swbluto said:
Nehmo said:
Once software learns how to program itself, it will evolve, and evolve in much less time than the eons it took us. The future isn't predictable after that point. Some people expect it in 20 years.
I expect it within 15 years. It's a project like
http://www.humanbrainproject.eu/ that will probably lead to
advanced artificial intelligence [emphasis added].
Artificial Intelligence? That's the last thing we (or any other civilization) need. There's an article in JIR (
Journal of Irreproducible Results, unfortunately no longer published) that addressed this concept, although rather obliquely. To paraphrase and shorten, it went something like this (CAUTION - long-winded):
A physics teacher at [I forget the college] was noticing that his science and math students seemed to be getting dumber on the average each year. He mentioned the phenomenon to his colleagues and they all concurred, deciding that this sounded like a fundable research subject. Well, they didn't get the funds, but they did come up with a hypothesis and a solution (this was the part that didn't get funded).
In the Universe, there are two things which are constant: the total amount of matter plus energy and the total amount of information. If this is true, then their ratio must also be constant: the total amount of intelligence (information/things which can use it - a subset of total matter and energy). Therefore, if you make one thing smarter, the rest of the Universe must become on the whole the same amount dumber. Students used to use pencil and paper, then slide rules, then fancy calculators, then computers. With each advance in the intelligence of their tools, the students themselves became dumber. We haven't seen another Einstein since he died in 1955.
* What was needed to reverse the trend was not creating artificial intelligence in the next generation of computers, but ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY. Enabling (disabling?) the next generation of computers with ARTIFICIAL STUPIDITY will lower the amount of intelligence in the local neighborhood and this will have to be compensated for with an increase of intelligence in the computer users in order to keep the total amount of intelligence constant.
This is what the physicists proposed for a research grant, first as a pilot project, then a regional test, then national adoption in order to breed a whole generation of Einstein-intelligent scientists. (Yes, a really long-term project - if you've got a good idea, you have a responsibility to milk it as long as you can.) Unfortunately, the funding reviewers were the top scientists in their fields and, as such, had been working with the most advanced instruments and computers available for a number of years. Because of this, most of their intelligence had been sucked out of them and the proposal was not funded. EOS
I guess we'll just have to wait until things get so bad that we can't build the smart machines any more, then we'll see the population get smarter, as history once again repeats itself.
* Note: If aliens arrive and they seem friendly, bringing fancy machines to help us solve all our problems,
RUN. This is how they will take over the planet, not with advanced weapons. Our collective IQ's will plummet overnight.
Cameron
