The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (53 page)

The education of AIs will be much faster than that of unenhanced humans. The twenty-year time span required to provide a basic education to biological humans could be compressed into a matter of weeks or less. Also, because non-biological intelligence can share its patterns of learning and knowledge, only one AI has to master each particular skill. As I pointed out, we trained one set of research computers to understand speech, but then the hundreds of thousands of people who acquired our speech-recognition software had to load only the already trained patterns into their computers.

One of the many skills that nonbiological intelligence will achieve with the completion of the human brain reverse-engineering project is sufficient mastery of language and shared human knowledge to pass the Turing test. The Turing test is important not so much for its practical significance but rather because it will demarcate a crucial threshold. As I have pointed out, there is no simple means to pass a Turing test, other than to convincingly emulate the flexibility, subtlety, and suppleness of human intelligence. Having captured that capability in our technology, it will then be subject to engineering’s ability to concentrate, focus, and amplify it.

Variations of the Turing test have been proposed. The annual Loebner Prize contest awards a bronze prize to the chatterbot (conversational bot) best able to convince human judges that it’s human.
²¹⁷
The criteria for winning the silver prize is based on Turing’s original test, and it obviously has yet to be awarded. The gold prize is based on visual and auditory communication. In other words, the AI must have a convincing face and voice, as transmitted over a terminal, and thus it must appear to the human judge as if he or she is interacting with a real person over a videophone. On the face of it, the gold prize sounds more difficult. I’ve argued that it may actually be easier, because judges may pay less attention to the text portion of the language being communicated and could be distracted by a convincing facial and voice animation. In fact, we already have real-time facial animation, and while it is not quite up to these modified Turing standards, it’s reasonably close. We also have very natural-sounding voice synthesis, which is often confused with recordings of human speech, although more work is needed on prosodics (intonation). We’re likely
to achieve satisfactory facial animation and voice production sooner than the Turing-level language and knowledge capabilities.

Turing was carefully imprecise in setting the rules for his test, and signifi-cant literature has been devoted to the subtleties of establishing the exact procedures for determining how to assess when the Turing test has been passed.
²¹⁸
In 2002 I negotiated the rules for a Turing-test wager with Mitch Kapor on the Long Now Web site.
²¹⁹
The question underlying our twenty-thousand-dollar bet, the proceeds of which go to the charity of the winner’s choice, was, “Will the Turing test be passed by a machine by 2029?” I said yes, and Kapor said no. It took us months of dialogue to arrive at the intricate rules to implement our wager. Simply defining “machine” and “human,” for example, was not a straightforward matter. Is the human judge allowed to have any nonbiological thinking processes in his or her brain? Conversely, can the machine have any biological aspects?

Because the definition of the Turing test will vary from person to person, Turing test–capable machines will not arrive on a single day, and there will be a period during which we will hear claims that machines have passed the threshold. Invariably, these early claims will be debunked by knowledgeable observers, probably including myself. By the time there is a broad consensus that the Turing test has been passed, the actual threshold will have long since been achieved.

Edward Feigenbaum proposes a variation of the Turing test, which assesses not a machine’s ability to pass for human in casual, everyday dialogue but its ability to pass for a scientific expert in a specific field.
²²⁰
The Feigenbaum test (FT) may be more significant than the Turing test because FT-capable machines, being technically proficient, will be capable of improving their own designs. Feigenbaum describes his test in this way:

Two players play the FT game. One player is chosen from among the elite practitioners in each of three pre-selected fields of natural science, engineering, or medicine. (The number could be larger, but for this challenge not greater than ten). Let’s say we choose the fields from among those covered in the U.S. National Academy. . . . For example, we could choose astrophysics, computer science, and molecular biology. In each round of the game, the behavior of the two players (elite scientist and computer) is judged by another Academy member in that particular domain of discourse, e.g., an astrophysicist judging astrophysics behavior. Of course the identity of the players is hidden from the judge as it is in the Turing test. The judge poses problems, asks questions, asks for
explanations, theories, and so on—as one might do with a colleague. Can the human judge choose, at better than chance level, which is his National Academy colleague and which is the computer?

Of course Feigenbaum overlooks the possibility that the computer might already be a National Academy colleague, but he is obviously assuming that machines will not yet have invaded institutions that today comprise exclusively biological humans. While it may appear that the FT is more difficult than the Turing test, the entire history of AI reveals that machines started with the skills of professionals and only gradually moved toward the language skills of a child. Early AI systems demonstrated their prowess initially in professional fields such as proving mathematical theorems and diagnosing medical conditions. These early systems would not be able to pass the FT, however, because they do not have the language skills and the flexible ability to model knowledge from different perspectives that are needed to engage in the professional dialogue inherent in the FT.

This language ability is essentially the same ability needed in the Turing test. Reasoning in many technical fields is not necessarily more difficult than the commonsense reasoning engaged in by most human adults. I would expect that machines will pass the FT, at least in some disciplines, around the same time as they pass the Turing test. Passing the FT in all disciplines is likely to take longer, however. This is why I see the 2030s as a period of consolidation, as machine intelligence rapidly expands its skills and incorporates the vast knowledge bases of our biological human and machine civilization. By the 2040s we will have the opportunity to apply the accumulated knowledge and skills of our civilization to computational platforms that are billions of times more capable than unassisted biological human intelligence.

The advent of strong AI is the most important transformation this century will see. Indeed, it’s comparable in importance to the advent of biology itself. It will mean that a creation of biology has finally mastered its own intelligence and discovered means to overcome its limitations. Once the principles of operation of human intelligence are understood, expanding its abilities will be conducted by human scientists and engineers whose own biological intelligence will have been greatly amplified through an intimate merger with nonbiological intelligence. Over time, the nonbiological portion will predominate.

We’ve discussed aspects of the impact of this transformation throughout this book, which I focus on in the next chapter. Intelligence is the ability to solve problems with limited resources, including limitations of time. The Singularity will be characterized by the rapid cycle of human intelligence—
increasingly nonbiological—capable of comprehending and leveraging its own powers.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM, 2 BILLION B.C.
:
So tell me again about these ideas you have about the future
.

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM, 2 BILLION B.C.
:
Well, I see bacteria getting together into societies, with the whole band of cells basically acting like one big complicated organism with greatly enhanced capabilities
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
What gives you that idea?

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Well already, some of our fellow Daptobacters have gone inside other larger bacteria to form a little duo
.
²²¹
It’s inevitable that our fellow cells will band together so that each cell can specialize its function. As it is now, we each have to do everything by ourselves: find food, digest it, excrete by-products
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
And then what?

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
All these cells will develop ways of communicating with one another that go beyond just the swapping of chemical gradients that you and I can do
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Okay, now tell me again the part about that future superassembly of ten trillion cells
.

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Yes, well, according to my models, in about two billion years a big society of ten trillion cells will make up a single organism and include tens of billions of special cells that can communicate with one another in very complicated patterns
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
What sort of patterns?

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Well, “music,” for one thing. These huge bands of cells will create musical patterns and communicate them to all the other bands of cells
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Music?

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Yes, patterns of sound
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Sound?

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Okay, look at it this way. These supercell societies will be complicated enough to understand their own organization. They will be able to improve their own design, getting better and better, faster and faster. They will reshape the rest of the world in their image
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Now, wait a second. Sounds like we’ll lose our basic bacteriumity
.

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Oh, but there will be no loss
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
I know you keep saying that, but . . .

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
It will be a great step forward. It’s our destiny as bacteria. And, anyway, there will still be little bacteria like us floating around
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Okay, but what about the downside? I mean, how much harm can our fellow Daptobacter and Bdellovibrio bacteria do? But these future cell associations with their vast reach may destroy everything
.

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
It’s not certain, but I think we’ll make it through
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
You always were an optimist
.

F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Look, we won’t have to worry about the downside for a couple billion years
.

F
RIEND OF
F
UTURIST
B
ACTERIUM
:
Okay, then, let’s get lunch
.

MEANWHILE, TWO BILLION YEARS LATER . . .

N
ED
L
UDD
:
These future intelligences will be worse than the textile machines I fought back in 1812. Back then we had to worry about only one man with a machine doing the work of twelve. But you’re talking about a marble-size machine outperforming all of humanity
.

R
AY
:
It will only outperform the biological part of humanity. In any event, that marble is still human, even if not biological
.