will be a good 20 years, at least, before we create machines that approach this benchmark. From there, he estimates it will take at least 25 more years before machines possess the required level of intelligence to create machines smarter than themselves, which in theory would spark the singularity.
While humans have created very fast and powerful computers, we still haven’t created anything approaching the complexity of a mammalian brain. Researchers are, however, taking steps in that direction with endeavors such as the Blue Brain Project, which is an attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, but this research is still in its infancy.
Furthermore, I would dispute Pigliucci’s claim that we have “very little progress to show after decades of attempts” to create artificial intelligence. There have been great strides in using artificial intelligence to provide medical diagnoses, play chess, choose stocks to purchase, and so on.
Given the advances in AI and computing power we’ve seen over the past 40 years, is it so hard to believe that we’ll be successful in creating a human-level intelligence in the next two decades?