http://www.defensereview.com/article846.html

“His pessimism shows that Artificial General Intelligence is still quite far out, and while I think he might be overestimating the time-span for it”

He’s not overestimating it. In fact, he’s overstating what he has *today*. You could say COSPAL is as sophisticated as, say, one of the minor subsystems in an ant, but equating it to a three year old child is absolutely ludicrous. A three year old child is a self-aware, reasoning animal, capable of feats of pattern recognition, problem solving, creativity and dexterous manipulation that make COSPOL look like a “Hello, World” program — speaking, reading, writing, painting, playing musical instruments, and much more.

“the Singularity is scheduled earlier than after our lifetimes”

How can one refer to the Singularity as ’scheduled’?

True, a three year old child is much more “complex” than any computer program or robot. However, I think the statement you are citing only refers to abstract reasoning abilities, i.e., “If I switch the cups while the man is away, will he know where the ball is hidden when he comes back?”
In this (very limited) aspect a comparison between a program and a young child is not that far off. Again, the background knowledge of the world and a proper database of it is one of the biggest stumbling blocks.

Many of the attributes that you mention where the child is superior (reasoning, capable of pattern recognition, problem solving and dexterous manipulation) are within reach of artificial recreation. Creativity is a difficult argument here, because it is so hard to define. Once you give a definition of creativity, there is most likely already a computer program out there that fulfills it.

Of course, we are nowhere near self-awareness, but it again comes down to a proper definition. Some believe, that self-awareness is automatically created once a reasoning system becomes sufficiently complex.

By saying “the singularity is scheduled” I was just referring to the viewpoint of the proponents of the singularity idea. The law of accelerating returns leads to the conclusion that there will be an “invention explosion” in the not too distant future. It states that when we create self-replicating, self improving machines, the human intelligence will be decoupled from the invention process and the speed of paradigm shifts will skyrocket.

“Many of the attributes that you mention where the child is superior (reasoning, capable of pattern recognition, problem solving and dexterous manipulation) are within reach of artificial recreation.”

I’ll believe it when I see it.

“Creativity is a difficult argument here, because it is so hard to define.”

I mention creativity simply because it’s relevant to the discussion of Singularity. If any intelligence (nature or artificial) is really is going to design a superior successor, it will likely need to do more than merely improve the efficiency of existing designs, it will probably have to synthesize completely novel solutions, perhaps drawing on knowledge from fields that are not obviously related to the problem at hand.

“Of course, we are nowhere near self-awareness, but it again comes down to a proper definition.”

We don’t need to define it to discuss it. You and I are both intimately familiar with it from first-person experience. We don’t need a clearer definition that than, when talking among fellow humans (I can’t *prove* that you are self-aware, but I’m comfortable assuming you are, because your intelligence emerges from the same hardware as mine).

The problem is determining if a ‘non-human’ intelligence is self-aware. I have no idea how you would do that.

“Some believe, that self-awareness is automatically created once a reasoning system becomes sufficiently complex.”

An interesting thought. Is it a threshold, or a matter of degree? Was Einstein more self-aware than the kid riding the short bus?

“The law of accelerating returns leads to the conclusion that there will be an ‘invention explosion’ in the not too distant future.”

That’s not how I read it, and that doesn’t make sense, IMO. The explosion comes *only* when you reach a point where you’ve created a machine that’s smarter than yourself, with the presumption that it can then create an even more capable successor, so on and so forth. However, there’s no way to predict when we’ll achieve that initial target, if ever, or if it’s even possible.

It wouldn’t surprise me if some future branch of information theory concluded that it is not *possible* for an intelligence to *design* something smarter than itself (presuming, first, quantifiable definitions for intelligence and/or smart ^_^).