The AI Revolution Part 1.docx

1、The AI Revolution Part 1The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence (Part 1)January 22, 2015 By Tim Urban Note:The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could notbelievewhat I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that whats hap

2、pening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. Not shockin

3、gly, that became outrageously long, so I broke it into two parts. This is Part 1._We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. Vernor VingeWhat does it feel like to stand here?It seems like a pretty intense place to be standingbut then you have to remember something ab

4、out what its like to stand on a time graph: you cant see whats to your right. So heres how it actually feels to stand there:Which probably feels pretty normalThe Far FutureComing SoonImagine taking a time machine back to 1750a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance commun

5、ication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. When you get there, you retrieve a dude, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. Its impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny

6、 capsules racing by on a highway, talk to people who had been on the other side of the ocean earlier in the day, watch sports that were being played 1,000 miles away, hear a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and play with my magical wizard rectangle that he could use to capture a real-

7、life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a paranormal moving blue dot that shows him where he is, look at someones face and chat with them even though theyre on the other side of the country, and worlds of other inconceivable sorcery. This is all before you show him the internet or

8、explain things like the International Space Station, the Large Hadron Collider, nuclear weapons, or general relativity.This experience for him wouldnt be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowingthose words arent big enough. He might actually die.But heres the interesting thingif he then went back

9、 to 1750 and got jealous that we got to see his reaction and decided he wanted to try the same thing, hed take the time machine and go back the same distance, get someone from around the year 1500, bring him to 1750, and show him everything. And the 1500 guy would be shocked by a lot of thingsbut he

10、 wouldnt die. It would befarless of an insane experience for him, because while 1500 and 1750 were very different, they weremuchlessdifferent than 1750 to 2015. The 1500 guy would learn some mind-bending shit about space and physics, hed be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with t

11、hat new imperialism fad, and hed have to do some major revisions of his world map conception. But watching everyday life go by in 1750transportation, communication, etc.definitely wouldnt make him die.No, in order for the 1750 guy to have as much fun as we had with him, hed have to go much farther b

12、ackmaybe all the way back to about 12,000 BC, before the First Agricultural Revolution gave rise to the first cities and to the concept of civilization. If someone from a purely hunter-gatherer worldfrom a time when humans were, more or less, just another animal speciessaw the vast human empires of

13、1750 with their towering churches, their ocean-crossing ships, their concept of being “inside,” and their enormous mountain of collective, accumulated human knowledge and discoveryhed likely die.And then what if, after dying,hegot jealous and wanted to do the same thing. If he went back 12,000 years

14、 to 24,000 BC and got a guy and brought him to 12,000 BC, hed show the guy everything and the guy would be like, “Okay whats your point who cares.” For the 12,000 BC guy to have the same fun, hed have to go back over 100,000 years and get someone he could show fire and language to for the first time

15、.In order for someone to be transported into the future and die from the level of shock theyd experience, they have to go enough years ahead that a “die level of progress,” or a Die Progress Unit (DPU) has been achieved. So a DPU took over 100,000 years in hunter-gatherer times, but at the post-Agri

16、cultural Revolution rate, it only took about 12,000 years. The post-Industrial Revolution world has moved so quickly that a 1750 person only needs to go forward a couple hundred years for a DPU to have happened.This patternhuman progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes onis what futurist Ray

17、 Kurzweil calls human historys Law of Accelerating Returns. This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress at a fasterratethan less advanced societiesbecausetheyre more advanced. 19th century humanity knew more and had better technology than 15th century humanity, so its n

18、o surprise that humanity made far more advances in the 19th century than in the 15th century15th century humanity was no match for 19th century humanity.11 open theseThis works on smaller scales too. The movieBack to the Futurecame out in 1985, and “the past” took place in 1955. In the movie, when M

19、ichael J. Fox went back to 1955, he was caught off-guard by the newness of TVs, the prices of soda, the lack of love for shrill electric guitar, and the variation in slang. It was a different world, yesbut if the movie were made today and the past took place in 1985, the movie could have hadmuchmore

20、 fun withmuchbigger differences. The character would be in a time before personal computers, internet, or cell phonestodays Marty McFly, a teenager born in the late 90s, would be much more out of place in 1985 than the movies Marty McFly was in 1955.This is for the same reason we just discussedthe L

21、aw of Accelerating Returns. The average rate of advancement between 1985 and 2015 was higher than the rate between 1955 and 1985because the former was a more advanced worldso much more change happened in the most recent 30 years than in the prior 30.Soadvances are getting bigger and bigger and happe

22、ning more and more quickly. This suggests some pretty intense things about our future, right?Kurzweil suggests that the progress of the entire 20th century would have been achieved in only 20 years at the rate of advancement in the year 2000in other words, by 2000, the rate of progress was five time

23、s faster than theaveragerate of progress during the 20th century. He believes another 20th centurys worth of progress happened between 2000 and 2014 and thatanother20th centurys worth of progress will happen by 2021, in only seven years. A couple decades later, he believes a 20th centurys worth of p

24、rogress will happen multiple times in the same year, and even later, in less than one month. All in all, because of the Law of Accelerating Returns, Kurzweil believes that the 21st century will achieve1,000 timesthe progress of the 20th century.2If Kurzweil and others who agree with him are correct,

25、 then we may be as blown away by 2030 as our 1750 guy was by 2015i.e. the next DPU might only take a couple decadesand the world in 2050 might besovastly different than todays world that we would barely recognize it.This isnt science fiction. Its what many scientists smarter and more knowledgeable t

26、han you or I firmly believeand if you look at history, its what we should logically predict.So then why, when you hear me say something like “the world 35 years from now might be totally unrecognizable,” are you thinking, “Cool.but nahhhhhhh”? Three reasons were skeptical of outlandish forecasts of

27、the future:1) When it comes to history, we think in straight lines.When we imagine the progress of the next 30 years, we look back to the progress of the previous 30 as an indicator of how much will likely happen. When we think about the extent to which the world will change in the 21st century, we

28、just take the 20th century progress and add it to the year 2000. This was the same mistake our 1750 guy made when he got someone from 1500 and expected to blow his mind as much as his own was blown going the same distance ahead. Its most intuitive for us to thinklinearly,when we should be thinkingex

29、ponentially. If someone is being more clever about it, they might predict the advances of the next 30 years not by looking at the previous 30 years, but by taking thecurrentrate of progress and judging based on that. Theyd be more accurate, but still way off. In order to think about the future corre

30、ctly, you need to imagine things moving at amuch faster ratethan theyre moving now.2) The trajectory of very recent history often tells a distorted story.First, even a steep exponential curve seems linear when you only look at a tiny slice of it, the same way if you look at a little segment of a hug

31、e circle up close, it looks almost like a straight line. Second, exponential growth isnt totally smooth and uniform. Kurzweil explains that progress happens in “S-curves”:An S is created by the wave of progress when a new paradigm sweeps the world. The curve goes through three phases:1. Slow growth

32、(the early phase of exponential growth)2. Rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth)3. A leveling off as the particular paradigm matures3If you look only at very recent history, the part of the S-curve youre on at the moment can obscure your perception of how fast things are advancing. The chunk of time between 1995 and 2007 saw the explosion of the internet, the introduction of Microsoft, Google, and Facebook into the public consciousness, the birth of social networking, and the intro