AI translates news from Chinese to English and reaches human performance, another milestone says Microsoft.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Luddites start to attack self-driving cars in California, and a Robot learns how to flee from violent kids,  maybe it is time for some kinds of defence system?

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.

German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse discussed the mechanism of an feedback between computation result and executed program in 1983 in his lecture "Faust, Mephistopheles and Computer" and coined the term Devils Wire.

In the early days of computer history, the program to compute and the data to compute on was separated.

Nowadays computer use the same memory for both, so it is possible to write programs that manipulate their own program.

Zuse says, that behind every technology Mephistopheles stands behind and grins, but the modern world needs computers to solve actual and upcoming  problems, but better, read the lecture by yourself...

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Scientists are worried about AI in the wrong hands,
AI can be our friend says Bill Gates,
Robots are taught to fight off humans,
the optical computer makes progress,
and the memtransistor makes progress.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

"Technology itself is neither good nor bad. People are good or bad."
Naveen Jain

Actually i believe the Revelation as described in the Bible already happened, about 60 AD. And the beast with the number 666 has to be identified with the Roman Empire and Caesar Nero.

But inspired by this blog, i will give a modern interpretation a try, so feel free to join me in an alternate and speculative world paradigm...

Short version

Technology is the Antichrist, and computer driven AI is the peak of technology.

Preamble

Over 10000 years ago we left Garden Eden and started the neolithic revolution, we started to do farming and keep livestock, we started to use technology to make our lifes easier, but over the centuries and millennia, we forgot how to live with mother earth in an balanced way.

Full version

 

Revelation 13:18

"Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast:  for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six."

Using the english-sumerian gematria system, which is based on 6 - A=6, B=12, C=18...Z=156, the word "computer" counts to 666.

The first human to mention the word computer for people doing computations was Richard Braithwait in a book called "The Yong Mans Gleanings" in 1613.

Using the english-sumerian gematria method, the name "Braithwait" counts to 666.

Rev 13:18 could act like a puzzle with an checksum, "computer" is the name of the beast, but the name (the number) was coined by a man, and the man who coined the name has the number 666 too.

Revelation 13:16-17

"And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads: And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name."

Nowadays, without an Smart Phone (or upcoming Smart Glasses), or an computer, you are limited in your daily business, from renting a car to doing payments.

So the mark is already here, the Smart Phone in the right hand, the upcoming Smart Glasses in the forehead, and the computer in general.

Revelation 13:15

"And he had power to give life unto the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak, and cause that as many as would not worship the image of the beast should be killed."

An image of the beast is given life and people are going to worship it...AI God Religion Spotted

 

Revelation 16 - The Seven Bowls of God’s Wrath

 

Rev 16:2

"And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast,  and upon them which worshipped his image."

Considering computers as the mark of the beast, the sore could be cancer caused by radiation.

Rev 16:3

"And the second angel poured out his vial upon the sea; and it became as the blood of a dead man: and every living soul died in the sea."

Our sea world is dying, overfishing, plastic particles, acidification, etc.

Rev 16:4

"And the third angel poured out his vial upon the rivers and fountains of waters; and they became blood"

Blood in Judaism is impure and Jews are not allowed to eat it, this could mean that our rivers get poisoned.

Rev 16:8-9

"And the fourth angel poured out his vial upon the sun; and power was given unto him to scorch men with fire. And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God, which hath power over these plagues: and they repented not to give him glory."

Climate Change causes already increasing heatwaves and droughts.

Rev 16:10-11

"And the fifth angel poured out his vial upon the seat of the beast; and his kingdom was full of darkness; and they gnawed their tongues for pain, And blasphemed the God of heaven because of their pains and their sores, and repented not of their deeds."

This one can be interpreted as God shutting the internet down, the kingdom of the beast. Some scientists conclude that a pole-shift is currently underway, this could cause the magnetic field around earth to collapse, so the electro-magnetic waves from the sun could damage computer chips worldwide.

[update 2020-11-04]

Pretty obvious the Internet seems a natural fit to be the kingdom of the beast (a computer driven AI) so what does it mean it was 'full of darkness', hehe, ever wondered about the dark-web, fake-news, hate-speech etc.? Darkness.

Rev 16:12-14

"And the sixth angel poured out his vial upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up, that the way of the kings of the east might  be prepared. And I saw three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet. For they are the spirits of devils, working miracles, which go forth unto the kings of the earth and of the whole world, to gather them to the battle of that great day of God Almighty."

This one is clear, the Euphrates river dries up, and it is scary to watch it  really happen. Dunno about the frogs and kings.

Rev 16:17-21

"And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done. And there were voices, and thunders, and lightnings; and there was a great  earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an  earthquake, and so great. And the great city was divided into three parts, and the cities of the nations fell: and great Babylon came in remembrance before God, to give unto her thecup of the wine of the fierceness of his wrath. And every island fled away, and the mountains were not found. And there fell upon men a great hail out of heaven, every stone about the weight of a talent: and men blasphemed God because of the plague of the hail;  for the plague thereof was exceeding great."

An earthquake, so strong, never happened before during mankind.

Closing Words

There are many passages in the Revelation i can not interpret in a way that the computer is the Antichrist. The seven heads, horns and ten crowns of the dragon, the mortal wound, or the first and second beast, etc.

The Roman Empire with Caesar Nero as Antichrist simply fits better.

But please leave a comment, if you have further puzzle pieces for AI Antichrist.

So, considering the pure potential of the meme AI Antichrist,

i give -1 points for the Singularity to take off.

It is non-stop in the news, every week it pops up in another corner, AIs based on Deep Neural Networks, so i will give it a try to write a lill, biased article about this topic...

The brain

The human brain consists of about 100 billion neurons, as much as stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way, and each neuron is connected via synapses with about 1000 other neurons, resulting in 100 trillion connections.

For comparison, the game playing AI, AlphaZero, by Google Deepmind used about 50 million connections to play chess on super human level.

The inner neurons of our brain are connected via our senses, eyes, ears, etc, with the outer world.

One neuron has multiple, weighted inputs and one ouput, if a certain threshold of input is reached, its output is activated, the neuron fires an signal to another neuron.

The activation of the synapse is an electrical and chemical process, neurotransmitters can restrain or foster the activation potential, just consider the effect alcohol or coffee has to your cognitive performance.

Common artificial neural networks do not emulate the chemical part.

The brain wires these connections between neurons during learning, so they can act as memory, or can be used for computation.

The "Von Neumann" architecture

Most nowadays computers are based on the von Neumann architecture, they have no neurons or synapses but transistors.

The main components are the ALU, Arithmetic Logic Unit, memory for program and data,  and various inputs and outputs.

Artificial Neural Networks have to be built in software, running on these von Neumann computers.

Von Neumann said that his proposed architecture was inspired by the idea of how the brain works, memory and computation. And in his book, "The computer and the brain", he gives an comparision of computers and the knowledge about biological neural networks of that time.

Dartmouth

First work on ANNs were published already in the 1940s, and in 1956 the "Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence" was held, coining the term Artificial Intelligence, and marking one milestone in AI. The work on ANNs continued, and first neuromorphic chips were developed.

AI-Winter

In the 1970s the AI-Winter occurred, problems in computational theory and the lack of compute power needed by large ANNs, resulted in cutting funds, and splitting the work into strong and weak AI.

Deep Neural Networks

With the rise of compute power (driven by GPGPU), further research, and Big Data, it was possible to train faster better and larger networks in the 21st century.

The term Deep Neural Networks, for deep hierarchical structures or deep learning techniques was coined.

One of the first and common usage for ANNs was and is pattern recognition, for example character recognition.

You can train a neural network with a set of the same, but different looking character, with the aim that the ANN will recognize the same character in various appearances.

With a deeper topology of the neural network, it is possible to identify for example pictures of cars with different net layers for color, shape etc.

The Brain vs. The Machine

A computer can perform fast arithmetic and logical operations, therefore the transistors are used.

Contrary, the neural network of our brain works massiv parallel.

The synapses of the human brain are clocked with 10 to 100 hertz, means they can fire to other neurons up to 100 times per second.

Nowadays computer chips are clocked with 4 giga hertz, means they can compute 4 000 000 000 operations per second per ALU.

The brain has 100 billion neurons, 100 trillion connections and consumes ~20 watt, nowadays biggest chips have 12 billion transistors with an usage of 250 watt.

We can not compare the compute power of an brain directly with an von Neumann computer, but we can estimate what kind of computer we would need to map the neural network of an human brain.

Assuming 100 trillion connections, we would need about 400 terabytes of memory to store the weights of the neurons. Assuming 100 hertz as clock rate, we would need at least 40 petaFLOPS (floating point operations per second) to compute the activation potentials.

For comparison, the current number one high performance computer in the world is able to perform ~93 petaFLOPS, has ~1 petabyte memory,  but an power consumption of more than 15 megawatt.

So, considering simply the energy efficiency of the human brain,
i give -1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Google AI starts to write Wikipedia articles, wording is still a bit broken, but it shows clearly the way AI goes.

Look out, Wiki-geeks. Now Google trains AI to write Wikipedia articles

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Books and movies address our collective fears, hopes and wishes, and there seems to be in main five story-lines concerning AI in Sci-Fi...

Super AI takes over world domination
Colossus, Terminator, Matrix

Something went wrong
Odyssey 2001, Das System, Ex Machina

Super AI evolves, the more or less, peacefully
Golem XIV, A.I., Her

The Cyborg scenario, man merges with machine
Ghost in the Shell, #9, Trancendence

There are good ones, and there are bad ones
Neuromancer, I,Robot, Battle Star Galactica

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Human Philosophers discuss the impact of social robots on mankind, still no Strong AI in sight that joins the debate.

Cherry piking...

The Moral Life of Androids - Should Robots Have Rights?
Edward Howlett Spence

"The question I explore is whether intelligent autonomous Robots will have moral rights. Insofar as robots can develop fully autonomous intelligence, I will argue that Robots will have moral rights for the same reasons we do. ..."

Robot Deus
Robert Trappl

"The ascription of god-like properties to machines has a long tradition. Robots of today invite to do so. We will present and discuss god-like properties, to be found in movies as well as in scientific publications, advantages and risks of robots both as good or evil gods, and probably end with a robot theology."

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

“He who cannot lie does not know what truth is.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

The Turing Test, proposed by Mathematician Alan Turing in 1950, was developed to examine if an AI reached human level intelligence.

Simplified, a person performs text chats with an human and the AI, if the person is not able to discern which chat partner the AI is, then the AI has passed the Turing Test.

The Loebner Prize performs every year a Turing Test contest.

It took me some time to realize, that the Turing Test is not so much about intelligence, but about lying and empathy.

If an AI wants to pass the Turing Test it has to lie to the chat partner, and to be able to lie, it has to develop some level of empathy, and some level of selfawareness.

Beside other criticism, the Chinese Room Argument states that no consciousness is needed to perform such an task, and therefore other tests have been developed.

Personally I prefer the Metzinger-Test, a hypothecical event, when AIs start to discuss with human philosophers and defend successfully their own theory of consciousness.

I am not sure if the Singularity is going to take off, but i guess that the philosophers corner is one of the last domains that AIs are going to conquer, and if they succeed we can be pretty sure to have another Apex on earth

Turing predicted that by the year 2000 machines will fool 30% of human judges, he was wrong, the Loebner Prize has still no Silver Medal winner for the 25 minutes text chat category.

So, -1 points for the Singularity to take off.