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Computer Programs, Humans, & Minds-in-general


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#1 Anand

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Posted 04 September 2002 - 02:54 AM


Advantages of Computer Programs, Humans, & Minds-in-General

© 2002 by Anand

trans_humanism@msn.com

www.singinst.org

Permission granted to redistribute


Advantages of computer programs over humans

The following advantages of computer programs over humans do not necessarily apply to advantages of minds-in-general over humans.
  • Greater design freedom, including ease of modification and duplication; the capability to debug, re-boot, and backup; and the capability to attempt numerous designs.
  • The ability to perform complex tasks without making human-class mistakes, such as mistakes caused by lack of focus, energy, attention, or memory.
  • The ability to perform extended tasks at greater serial speeds than conscious human thought, or human neurons, which perform approximately 200 calculations per second. (This approximation is contentious.) Transistors presently have a powerful 100 million to one speed advantage over neurons.
  • The in principle capacity to operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
  • The human brain can not be duplicated or "re-booted," and has all ready achieved "optimization" through design by evolution, making it difficult to further improve.
  • The human brain does not physically integrate well, externally or internally, with contemporary hardware and software.
  • The non-existence of "boredom" when performing repetitive tasks.
Advantages of humans over minds-in-general
  • Present AIs lack human general intelligence and multiple years of real-world experience.
  • The computational capacity of the human brain is estimated at 2 * 10^16, or 20 million billion calculations per second, which is twenty times greater than the supercomputer Blue Gene's predicted achievement of 10^15, or 1 million billion calculations per second, by 2005. However, the human brain may not have a computational advantage over computers for much longer. Kurzweil predicts that the computational capacity of the human brain will be accomplished on supercomputers, or clustered systems, by 2010, followed on personal computers, by 2020.
  • The human brain has all ready achieved a high-level of complexity and "optimization" through design by evolution, and therefore has proven functionality.
Advantages of minds-in-general over humans

The following are not proposed advantages of specific AI approaches over humans, but rather of minds-in-general over humans.
  • Greater capability to acquire, retrieve, store, and use information on the Internet, which contains most preexisting human knowledge.
  • Lack of human failings that result from complex functional adaptations, such as observer-biased beliefs or rationalization.
  • Lack of neurobiological features that limit human control over functionality.
  • Lack of complexity that result in humans designed by evolution, such as unnecessary autonomic processes, complex functional adaptations, or sexual reproduction.
  • The ability to advance upon design by evolution, which is continually constrained by blindness, the requirement to maintain preexisting design, and a weakness with simultaneous dependencies.
  • The ability to add more computational power to a particular feature or problem, and to optimize that computational power. This may result in moderate, or substantial, improvements to preexisting intelligence. (AI does not have an upper limit on computational capacity, whereas humans do.) Note that the speed of computational power is predicted to continually increase exponentially, and decrease exponentially in cost, every 12-24 months, in accordance with Moore's Law. This turn around rate of new hardware has important applicability to AI development, especially once AI has accomplished approximately human-equivalent general intelligence.
  • The ability to analyze and modify its entire design.
  • The ability to combine autonomic and deliberative processes.
  • The ability to communicate and share information, such as abilities, concepts, memories, and thoughts, at a greater rate, and on a greater level, than humans.
  • The ability to control what is and what is not learned, or remembered.
  • The ability to create new modalities that humans lack, such as a modality for code, which may improve the AI's programming capacity—by making the AI inherently native to programming—far beyond our own. A modality for code may allow the AI to perceive its hardware machine code, the programming language used to write the AI, and other abilities.
  • The ability to instantly learn new information.
  • The ability to non-autonomically operate on its functional levels; to consciously create, analyze, modify, and improve abilities, concepts, and memories.
  • The ability to operate on computer hardware that has powerful advantages over human neurons, such as the ability to perform billions of sequential steps per second.
  • The capacity to self-observe and understand on a fine-grained level that is impossible for humans. AIs may have an improved capacity for introspection and manipulation, such as the ability to introspect and manipulate code, which is the functional level comparable to human neurons, which we can not think thoughts about nor manipulate.
  • The most important and powerful capacity of minds-in-general over humans is the ability to recursively self-encapsulate and self-improve (i.e., bootstrap) its intelligence. As a mind becomes smarter, the mind can use its intelligence to improve its design, thereby improving its intelligence, which may allow for further improvements to its design, thereby allowing for further improvements to its intelligence. It is unknown when open-ended self-improvement may begin. A conservative assumption is approximately human-equivalent general intelligence; but it may begin substantially before, and it is important to plan nonconservatively for moral and ethical reasons.
References

Kurzweil, Ray. 2001. "The Law of Accelerating Returns."
www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html
Voss, Peter. 2001. “Why Machines Will Become Hyperintelligent before Humans Do.”
www.optimal.org/peter/hyperintelligence.htm
Yudkowsky, Eliezer. 2002. "Levels of Organization in General Intelligence."
www.singinst.org/DGI




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