Review by Terry Winograd

There is a great deal of speculation today about the potential for a "singularity" in which superintelligence emerges, and there is a great deal of debate about what will happen as a result. The scientific and philosophical arguments for and against these speculations are less interesting than the fact that many serious people take this as a topic of interest. In reading the diverse and well-chosen perspectives in this volume, we can get insights into the underlying views of rationality, human nature, scientific and social progress, and of hopes and fears for the future. The editors have provided a valuable overview of the singularity debate, and the style of articles with responses provides the reader with entry into the dialog. There is much to be gained from reading them and understanding the interpretations they represent. I am happy to recommend the book both for artificial intelligence researchers and for the more general public interested in the future of computing.

Terry Winograd, Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University

New Millennium AI and the Convergence of History: Update of 2012

Jürgen Schmidhuber, University of Lugano & SUPSI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has recently become a real formal science: the new millennium brought the first mathematically sound, asymptotically optimal, universal problem solvers, providing a new, rigorous foundation for the previously largely heuristic field of General AI and embedded agents. There also has been rapid progress in not quite universal but still rather general and practical artificial recurrent neural networks for learning sequence-processing programs, now yielding state-of-the-art results in real world applications. And the computing power per Euro is still growing by a factor of 100-1000 per decade, greatly increasing the feasibility of neural networks in general, which have started to yield human-competitive results in challenging pattern recognition competitions. Finally, a recent formal theory of fun and creativity identifies basic principles of curious and creative machines, laying foundations for artificial scientists and artists. Here I will briefly review some of the new results of my lab at IDSIA, and speculate about future developments, pointing out that the time intervals between the most notable events in over 40,000 years or 2⁹ lifetimes of human history have sped up exponentially, apparently converging to zero within the next few decades. Or is this impression just a by-product of the way humans allocate memory space to past events?

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Can machine learning bring about an intelligence explosion? (Extended abstract)

Itamar Arel, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, The University of Tennessee

Reward-Driven Learning and the Threat of an Adversarial Artificial General Intelligence Singularity 

A myriad of evidence exists in support of the notion that mammalian learning is driven by rewards. Recent findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience strongly suggest that much of human behavior is propelled by both positive and negative feedback received from the environments with which we interact. The notion of reward is not limited to indicators originating from a physical environment. It also embraces signaling generated internally in the brain, based on intrinsic cognitive processes. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), coarsely viewed as human- level intelligence manifested over non-biological platforms, is commonly perceived as one of the paths that may lead to the singularity. Such a path has the potential of being either beneficially transformative or devastating to the human race, to a great extent depending on the very nature of the AGI.