* The article is correct and the current singularity (as described by Kurzweil) will hit a plateau. No further progress will be made and we'll have machines that are forever dumber than humans.
* The singularity will continue up until SAI. So help them human race if we shackle it with human ideologies and ignorance.
There is no way to tell. AlphaGo immensely surprised me - from my perspective the singularity is happening, but there is no telling just how far it can go. AlphaGo changed my perspective of Kurzweil from a lunatic to someone who might actually have a point.
Where the line is drawn is "goal-less AI," possibly the most important step toward SAI. Currently, all AI is governed by a goal (be it a goal or a fitness function). The recent development regarding Starcraft and ML is ripe for the picking, either the AI wins or not - a fantastic fitness function. The question is, how would we apply it to something like Skyrim: where mere continuation of existence and prosperity are equally as viable goals (as-per the human race). "Getting food" may become a local minimum that obscures any further progress - resulting in monkey agents in the game (assuming the AI optimizes for the food minimum). In a word, what we are really questioning is: sapience.
I'm a big critic of Bitcoin, yet so far I am still wrong. The same principle might apply here. It's simply too early to tell.
I think you are making a false dichotomy here. It is perfectly possible for the article to be right, and there is still a future with general artificial intelligence and a singularity. If you believe the singularity is inevitable then you should read the article as saying that we are woefully misjudging where the asymptote is -- yes current progress looks impressive, but there are some really big steps that we are currently ignoring, and real human level AI is a century or two out, not a decade or two out. That's perfectly possible, and most philosophers who work in consciousness and philosophy of mind (as well as a very large portion of the machine learning community) will tell you that there is still some big hurdles that we don't even have the faintest idea how to cross (the whitehouse report on AI described it as a "chasm").
It's already happening. The world became hyper efficient. The hackers behind "Trumpbots" made money on the prediction markets. Understanding that mechanic makes me almost certain the singularity arrived after his election.
* The article is correct and the current singularity (as described by Kurzweil) will hit a plateau. No further progress will be made and we'll have machines that are forever dumber than humans.
* The singularity will continue up until SAI. So help them human race if we shackle it with human ideologies and ignorance.
There is no way to tell. AlphaGo immensely surprised me - from my perspective the singularity is happening, but there is no telling just how far it can go. AlphaGo changed my perspective of Kurzweil from a lunatic to someone who might actually have a point.
Where the line is drawn is "goal-less AI," possibly the most important step toward SAI. Currently, all AI is governed by a goal (be it a goal or a fitness function). The recent development regarding Starcraft and ML is ripe for the picking, either the AI wins or not - a fantastic fitness function. The question is, how would we apply it to something like Skyrim: where mere continuation of existence and prosperity are equally as viable goals (as-per the human race). "Getting food" may become a local minimum that obscures any further progress - resulting in monkey agents in the game (assuming the AI optimizes for the food minimum). In a word, what we are really questioning is: sapience.
I'm a big critic of Bitcoin, yet so far I am still wrong. The same principle might apply here. It's simply too early to tell.