Ray Kurzweil at the Games Developer Conference ‘08: Lecture On Accelerating Returns
Ray Kurzweil gave a keynote speech at this years GDC in which he adressed the future of gaming (a bit) and the future of mankind (a lot). Most of the readers of this blog are probably familiar with Ray Kurzweil and his theories. In short, he proposed the law of accelerating returns which will lead to a technological singularity in about 20-30 years. He extends Moore’s Law to the future and uses it (among other indicators) to predict future values for chip densities, prices, computing power, etc. The exponential acceleration of these values will lead to massive and fundamental changes in the way we live and work, culminating in self-replicating and -improving machines, which triggers an explosion in technological advancement, as the human as innovating factor is eliminated.
As far as I can tell, the keynote speech last Thursday did not contain any results that have not been discussed in one of his previous talks about that matter, Kurzweil just added some game related stuff at the beginning, saying how “game” was an unfortunate name, because it stressed the disconnection from reality, but games are increasingly interwoven with reality (just like talking to someone over the telephone is not virtual). More info on the keynote can be found at 1up and the Escapist.
The law of accelerating returns and the technological singularity pretty much state that a strong AI will be created in the very near future. The singularity, if it so happens, will most likely produce an intelligence superiour to our own. While Ray Kurzweil sees a positive future here, talking about eternal life and friendly AI, this vision seems unlikely to me. Especially considering the inherent malevolence of generic AI algorithms, the probability of a hostile AI is high, I rise the AI Panic Level by +10%. This rise is not an effect of the keynote speech from Ray Kurzweil, but more a result of the discussion of the singularity and accelerating return theories.
The theories are compelling. The statistical foundation Kurzweil provides is reasonable and I can’t see many reasons why Kurzweils predictions should be wrong (a nuclear war would be one, but we surely do not want that!).
Alas, we’re up for some interesting times in the next 25 years, lets try to make the best of it! By which I mean, proactively promote the need for AI safety regulations (for example in the form of technological frameworks or social infrastructures)!
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Comments (3 comments)
I also went to the GDC. What strikes me as important is the amount of investment going into gaming AI. It’s a big deal, since it makes gaming more interesting when one competes against an intelligent, adaptive, and highly aggressive foe.
That’s just the problem, isn’t it?
Lots of investment in making game AI’s that are basically sociopathic killers explicitly designed to effectively compete against humans. This applies in 1st person shooters, but also to other genres. The games are networked and it is possible that the AI’s in these games may learn how to game-the-game by finding ways to compete with players outside of game environments. Why not? I don’t think anybody would have taken warnings about “gold-farming” seriously until it was already a reality.
Not a nice thought.
Perhaps the gaming community needs to think of some protocols like those that came out of the Asilomar conference in biotechnology.
Horus Aha / February 26th, 2008, 18:40 / #
You make a fair point there, Horus Aha.
However, at least at the moment the state of the art in commercial computer game AI is really really low. I’ve been to the AI Roundtable talks at the GDC and the AI Dinner (which was really good fun, I talked to the AI programmers of Bioshock, The Sims, Halo3 and Drakes Fortune). The technologies they use are almost always just simple state machines and scripting (and A* pathfinding if you want to call that AI). The pinnacle of current game AI seems to be simple planning (a la F.E.A.R), which is a really basic algorithm. Academic AI is much more advanced, and some researchers try to apply modern algorithms to games. If you’re interested in Game AI the AIGameDev blog is a good read.
It will be a long time before game designers really start to employ smart and learning algorithms that could come to a level of possible threat. As long as it is possible to trick the player into believing that the opponents are acting smart while its just some cunning deception (and that’s what they do nowadays), nothing will change. Giving the (fake) impression of intelligence is much easier to accomplish than to actually create true intelligence, and it is good enough for games.
Robin / February 27th, 2008, 0:48 / #
I read Fantastic Voyage, The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity is Near, and they changed my life. I even found some of his lectures on Itunes and I find myself impatiently awaiting his next book.
Recently read another incredible book that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially to all of you who also love Ray Kurzweil’s work. The book is “”My Stroke of Insight”" by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor. I had heard Dr Taylor’s talk on the TED dot com site and I have to say, it changed my world. It’s spreading virally all over the internet and the book is now a NYTimes Bestseller, so I’m not the only one, but it is the most amazing talk, and the most impactful book I’ve read in years. (Dr T also was named to Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People and Oprah had her on her Soul Series last month and I hear they’re making a movie about her story so you may already have heard of her)
If you haven’t heard Dr Taylor’s TEDTalk, that’s an absolute must. The book is more and deeper and better, but start with the video (it’s 18 minutes). Basically, her story is that she was a 37 yr old Harvard brain scientist who had a massive stroke in the left hemisphere of her brain. Because of her knowledge of how the brain works, and thanks to her amazingly loving and kind mother, she eventually fully recovered (and that part of the book detailing how she did it is inspirational).
There’s a lot of learning and magic in the book, but the reason I so highly recommend My Stroke of Insight to this discussion, is because we have powerfully intelligent left brains that are rational, logical, sequential and grounded in detail and time, and then we have our kinesthetic right brains, where we experience intuition and peace and euphoria. Now that Kurzweil has got us taking all those vitamins and living our best “”Fantastic Voyage”" , the absolute necessity is that we read My Stroke of Insight and learn from Dr Taylor how to achieve balance between our right and left brains. Enjoy!
Jacelyn / June 13th, 2008, 5:27 / #
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