Pacing the Frontier: The Explosion

Warm Greetings to All,

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Every Sunday, a new forum. Our meeting starts at 9:00 AM with friendly wakeup chat; then our select topic panel briefly introduces the subject at 9:15, followed by member discussion and Q&A.
Volunteer introduction panelists will meet following each forum to develop the next program;.

This Sunday:

# Pacing the Frontier: The Explosion

## Details

This week we begin a new series where we ask the question whether we could build one on purpose, and whether it could then build the next one without us.

We begin with Irving John Good. In "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" (1965), he noticed that designing machines is itself an intellectual task. So a machine that surpassed us at intellectual tasks would surpass us at that one too, and its successor would be better still, and the gap between generations would close. He called such a device the final invention we would ever need to make, provided it stayed docile enough to tell us how it worked. The whole later literature is a footnote to that conditional.

Contribution: intelligence is the one capability that can be turned on itself.

We then turn to Ray Kurzweil, who supplied the timetable Good declined to give. His law of accelerating returns holds that technological progress compounds rather than accumulates, because each paradigm supplies the tools that build the next one, and that the resulting curve is exponential across evolution, computation, and cost. From this he reads dates off the graph: human-level machine intelligence around 2029, a singularity around 2045. Vernor Vinge had named the threshold in the 1980s; Kurzweil is the one who insisted we could see it coming.

Contribution: the argument for imminence is an argument about a curve, not about a mechanism.

We arrive finally at Kevin Kelly, who asks what is actually being turned up. In "The Myth of a Superhuman AI" (2017), he argues that the case rests on unexamined assumptions: that intelligence is a single dimension, that it is general purpose, that it can be scaled without limit, and that having more of it dissolves most other problems. He proposes instead that minds occupy a combinatorial space of many specialized capacities, that humans are not general-purpose reasoners either, and that thinking is only one input to progress, since the rest is experiment, which runs at the speed of the world. Contribution: if intelligence has no single axis, then "smarter than every human" has no fixed meaning, and the explosion has no dial to turn.

LinksLinks

Irving John Good

• "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine" (1965, Advances in Computers 6, 31–88): https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/a5e423ee-54e0-4eec-aeca-32b73f851af5/content
• I. J. Good — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._J._Good
• Technological singularity — Wikipedia — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Ray Kurzweil

• The Singularity Is Near (2005, Viking); The Singularity Is Nearer (2024, Viking): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Singularity_Is_Near
• "The Law of Accelerating Returns" (2001, essay): https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-accelerating-returns
• Vernor Vinge, "The Coming Technological Singularity" (1993, VISION-21 Symposium, NASA): https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
• Ray Kurzweil — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

Kevin Kelly

• "The Myth of a Superhuman AI" (2017, The Technium / Wired): https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/
• The Inevitable (2016, Viking) - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_(book)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inevitable_(book))
• Kevin Kelly — Wikipedia — [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Kelly_(editor))

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https://www.meetup.com/platoscave/
https://www.meetup.com/orlando-stoics/

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