[Uber V8]

Have you guys ever heard of Technological Singularity?

Technological Singularity: refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means.[1] Since the capabilities of such intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of a technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which events cannot be predicted or understood

Is it technically possible for computers to eventually become smarter than human?

I would say Siri is a minuscule version of this concept. What do you guys think?

[justinnum1]

computers are already smarter than humans...that watson computer that played jeopardy...

[kyleb350]

I definitely think we'll get artificial intelligence to mimic and eventually exceed the human brain's capabilities. It's only a matter of time.

[Uber V8]

Originally Posted by justinnum1

computers are already smarter than humans...that watson computer that played jeopardy...

please explain. i must have missed that episode.

[hks786]

I don't think we will ever be able to achieve it

[Uber V8]

Originally Posted by kyleb350

I definitely think we'll get artificial intelligence to mimic and eventually exceed the human brain's capabilities. It's only a matter of time.

Interesting. I tend to think so too, but there is a fine line between when the tech can help us and hurt us. Such as the google car that can drive by itself. BUT, computers can malfunction thus causing havoc.

[justinnum1]

Originally Posted by FwdFtl

please explain. i must have missed that episode.

It was an IBM computer, fastest one ever made and it had voice technology so it understood people talking to it...text to speech...

They played jeopardy, real jeopardy, this computer named watson and the 2 highest guys that won the most money in jeopardy...the computer killed them

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html

[Uber V8]

^^ simply amazing. let's hope watson never gets a fully functional body... and gets mad.

[justinnum1]

What will really be crazy is when a computer like watson which bascially a ton of servers linked together, when they ahve the power of watson in a chip small enough to fit in a laptop, probably 10 years away from that imo, but some really neat shit is going on in the tech world

[Seminole]

The thing with Watson is that it was specifically built for one purpose, to understand a question and pop out the answer. Due to its processing power it's able to sort through vast quantities of raw data and pick the answer faster than a human can. Despite all that it still isn't even close to the ability of a human brain.

Watson had access to 200 million pages of structured and unstructured content consuming four terabytes of disk storage,[8] including the full text of Wikipedia,[9] but was not connected to the Internet during the game.[10][11] For each clue, Watson's three most probable responses were displayed on the television screen. Watson consistently outperformed its human opponents on the game's signaling device, but had trouble responding to a few categories, notably those having short clues containing only a few words

All the "knowledge" Watson has is just information stored on a hard drive. The innovative thing about it really is the voice recognition and how it picks out key words in the question to identify what it needs to search for.

But it cannot come close to the human brain when it comes to problem solving. A human can look at a problem and come up with a solution to it with no prior knowledge of the situation. A computer such as Watson can only give an answer if it has been programed to recognize the scenario and give a certain response. Self-learning computers that can mimic a human brain are still a ways off. Until something like that comes along computers such as Watson are nothing more than fancy search engines.

[Foodle]

You have to define "smarter" before anyone can answer your question.

As for Watson, the IBM guys were sort of cheating in that Watson didn't have to do everything a human did to answer a question. A human brain needs to process the visual and auditory information (read and hear the question), understand it, formulate the answer, then control their arm to hit the buzzer. Watson got the question typed into it, so no complex image or audio processing needed. It still needed to do a lot of natural language processing to "understand" the question, which is quite computationally intensive. Also Watson was allowed to "buzz in" electronically, versus using an actuated robotic arm or similar mechanism that would have simulated a human's buzz in.

Finally, Watson used an enormous amount of power to answer the Jeopardy questions. Watson had about 3000 Power7 processors, each burning about 125W of power. This isn't even counting the memory power, communication power, storage power, or the power required to cool the entire system. A human brain burns about 30W total; the entire body about 100W. So in terms of power efficiency, Watson is way off.

Don't get me wrong, Watson playing Jeopardy is a very very impressive feat, but machines are still a long way off from doing everything humans can do. However, they have clearly exceeded humans by orders of magnitude in some tasks (like raw mathematical calculation).

[Foodle]

Originally Posted by Seminole

The innovative thing about it really is the voice recognition and how it picks out key words in the question to identify what it needs to search for.

Watson did not use voice recognition. It had the question sent to it in text form at the same time that the question was revealed to the human contestants.

[Seminole]

Originally Posted by Foodle

Watson did not use voice recognition. It had the question sent to it in text form at the same time that the question was revealed to the human contestants.

Oh . Close enough though, I meant to refer to how it was able to interpert the questions asked to it and figure out what to look for. I didn't actually watch the show, so I assumed it used voice recognition.

[Uber V8]

Originally Posted by Seminole

Self-learning computers that can mimic a human brain are still a ways off. Until something like that comes along computers such as Watson are nothing more than fancy search engines.

How far off is ways off to you?

Originally Posted by Foodle

You have to define "smarter" before anyone can answer your question.

smarter as in having the intellectual capacity to problem solve in real life, every day scenarios in a far more efficient and faster manner than humans.

best definition I can come up with

[gcochard]

I had to take a class on this for my computer science degree. The singularity has always been "about 20-30 years off" since the concept was conceived back in the 90s.

There is speculation on whether this will even be possible, and neuroscientists keep finding out that the brain processes information faster and more efficiently than previously thought.

If it happens, it will most likely be within the life span of people who are alive today. If it doesn't happen that soon, it will be impossible for it to happen due to the laws of physics.

I can say with confidence that we are still NOT EVEN CLOSE to it happening, however cool it would be to imagine it happening.

Even if hardware is capable of processing information faster than a brain, there has to be software to utilize the hardware in an intelligent way. The current understanding of AI can not compare to the way that the brain thinks.

There is also the question about whether a human is smart enough to make something smarter than him/her. If that is possible it will happen, and when it does, that "brain" will be able to come up with an even smarter "brain", and so on. That is why it is called the singularity, because it will be a single starting point for an explosion of ever-increasing intelligences. If we cannot create something smarter than ourselves, we may eventually have the equivalent of human brains (getting faster and faster), but that is as far as it will go.

This ended up being longer than I expected, but that's my take on the singularity.

[kyleb350]

Originally Posted by justinnum1

It was an IBM computer, fastest one ever made and it had voice technology so it understood people talking to it...text to speech...

They played jeopardy, real jeopardy, this computer named watson and the 2 highest guys that won the most money in jeopardy...the computer killed them

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html

I watched the video on that site on how Watson generates an answer... quite impressive. I also remember seeing a "making of" show of how he is able to interpret non-analytical data such as obscure references or puns and was blown away. Technology has definitely come a long way.

[justinnum1]

It will really be amazing when we can get that kind of technology in a small size, like a tablet or even a phone

[Seminole]

Originally Posted by FwdFtl

How far off is ways off to you?

I agree with a lot of what cliffhopper said. I can't really put a time frame on it, but at a minimum I think it's 30 years away. There's so much that has to be overcome to create that kind of intelligence.

[BayMoWe335]

Answering questions isn't really that impressive. Computers can search databases for that.

Computers that can actually process visual stimuli, show emotion, and correctly know what something means, even without saying it, are very far away from reality. The ability for to know what another person is thinking is the true measure for artificial intelligence. The fact you can tell your girlfriend is pissed without her saying it is much harder than asking what the temperature was on a day in 1951 in New York.

In that way, computers aren't even close.

Crunching numbers, finding facts, etc...computers have been miles ahead for decades. That isn't artificial intelligence. Even though Watson is amazing, he wastes a lot of time "thinking" about answers that are completely wrong, which humans don't do. We simply process and "know" or "recall" the answer seemingly instantly. Amazing. The dreams we have, the weird connections we make, smells, tastes, memories, love, hate, regret, sadness, greed, joy, fatigue, goosebumps when someone walks in a room, etc....computers can't touch that kind of stuff.

[kmarei]

When a computer can figure out females
Then I'll be impressed

[Augenbrauezug]

Originally Posted by justinnum1

It was an IBM computer, fastest one ever made and it had voice technology so it understood people talking to it...text to speech...

They played jeopardy, real jeopardy, this computer named watson and the 2 highest guys that won the most money in jeopardy...the computer killed them

http://www-03.ibm.com/innovation/us/watson/index.html

Right, but it's still just pre programmed with millions of facts, and designed to use key words and their position within a sentence, to deduce through thousands of possibilities, what it thinks is the correct answer. While it's immensely impressive, it still really isn't demonstrating human intelligence, just mimicking it in a very realistic manner. If I remember correctly it's also using logic to correct it's self after incorrect answers.

I still, think it's a LONG way until computer are out doing humans, in a real 'threatening' way.

[sanf]

as soon as we can install memory cards and load info into our brains.. the computers are done.