{"id":288,"date":"2012-02-01T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T17:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/facingthesing.wpengine.com\/?p=288"},"modified":"2014-12-06T14:43:55","modified_gmt":"2014-12-06T22:43:55","slug":"intelligence-explosion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/2012\/intelligence-explosion\/","title":{"rendered":"Intelligensexplosion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tyv\u00e4rr \u00e4r denna artikel enbart tillg\u00e4nglig p\u00e5 English<\/a>, Fran\u00e7ais<\/a>, \u0440\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439<\/a>, Sloven\u010dina<\/a>, \u4e2d\u6587<\/a> och Italiano<\/a>.<\/p>

Suppose you\u2019re a disembodied spirit watching the universe evolve. For the first nine billion years, almost nothing happens.<\/p>\n

\u201cGod, this is so boring<\/em>!\u201d you complain.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow so?\u201d asks your partner.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s no depth or complexity to anything because nothing aims<\/em><\/a> at anything. Nothing optimizes<\/a> for anything. There\u2019s no plot<\/em>. It\u2019s just a bunch of random crap that happens. Worse than Seinfeld<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cReally? What\u2019s that over there?\u201d<\/p>\n

You follow your partner\u2019s gaze and notice a tiny molecule in a pool of water on a rocky planet. Before your eyes, it makes a copy<\/em> of itself. And then another. And then the copies make copies of themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cA replicator!\u201d you exclaim. \u201cWithin months there could be millions<\/em> of those things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI wonder if this will lead to squirrels.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are squirrels?\u201d<\/p>\n

Your partner explains the functional complexity of squirrels, which they encountered in Universe 217.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s absurd<\/a>! At anything like our current rate of optimization, we wouldn\u2019t see any squirrels<\/em> come about by pure accident until long after the heat death of the universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

But soon you notice something even more important<\/a>: some of the copies are errors<\/em>. The copies are exploring the neighboring regions of the conceptual search space. Some of these regions contain better replicators, and those superior replicators end up with more copies of themselves than the original replicators and explore their own neighborhoods.<\/p>\n

The next few billions years are by far the most exciting you\u2019ve seen. Simple replicators lead to simple organisms, which lead to complex life, which leads to brains, which lead to the Homo<\/em> line of apes.<\/p>\n

At first, Homo<\/em> looks much like any other brained animal. It shares 99% of its coding DNA with chimpanzees. You might be forgiven for thinking the human brain wasn\u2019t that big a deal\u2014maybe it would enable a 50% increase in optimization speed, or something like that. After all, animal brains have been around for millions of years, and have gradually evolved without any dramatic increase in function.<\/p>\n

But then one thing leads to another<\/a>. Before your eyes, humans become smart enough to domesticate crops, which leads to a sedentary lifestyle and repeatable trade, which leads to writing for keeping track of debts. Farming also generates food surpluses, and that enables professional specialization, which gives people the ability to focus on solving problems other<\/em> than finding food and fucking. Professional specialization leads to science and technology and the industrial revolution, which lead to space travel and iPhones.<\/p>\n

The difference between chimpanzees and humans illustrates how powerful it can be to rewrite an agent\u2019s cognitive algorithms. But, of course, the algorithm\u2019s origin in this case was merely evolution, blind and stupid<\/a>. An intelligent process with a bit of foresight<\/em> can leap through the search space more efficiently. A human computer programmer can make innovations in a day that evolution couldn\u2019t have discovered in billions of years.<\/p>\n

But for the most part, humans still haven\u2019t figured out how their own<\/em> cognitive algorithms work, or how to rewrite them. And the computers we program don\u2019t understand their<\/em> own cognitive algorithms, either (for the most part<\/a>). But one day they will<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Which means the future contains a feedback loop<\/a> that the past does not:<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re eurisko<\/span><\/a>, you manage to modify some of your metaheuristics, and the metaheuristics work noticeably better, and they even manage to make a few further modifications to themselves, but then the whole process runs out of steam and flatlines.<\/p>\n

It was human intelligence that produced these artifacts to begin with. Their own<\/em> optimization power is far short of human\u2014so incredibly weak that, after they push themselves along a little, they can\u2019t push any further. Worse, their optimization at any given level is characterized by a limited number of opportunities, which once used up are gone\u2014extremely sharp diminishing returns. . . .<\/p>\n

When you first build an AI, it\u2019s a baby\u2014if it had to improve itself, it would almost immediately flatline. So you push it along using your own cognition . . . and knowledge\u2014not<\/em> getting any benefit of recursion in doing so, just the usual human idiom of knowledge feeding upon itself and insights cascading into insights. Eventually the AI becomes sophisticated enough to start improving itself<\/em>\u2014not just small improvements, but improvements large enough to cascade into other improvements. . . . And then you get what I. J. Good called an \u201cintelligence explosion<\/a>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

. . . and the AI leaves our human abilities far behind<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At that point, we might as well be dumb chimpanzees watching as those newfangled \u201chumans\u201d invent fire and farming and writing and science and guns and planes and take over the whole world. And like the chimpanzee, at that point we won\u2019t be in a position to negotiate with our superiors. Our future will depend on what they<\/em> want.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tyv\u00e4rr \u00e4r denna artikel enbart tillg\u00e4nglig p\u00e5 English, Fran\u00e7ais, \u0440\u0443\u0441\u0441\u043a\u0438\u0439, Sloven\u010dina, \u4e2d\u6587 och Italiano.Suppose you\u2019re a disembodied spirit watching the universe evolve. For the first nine billion years, almost nothing happens. \u201cGod, this is so boring!\u201d you complain. \u201cHow so?\u201d… continue reading<\/a> »<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/intelligenceexplosion.com\/sv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}