Stephen Hawking: Humans only have about 1,000 years left

a reply to: Blue Shift

If you can't recognise this reality from all of the available evidence then your discernment and judgment is severely impaired. Which means your opinion is worth nothing because you can't even recognise the truth when it is staring you right into the face.

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

Regards expert systems and the reason the interviewer skills are so important. This would be because the interviewer, in determining which questions to ask, is the one who would be the limiting factor as to the performance of the ES. It is the interviewers job to ask the questions and develop the circumstances under which the decisions the ES is to be responsible for. If the interviewer does not ask the right questions or determine the correct range of responses then the ES cannot respond according to reality compared to what the interviewer encompassed. The more accurate questions/scenarios the interviewer is able to outline, the better suited the ES will be to it's task.

Exactly. The best "interviewers" for a specific expert system are people with knowledge in that domain as they have a much better sense of which questions to ask and how to ask them. But barring that, there are folks that are just good at this and they will start at very basic info and then walk through a typical scenario with the expert to determine what the expert is looking for, and then what the experts response would be once they had the info they needed. The more specific the domain the better the ES is. For instance there isn't a real "Dr. in a box" ES system out there but there are some very good ones within specific fields of medicine like Oncology, or Nephrology to name a few.

What I'm getting out of this is that there are times an AI will reason out a solution and then remember the steps it used to produce that solution. The next step would be for the machine to use the same steps to solve similar problem not related to the original thought processes. It may improvise or add on to the prior reasoning solution and in that way show transfer of learning; evolution?

Yes! The best ML systems are those that remember both the solution and the path it took to get to that solution. It drastically reduces the amount of time spent on similar problems and that "learning" often can be applied in multiple contexts. These types of systems are notoriously difficult to build, and we often fail. The damndest thing is that we seem to be unable to do what we want the systems we build to do - learn from our successes and our failures. When it comes to designing and building neural network systems we often don't know why system A succeeded and system B failed. And to make things even more interesting, rebuilding system A doesn't always work as intended either. It's bloody maddening at times...

But we're working on it. And quantum computing (HW) will be what leads to the singularity. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind about that. And we're very, very close. Closer than I can publicly talk about. Forget D-Wave (or what will be it's commercial product)...there are things light years beyond it safely under Darpa's umbrella.

Watch this space...

Purgatory last 1000 years, seeing what all's going on in world today I would say he is probably pretty accurate. Probably won't be any white people left. Just dumb zero cultured beige world where Christianity is illegal. Incest, beastiality, pedophilia, prostitution will all be legal. Most men will be women, and women men. Won't be Christmas or Easter. All holidays will vanish because it offended someone. Meanwhile children still starving in Africa. Birth rates everywhere else drop from sexual diseases, confusion, infertility and common stale bourne, water will be entirely polluted, earth have hardly any real nutrients from preservatives and chemicals...

I'd honestly say it's closer than we think if things don't change very soon.

I mean it's 2016 and 51 countries are slaughtering Christians.

:shrugs: