Leveraging the Singularity: Introducing AI to Liberal Arts Students
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Proceedings of the 2008 AAAI Workshop on Artificial Intelligence Education Leveraging the Singularity: Introducing AI to Liberal Arts Students James B. Marshall Department of Computer Science Sarah Lawrence College One Mead Way Bronxville, NY 10708 [email protected] Abstract signed. Most of the successful real-world AI systems de- In recent years, the notion that computers and robots will at- veloped to date operate only within narrowly defined tain superhuman levels of intelligence in the next few dec- boundaries. Master chess programs typically can’t play ades, ushering in a new “posthuman” era in evolutionary checkers or poker, even poorly; a robot that can navigate history, has gained widespread attention among technology mazes or drive itself across town probably isn’t very good enthusiasts, thanks in part to books such as Ray Kurzweil’s at diagnosing diseases or composing music, even at a very The Singularity Is Near. This paper describes an introduc- tory-level AI course designed to examine this idea in an ob- basic level. Efforts to develop natural language under- jective way by exploring the field of AI as it currently is, in standing systems and automated translators, an area of in- addition to what it might become in the future. An impor- tense research for the past several decades, have yielded tant goal of the course is to place these ideas within the only a modest amount of progress. Developing truly flexi- broader context of human and cosmic evolution. The course ble and robust systems with a broad spectrum of intelli- is aimed at undergraduate liberal arts students with no prior gence and common sense, what some researchers have background in science or engineering. begun calling Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), re- mains a distant and formidable goal. Introduction Nevertheless, despite the many challenges still fac- ing AI, there has been a remarkable increase over the past The field of Artificial Intelligence is now over a half- few years in the level of speculation and excitement about century old, having established itself as a viable intellec- the prospects of achieving human-level intelligence in tual discipline in the early 1950s, with the advent of the computers and robots within the next few decades. A new first programmable electronic computers. Since then, the vision of humanity’s future has taken hold among many dream of creating intelligent machines has lost none of its technology enthusiasts, and has been gradually making its original excitement and fascination, and impressive ad- way into the wider public consciousness. According to this vances have been made in almost every area of the field. vision, the continuing acceleration of computer power and Today, machines can recognize faces, process speech, other information-based technologies, combined with ad- learn from experience, drive themselves autonomously for vances in molecular biology, genetic engineering, and the hundreds of miles, explore the surfaces of distant planets, nascent field of nanotechnology, will soon lead to the de- beat human chess masters with ease, diagnose some dis- velopment of machines that will match, and then quickly eases better than human experts, compose music, handle surpass, the intellectual powers of humans. Once machines customer service calls interactively over the phone, and attain this level of sophistication, they will be able to ana- even improve their performance through simulated evolu- lyze, understand, and enhance their own designs, setting in tion, to mention just a few of the many accomplishments motion an ever-accelerating cycle of recursive self- that AI researchers have achieved over the years. improvement. This will utterly transform our civilization, Yet for all of its successes, AI still has far to go. in ways that are almost impossible to foresee, and will Progress in many areas has been painstakingly slow, and mark the beginning of a new “posthuman” era in evolu- we still lack robust general-purpose systems that exhibit tionary history. This scenario is often referred to as the intelligence across a wide range of different problem do- Singularity, by way of analogy with physics. Just as a mains, beyond those for which they were specifically de- physical singularity such as a black hole has an event hori- zon beyond which no information about it can be known, Copyright © 2008, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelli- the technological Singularity represents a discontinuity in gence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. the flow of human history, beyond whose “event horizon” 62 nothing can be known or predicted. sailing ships plied the seas. Within a few more centuries, The term “Singularity” seems to have first been the printing press and the steam engine and the harnessing suggested by the mathematician and science fiction author of electricity had transformed human society as thoroughly Vernor Vinge in the 1980s, but these ideas can be traced as the invention of farming and the plough had several back much further. In 1965, for example, the statistician millennia earlier. And the past one hundred years have I. J. Good wrote of a coming “intelligence explosion”: witnessed the most radical technological advances of all. Think of the world of 1908, as compared to the world of Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a ma- 2008. Back then, automobiles, telephones, phonographs, chine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities and flying machines were curiosities only recently in- of any man however clever. Since the design of ma- vented. Television, digital computers, hydrogen bombs, chines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultrain- space travel, mobile phones, and the Internet were as yet telligent machine could design even better machines; unimaginable, though they lay only a few decades away in there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left the future. far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is What of the next one hundred years? Viewed from the last invention that man need ever make. a larger historical perspective, it is hard to imagine that the technological advances of the coming decades will be any More recently, the well-known AI pioneer and tech- less profound or far-ranging than those of the past century. nologist Ray Kurzweil, and the robotics pioneer Hans In all likelihood their impact will be far greater. Barring Moravec of CMU, have introduced these ideas to a much some unprecedented catastrophe, the arc of the trajectory wider audience through several popular science books seems clear: ever upward, at an ever faster pace. Our most (Moravec, 1988, 1999; Kurzweil 1999, 2005). In particu- advanced current technologies will seem far cruder and lar, Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near has inspired more antiquated a hundred years from now than the slide much discussion and controversy within academic circles rules, flying machines, and Model T’s of 1908 seem to us since its publication in 2005 (Singularity Summit 2006, today. Think of the implications. 2007), and there is even a movie version of the book in the But does this mean that we will have succeeded by works, slated for release later this year. Kurzweil confi- then in creating conscious robots with superhuman intelli- dently and enthusiastically predicts that by 2029 computers gence, poised to supersede or even supplant us in the re- will have fully passed the Turing Test, as a result of pro- lentless ongoing march of evolutionary development? gress in reverse engineering the human brain made possi- Could we homo sapiens really be on the verge of creating ble by the continued development of faster computational our own successors? The prospect of an imminent transi- hardware according to Moore’s Law. Moravec predicts tion from carbon-based human intelligence to silicon-based that cheap computer hardware will match the computa- machine intelligence does in fact have its precedents in the tional capacity of the brain by 2020. Others, however, history of life on Earth: the origin of life itself was a including the respected computer scientist Bill Joy, are “phase transition” from inanimate to animate matter, which profoundly worried about the dangers posed to humanity took place billions of years ago on the early Earth; much by the development of intelligent robots and other power- later, life changed substrate again with the colonization of ful technologies. They argue that we should impose strict the land by early amphibians. Such things are possible. Or limits on current research in AI, genetics, and nanotech- is it more likely, as Joy fears, that the development of ever nology, or even abandon work in some areas entirely, be- more powerful technologies will, one way or another, un- fore it is too late (Joy, 2000). leash a catastrophe on a vast scale that destroys our techno- What can one make of all this? On the one hand, it logical society, or even renders humanity extinct? Perhaps is tempting to dismiss these ideas as simply the fanciful all emerging intelligent civilizations in the Universe (if speculations of technology buffs prone to overindulging in indeed any others exist) go through a similar dangerous science fiction. On the other hand, if one examines the period of technological adolescence, a kind of evolutionary arguments more carefully and objectively, they become “test” to determine if they are mature enough and wise harder to dismiss outright, especially if one takes a longer- enough to manage their newfound powers, and thus worthy range view of the evolution of life on Earth. There can be enough to survive and flourish. Perhaps we are entering no doubt that something profound has been happening on our own time of testing. our planet over the past few millennia. Around ten thou- sand years ago, the technology of agriculture first appeared on the Earth, invented by itinerant tribes of humans who An Idea for a Course were already quite adept at making tools for hunting and Regardless of how much credence one gives to the argu- gathering their food.