Why Robots Will Not Be Smarter Than Humans By 2029 294
Hallie Siegel writes "Robotics expert Alan Winfield offers a sobering counterpoint to Ray Kurzweil's recent claim that 2029 will be the year that robots will surpass humans. From the article: 'It’s not just that building robots as smart as humans is a very hard problem. We have only recently started to understand how hard it is well enough to know that whole new theories ... will be needed, as well as new engineering paradigms. Even if we had solved these problems and a present day Noonian Soong had already built a robot with the potential for human equivalent intelligence – it still might not have enough time to develop adult-equivalent intelligence by 2029'"
Re:"Robots" will never be as smart as a human. (Score:5, Insightful)
By the same argument you could say that any good library from 1950 was also smarter then a human. You'd be just as wrong.
Very Sober (Score:5, Insightful)
Robotics expert Alan Winfield offers a sobering counterpoint to Ray Kurzweil ...
I like how the naysayers are depicted as sober, rational minded individuals while those who see things progressing more rapidly are shown as crazy lunatics. They are both making predictions about the future. Why is one claim more valid than the other? We're talking fifteen years into the future here. Do you think that the persons/people predicting that "heavier than air flying machines are impossible" only eight years before the fact were also the sober ones?
Lord Kelvin was a sober, rational minded individual. He was also wrong.
Re:"Robots" will never be as smart as a human. (Score:5, Insightful)
Computers on the other hand can already be argued to be smarter than a human - if you consider the entire internet as a single computer.
Depends on how you define "smarter."
The internet holds more knowledge than a single human ever could, but machines cannot do anything without direct, explicit directions - told to it by a human. That's the definition of stupid to me: unable to do a thing without having to all spelled out to you.
There's a reason D&D considers Wisdom and Intelligence to be separate attributes.
Re:Very Sober (Score:5, Insightful)
| I like how the naysayers are depicted as sober, rational minded individuals while those who see things progressing more rapidly are shown as crazy lunatics. They are both making predictions about the future. Why is one claim more valid than the other?
It's because the naysayers are the ones more actively working in the field and closest to the experimental and theoretical results and are trying to actually accomplish these kinds of tasks.
Obviously in 1895 heavier than air flying machines were possible because birds existed. And in 1895 there was a significant science & engineering community actually trying to do it which believed it was possible soon. Internal combustion engines of sufficient power/weight were rapidly improving, fluid mechanics was reasonably understood, and it just took the Wrights to re-do some of the experiments correctly and have an insight & technology about controls & stability.
So in 1895, Lord Kelvin was the Kurzweil of his day.
Re:Kurzweil is an idiot with Super Powers (Score:5, Insightful)
There's two schools of thought on this:
There are those who think Kurzweil is a crazy dreamer and declare his ideas bunk.
There are those who think Kurzweil is a smart guy who's been right about a fair number of things, but take his predictions with a grain of salt.
There doesn't seem to be a lot in the middle.
[You can score me in the second camp, FWTW.]
Re:Kurzweil is an idiot with Super Powers (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, your second point IS the middle. The logical third point would be, there are those who think Kurzweil is a genius and is spot on about the future.
AI and the prevalence of bombast (Score:5, Insightful)
o we don't know what "thinking" is -- at all -- not even vaguely. Or consciousness.
o so we don't know how "hard" these things are
o and we don't know if we'll need new theories
o and we don't know if we'll need new engineering paradigms
o so Alan Winfield is simply hand-waving
o all we actually know is that we've not yet figured it out, or, if someone has, they're not talking about it
o at this point, the truth is that all bets are off and any road may potentially, eventually, lead to AI.
Just as a cautionary tale, recall (or look up) the paper written by Minsky on perceptrons (simple models of neurons and in groups, neural networks.) Regarded as authoritative at the time, his paper put forth the idea that perceptrons had very specific limits, and were pretty much a dead end. He was completely, totally, wrong in his conclusion. This was, essentially, because he failed to consider what they could do when layered. Which is a lot more than he laid out. His work set NN research back quite a bit because it was taken as authoritative, when it was actually short-sighted and misleading.
What we actually know about something is only clear once the dust settles and we --- wait for it --- actually know about it. Right now, we hardly know a thing. So when someone starts pontificating about dates and limits and what "doesn't work" or "does work", just laugh and tell 'em to come back when they've got actual results. This is highly distinct from statements like "I've got an idea I think may have potential", which are interesting and wholly appropriate at this juncture.
Re:Very Sober (Score:2, Insightful)
It's because the naysayers are the ones more actively working in the field and closest to the experimental and theoretical results and are trying to actually accomplish these kinds of tasks.
More actively than Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google in charge of machine intelligence? Very few people in the world are more active in AI-related fields than he is.
Re:Kurzweil is an idiot with Super Powers (Score:4, Insightful)
I propose, en the other (third) hand, that reliably educating humans to be smart should be the first step. We will only do the artificial intelligence bit when we actually get the human intelligence angle.... and that will not, for sure, happen any time soon.