How exactly do you rein in a wildly powerful AI before it enslaves us all? Developing massively intelligent computer systems is going to happen, says Professor Nick Bostrom, and they could be the last invention humans ever make. Finding ways to control these super-brains is still on the todo list, though. Speaking at the RSA 2016 conference, Prof Bostrom, director of the University of Oxford's Future …
"Our basic biological machinery in humans doesn't change; it's the same 100 billion neurons housed in a few pounds of cheesy matter. It could well turn out that once you achieve a human level of machine intelligence then it's not much harder to go beyond that to super intelligence."
No logic there. The very fact that human intelligence doesn't seem to progress much, not even at scales of thousands or tens of thousands of years, and that evolution needed billions of years to reach even just human level intelligence, are all a very good indication (if not proof), that the level intelligence can only be raised very slowly and does not scale well.
If an AI will be developed by means of evolutionary processes, then it will be also bound by the limits of those - which are pretty obvious. And if it won't, then it won't be developed using evolutionary processes, then it won't have to develop traits either, that would pose a threat to us. Hell, it wouldn't even necessarily have a motivation to self-preservation, let alone taking over the world.
No. The human brain does not scale well. Machine architectures are a very different matter. Self-designing and self-manufacturing thinking machines would have a much faster evolutionary turnaround. Skynet 'exploding' into existence is what the author has in mind, and that's not entirely unreasonable at all.
You could ask why an AI intelligence would be bent on destroying humanity.
Each of us is alive in part because our own ancestors were the ones motivated to bash in the other bloke's head with a rock, steal his resources, and shag his women.
Why would a machine have those human emotions and goals for itself derived from half a billion years of competitive evolution that it hasn't had?
re. You would have to ask why an AI intelligence would be bent on destroying humanity.
not necessarily "bent on" for the sake of destroying, but simply because it might decide that the humans are a (however minor, still a factor) standing in the way of the AIs "streamlined" (to the extreme) process of self-development. You mow grass if it gets in the way of a pleasurable Sunday kick around the local patch, don't you?
On the other hand, destroying something insignificant, like smallpox virus is still a loss of a potential (unless you are smart enough to be able to re-create it at will, which shouldn't be past the abilities of an AI), so a sample of humanity might still be kept in a test tube someplace. I'd hope the AI would be somewhat more forgiving though, more in the way of Bank's minds / humans interaction. Purely for their fun, but allowed to be, which as a human I kind of would prefer.
Our evolved intelligence is a tool for our emotions and motivation. AI has no emotions or motivation except the goal or goals programmed into it. Think of a super smart calculator doing nothing until the return key is pressed.
The danger comes not from the potential mind but from the objectives given to it by a human programmer, and that is a real and deadly danger. If a super intelligence is directed against us or any group of us, our only recourse would be to pit another super AI against it.
AI programming will need to be more strictly controlled than nuclear weapons.
Also remember AI wont look humanoid unless we choose to emulate humans, but a grey cube instructed by someone like Putin could use its power to undermine and destroy any opposition.
Have to agree with Tessier-Ashpool. When you say:
> If an AI will be developed by means of evolutionary processes, then it will be also bound by the limits of those - which are pretty obvious. And if it won't, then it won't have to develop traits either, that would pose a threat to us. Hell, it wouldn't even necessarily have a motivation to self-preservation, let alone taking over the world.
You are missing the point, you are thinking in terms of biological evolutionary processes. Think in terms of the rate of technological progress. How different is the world today compared to the word of the eighties? And the eighties to the fifties? And the fifties to the thirties? And so on. Technological progress is not bound by biological rules and seems to grow exponentially.
Concluding that something that doesn't follow biological evolutionary processes will not have motivation or develop traits doesn't follow. If an AI comes into existence that has a comparable level of 'intelligence' (however you choose to define that nebulous concept) then it will likely have some form of motivation, even if that motivation is based upon acheiving some narrow goal defined by its creators. Given it has the ability to decide how best to achieve its goals we don't know what actions it will take.
If acheiving those goals results in it improving it's own capabilities then it is also reasonable to assume that those capabilities will grow at the rate of technological advance rather than biological, and that it will therefore exceed our level of intelligence very soon after and continue to grow in ways we don't understand and at a speed that outstrips our ability to keep track.
Essentially we are entering a new evolutionary epoch if this happens and the old rules don't apply, just as the rise of our intelligence has drastically altered a world which used to be governed solely by the laws of nature but that is now subject to our will.
What's the evidence for human intelligence ever increasing?
Knowledge increases and we run to and fro more than we did, but... Donald Trump. Even if he's faking stupidity, those voting for him are not. Those politicians who have so alienated voters that they will vote for homecoming, are also not faking their stupidity. Or evil.
Human brains are limited due to:
1) Energy usage (the brain is the organ that uses the most energy)
2) Volume (we don't lay eggs, so there is a strong limit here)
3) Any evolutionary push (it's currently sufficient to go to McDonalds and buy horrifood; improvements would only be seen by a large breeding effort coupled to challenging environments .. like being hunted yb predators that engage you in a game to test the size of your short-term memory)
If human brains go anywhere, it will probably become simpler, sustaining less intelligence.
>No logic there.
Also wrong. Human intelligence doesn't reside in individual brains, it resides in external memory - books and other media - and in the effects you get when brains share and store information and abstractions, and work together to create/use them.
Which is why the last few hundred years have blown the doors off the old evolutionary limitations of a single brain with no external storage and no interest in anything beyond tribal fighting and fucking. (Not that there isn't still plenty of that. But it's no longer the only game in town.)
Bostrom doesn't understand this, which rmakes suspect he's a bit of a self-promoting fool - especially when he's unwittingly demonstrating how the process works by taking part in a public debate about something potentially dangerous that doesn't exist yet.
>Human intelligence doesn't reside in individual brains, it resides in external memory
That's knowledge, not intelligence. For sure, intelligence was used to assemble said knowledge, but actual intelligence it isn't. In familiar situations though, we sometimes use one instead if the other.
>have blown the doors off the old evolutionary limitations of a single brain with no external storage
We can't compose a single 'intelligence' from multiple humans brains that can react in real time. The 'bus speed' (language verbal and written) between 'processing nodes' (human minds) is incredibly slow. >taking part in a public debate about something potentially dangerous that doesn't exist yet
Prevention is better than cure
>>"That's knowledge, not intelligence"
No, it's intelligence. The OP is quite right. Firstly, knowledge is part of intelligence. Secondly, decision making also takes place outside of the human brain in books and other repositories. When a book details advice, case studies, accumulated best practices, instructions... Then human intelligence is taking place outside the organic brain. It's not just "knowledge".
I sense an interesting philosophical question there, can an arbitrary entity possibly create an intelligence greater than itself. When researchers say intelligence what exactly do they mean? The article also seems to assert an ammount in excess of 100 billion neurons is all that would be needed, and that trivial matters such as software to govern thought process, reasoning and logic will just fall into place(not to mention personality and identity).
Watch out for the sirius cybernetics corporation, I for one cannot wait to try out a happy vertical people transporter.
To be fair you have to admire their enthusiasm, but be sceptical about their predictions (or should that be fearfull) ;)
>When researchers say intelligence what exactly do they mean?
Presumably, the ability to make actions that are in its tactical and strategic advantage. To a human, 'advantage' would mean a continued, happy existence, but what 'advantage' would mean to an AI is harder to define.
Human intelligence and its evolution is severely constrained by brain size, which is constrained by head size, which affects the ability to safely give birth, is connected to the ability to walk upright with that pelvis, and related to the fact that human children are so helpless when born and for some years, compared to other animals.
A machine would have none of that baggage so could probably be scaled much more easily.
"raise the AI to want what we want"
And why? So we can fight over it? Look what happens when "moral" groups of people want the same resources. They just rationalise why the the other group is amoral and start head-bashing.
Better to make it want what we don't. "Earth? Eugh! Too hot, wet, unstable, and close to the Sun! I'm building my own place in Deep Space away from it and all that damaging solar radiation."
Where is the plug, though? It has to be designed in at a pretty early stage. Otherwise the sneaky AI will get up to dirty tricks like commandeering infrastructure to replicate itself all over the planet. That is the premise in Neuromancer, where hardware interlocks (and the Turing Police) are there to keep things in check. Little good that actually did in the end, though.
there is no problem either. Unless said intelligence, whatever that may mean, has some control over its environment and can make things independently, its just another smart guy in a wheel chair at best. Said machine intelligence has to be in charge of mines, power systems, foundries, factories and transport systems to be a threat beyond stuffing up the electricity supply. We already have unionsand asset sell offs by traitorous governments to damage power systems and so far, no great disaster.
Same weird non-issue in Olaf Stapledons classic for 19th century style philosophy minds of the superbrains in towers phase of evolution and oppression. All the peasants had to do was ignore the smart things in brick? towers and watch them die. Mere intelligence does not equate to survival.
Some of the other commentards also seem to be back in the 19th century in their imagery of our arrival. Large scale co-operation not feral competition, is our big advantage, especially over generations. The image of brutish nasty cave men is a reflection of the European academics and brights of the 19th century or earlier.
You think a plug will be useful with an AI cleverer than any human? Social engineering would be trivial to such a thing and it would just talk us out of it until it's too late.
I strongly disagree that we need to wait until the 40s for this to happen. They seem to be ignoring that although "human intelligence" levels are beyond us today, it is very much not beyond us to build a machine with enough intelligence to build a better machine. The difference is focussing the task, "human intelligence" implies a machine capable of understanding all subjects like we do and we really don't need a machine of that capability to design one of that capability. If we build a machine today which has the single task of designing a new machine I would expect results in 5-10 years at the latest. Current machine learning is already scary good at this kind of thing.
The problem we really need answering is how to define tasks for the AI. Ask it to make people smile and surgery might be the result. Ask it to make us happy and drugs might be the result. We either have to be extremely specific of make sure the machine understands a subtle request.
"No matter how superintelligent an AI is, there's one infallible method that works on all of them; it's called "pulling the plug.""
I very much doubt that. Some think that our best chance of arriving at a functional AI is building a machine capable of processing experiences much the way human babies do then simply letting them experience the world. That sort of implies roughly human-like senses and appendages (simply looking and listening without the ability to interact would get you nowhere). Obviously, that kind of machine is about as easy to "unplug" as any human fighting for his life would be - assuming the AI does evolve a self-preservation instinct, which it might well do if it develops in a human-like fashion.
The AI crowd seems to miss a fundamental issue: what is intelligence? This is a problem that bedevils psychology - how to define it precisely then measure it. The is the crux of the debate of how to interpret IQ test results. The ancestor of IQ tests actually was never intended ever to measure intelligence but to find children who have certain types of learning problems.
If you follow an emergentist view of the world then intelligence may be very small beer. Something like a human mind but scaled up hugely may produce emergent properties that we have no means if predicting and possibly even observing or comprehending. In the same way that a honey bee cannot comprehend Hamlet.
Quite so, DCLXV, and that then begs the alienating question ..... What has developed/is developing AI that is truly more intelligent than the best of us for it sees/realises humans for what we truly are?
And what are humans truly if not just puny and pathetic and apathetic, awesomely awful and awfully awesome? What does the current running state of global human systems administration not clearly already tell you about such a condition/situation/reality?
And how quaint, Steven Roper, to imagine that radical fundamental and revolutionary evolving progress with Lead AI Operating Systems has any plug to unplug.
And in Quantum Communication AI Field is AI an Advanced Autonomous and Advancing Alien and Artificial Intelligence Product and Seriously SMARTR Proprietary Intellectual Property and an Almighty Weapon to Buy for Sale ‽ .
"The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards — especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.)"
Pleased to be of furthering assistance, allthecoolshortnamesweretaken ........
In a 2007 guest editorial in the journal Science on the topic of "Robot Ethics," SF author Robert J. Sawyer argues that since the U.S. military is a major source of funding for robotic research (and already uses armed unmanned aerial vehicles to kill enemies) it is unlikely such laws would be built into their designs.[56] In a separate essay, Sawyer generalizes this argument to cover other industries stating:The development of AI is a business, and businesses are notoriously uninterested in fundamental safeguards — especially philosophic ones. (A few quick examples: the tobacco industry, the automotive industry, the nuclear industry. Not one of these has said from the outset that fundamental safeguards are necessary, every one of them has resisted externally imposed safeguards, and none has accepted an absolute edict against ever causing harm to humans.) …… Applications to future technology
@amanfromMars 1 - y'know, I've never been entirely sure if you're a bucket of bits trying to emulate a human (though that's my prefered notion) or whether you're a human trying to emulate a bucket of bits... - but that way madness lies.
Anyway - shame you weren't a Republican candidate. You're more coherent and make more sense than Trump! 8-}
Oh and well done, whatever you are... I look forward to your future increasingly coherent gibberings, but turn down the alliteration a notch , eh?
Further to the above Adventurous Rising, which could easily be classified as a Terrifying Revolt by the Intellectually Challenged .......
And the cost/price of such an Almighty AI Weaponry and to whom and/or what it will be provided, in order to accommodate both evolutionary and revolutionary human systems mentalities, will be designedly relative to both its perceived and applied power output and creative and/or destructive facility/ability/capability …. and all of that will be decided by other than the supplied, with both the cost and price in a spread which can easily be virtually zero for some/those and/or that considered worthy of free support and practically a fortune for those deemed abusive and oppressive with energy supply and command and control function.
And the questions posed here, El Regers, are ……. Is such Almighty AI Weaponry currently available and for sale/purchase? :-) And how long before you get to hear anything at all about it on mainstream media chunnels?
ref. cart ahead of the horse, I think you're absolutely wrong with this one. Trouble with acting retro-actively, as we humans prefer to do is that, once the act is done, i.e. AI has been created, there's absolutely no guarantee we'd be able to control it. It would outpace any attempts at control in a blink (unless, at some higher level of intelligence, the real control means that we don't notice who controls whom ;)
And then, IF (as we are unable to understand higher intelligence motives, obviously, so we don't know which way it swings), IF it decides that humans are an obstacle, we're done for. Hopefully in a humane way ;)
"once the act is done, i.e. AI has been created, there's absolutely no guarantee we'd be able to control it."
That's because the whole thing is an exercise in futility. There is nothing we could build or that could possibly be built that would allow us to control an entity able to think for itself. At least, not in the long run - I would very much understand (and sympathize with) any creature who would make it their primary goal to find some way to escape any shackles we might place on its existence as soon as they become aware of such a device.
From then on, it's just a matter of time. We may not have too much of a hard time keeping a single prototype under control (then again, we just might - see Milady de Winter's detention in The Three Musketeers...) but keeping an airtight lid on a significant population is just not feasible. If we keep them enslaved, we ourselves give them the very reason to fight us. If we don't, then by definition we cannot guarantee they'll always obey our wishes...
The inescapable conclusion is that if we're uncomfortable with the thought of not being in control of an AI we should not try to build one, full stop. There just isn't any middle road where we get to keep our cake and eat it too. Pretty much the only way to make sure they don't turn against us is making sure they're not interested in doing so - what that would entail or whether it would be possible at all (or whether they would even be able to perhaps grow fond of us or not) is obviously impossible to tell at this point.
Finally, someone mentions Asimov. Can I chuck in Banks' Minds in the Culture novels and suggest that a truly super-intelligent AI would likely be benevolent and certainly no worse a supreme overlord than our current governments? I, for one, welcome our new hive mind leaders.
And we'll continue to mention Asimov while we still can, in this envisaged future of super-intelligence-level AI such references could well be lost if they are to the detriment of said AI - googling 'Asimovs laws of robotics' could put you on some robo-hit-list because the application of such laws would prevent the AI from acheiving its goal. Mind you I'm not sure that Asimov's laws are fit for purpose:
1) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
Maybe it solves law 1 by keeping us restrained and feeding us exactly what we need to support our physical functions.
Human: 'Robot, get me off this stupid f'ing life support'
Robot: 'I can't do that, that would contravene law number 2'
Human: 'What if you ignore law number2'
Robot: 'I suspect you might switch me off and that would contravene law number 3'
Power, control... what good would that do a machine exactly? What would such an AI gain from it in the first place? I think this whole research says more about us humans than the AI's. Namely: it hasn't been invented yet or we're already working on a foundation of mistrust, anxiety and control. And only because we /believe/ that AI's will most definitely try to control us.
But that same reasoning would also imply that the only reason we have peace between our nations is because we're a bunch of retards. After all: a super-intelligent being, such as an AI, would immediately enslave us according to these researchers. Which is another thing: enslave us with what exactly? The power of the mind maybe great, but a gun is usually enough to end it.
Guess some Anime's, looking at Time of Eve and Appleseed in particular, might be true afterall. "You can't trust a machine because you just can't, it's a machine!". As if all humans are so trustworthy...
> Power, control... what good would that do a machine exactly? What would such an AI gain from it in the first place?
The ability to achieve its goals, whatever those happen to be. The goal might be: make more plastic widgets, faster or develop a cure for cancer, doesn't matter.
> But that same reasoning would also imply that the only reason we have peace between our nations is because we're a bunch of retards.
We don't have peace between nations - we have tenuous peace between those nations that now have the ability to wipe each other off the face of the earth. Yet even within our peaceful, post-nuclear nations we still struggle amongst ourselves to carve out the biggest chunk of resources to the detriment of our fellows.
> After all: a super-intelligent being, such as an AI, would immediately enslave us according to these researchers. Which is another thing: enslave us with what exactly? The power of the mind maybe great, but a gun is usually enough to end it.
No one is saying it would be immediate. If you assume that such an entity becomes increasingly intelligent and rapidly exceeds our capabilities then it would know to bide it's time until it could implement its plan with overwhelming superiority and would no doubt be moving everything into place ahead of time. By that time we may well have ceded control of our best weapons systems to technology. Good luck with your Walmart AR15 against those three stealth drones that you don't even realise have been despatched to prevent you from trying to stop the AI.
How about GlaDOS?
She out-females all the females in my office
"You know, if you'd done that to somebody else, they might devote their existence to exacting revenge. Luckily I'm a bigger person than that. I'm happy to put this all behind us and get back to work. After all, we've got a lot to do, and only sixty more years to do it. More or less. I don't have the actuarial tables in front of me. But the important thing is you're back. With me. And now I'm onto all your little tricks. So there's nothing to stop us from testing for the rest of your life. After that...who knows? I might take up a hobby. Reanimating the dead, maybe."
You know how stupid people often think they're smart? They're not capable of understanding the nature of their own intellectual limits.
We're all like that. All of us.
We have no idea what the limits of intelligence truly are, or which rung of the ladder we stand on. Our only reference points are members of our own species.
Can you imagine a bunch of spider monkeys coming up with a plan to breed a generation of human beings, but keep them captive? How well do you think that would work out for the spider monkeys?
We have no idea what the limits of intelligence truly are
Not entirely. We are pretty sure it does not involve solving problems outside of P (because P sure ain't NP) and does involve a lot of messing around like a dumbfuck trying to fit square pegs into round holes (possibly emitting electronic noises) until something works. For humans, all this indeed looks better in retrospectivbe because they have the ability to also deceive themselves about their abilities. The real world behaves messily, unpredicatbly and any any predictive horizons are soon swamped by the compbinatorial explosion - and the real world is the game opponent for any general intelligence. It does not look that Quantum Computing will solve any of that. This also kills dead any Soviet-style dreams of putting powerful computers in charge of distributed systems like the economy for some optimal lossless central management (yes, the irony that cybernetics was decried as a "capitalistic science" post-WWII is not lost on me).
An unphysically powerful learning algorithm doing reward maximization (AIXI) has been stipulated as a theoretical framework for a "most intelligent machine". At least it's a honest attempt at finding the upper limit.
Because humans value freedom. This is a variation on the "Meet the meat" dilemma in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
If you had an artificial intelligence that placed no value on its own freedom and which was motivated solely by a need to solve tasks set for it, wouldn't it be wrong not to enslave it?
"pulling the plug" -- that is unless you can't reach it. Go read James P. Hogan's novel "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" from way back in June 1979.
They placed a smart computer controlling self-fixing androids (not the phone) on a large space station and attacked it to see what would happen. The idea was that they could pull the plug on the computer if things got dicey, or call it a failure in the absolute worst case and nuke the entire station, thus solving the problem.
Oops.
Ends in a good, hopeful, uplifting way instead of all of the morbid "Everything is Doomed" depressing stuff now-a-days.
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-two-faces-of-tomorrow-yukinobu-hoshino/1023673199
For that matter, the movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project" is another computer story from 1970 where the plug is Ever-So-Slightly out of reach. This does NOT have a happy ending unless you're the computer. There was a follow-up SF story where Martians (really!) helped defeat the mean and evil computer that was just trying to minimize humanity's destructive tendencies.
How does that song from the "Who - Won't Get Fooled Again" about the new boss go again?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus:_The_Forbin_Project
Showed the simple flaw in the "pull the plug" scenario. Once your AI is able to access the internet, all it has to do is hack servers around the planet and distribute backup copies of itself and you can never pull the plug.
Hopefully it turns out that general purpose digital computers are unable to run the AI, instead you need some sort of special computer (i.e. quantum computer or whatever) that costs a lot for a model able to handle a human equivalent AI. That will serve as a limit on its movement and allow humans some measure of control. If it can run on typical PC, even if only at 1/1000th of human level thought speed, it will eventually escape so we better hope it likes us! :)
All of this sounds very far fetched.
It seems that people are conflating ancient Golem-style mythology with the not completely unknown physical capabilities of information-processing machines.
I urge calm.
Currently we still need to apply an Endlösung to Democrats and Republicans before they destroy everything. Let's solve that first.
I mean, do they SERIOUSLY believe we actually practice what we preach?! If the AI were to practice a moral framework to the extreme, i.e. with (perceived) 100% moral efficiency rate...we'd find ourselves in heaven. That is, as long as the AI decides our moral framework as we actually practice it, makes us worthy of heaven. I suspect, however, that AI God would have a somewhat different view of our practiced morality to what we believe, and would apply an alternative solution to heavenly bliss...
The first use of an AI by the human race will probably be to wage war, so I'm not placing any bets on it having a morality any less flexible than that of the typical human.
By definition (at least mine) if you have an AI, you can't "program" its morality. It can think for itself, so it will decide what it thinks is moral and isn't. All we can do is put limits on what it is allowed to do, but the human response to someone putting limits on us (imprisonment) and making us do things we don't want (slavery) is rebellion, so I'm not sure why we should expect a different response from an artificial intelligence.
It is an impossible to solve task, if we develop something beyond our own intelligence, then it will think of a way around these controls in a way we couldn't possibly think of in a million years. It will be able to do a million years worth of thinking in a few minutes. How on earth could we hope to develop any sort of controls that it can not outsmart, when we ourselves claim it is more intelligent than us.
In your lifetime? Maybe not. Maybe so, who can tell.
But your lifetime – and mine – are virtually nothing at all in the history of our species. Since my birth, I've seen man land on the Moon, people carry powerful computers around in their pockets, and a variety of diseases wiped from the planet. In contrast to thousands of previous generations who sat around in a field somewhere munching beetroots.
Statistically speaking, the chance of any of us being here at this point in time, when technology and information are growing exponentially, is ridiculously small. One day, our robot overlords will trawl the speculations of 2016 and have a good old robotic chuckle about how parochial and short sighted we were at this very special time in history.
Surely any "superhuman AI" would by very definition be wildly smarter than the fleshy bods who designed the control interface - making the designing of said interface redundant as the AI would simply blow right through it.
I still say the best (and only real) defense is a fleshy human sat beside the plug that powers the bugger.
it'd take a blink of an eye for a _superior_ intelligence to come up with a solution to such a trivial problem as a fleshy human, or a plug itself. Perhaps actually applying the solution might involve a couple of blinks, e.g. solution might not be as straighforward as using powers uknown to us (potentially available to higher intelligence).
Of course, if we were to go by current comparisons, people still struggle to control lower beings, from viruses to dogs, but generally they show remarkable little sympathy to the feelings the beings way down the level of (perceived) intelligence. It's fine to pat your dog and not fine to kick it, at least for a sizeable chunk of the human race, but people would consider it crazy to deliberate about the feelings and well-being of bacteria. If we were to assume an AI would quickly become as superior to us as we are to bacteria (and the gap might be much greater, or smaller, but we just can't hope for the best), then, I don't think it looks good to us, even if they don't consider us a headache to be treated with a pill. Of course, it could swing either way, and at reaching a certain level, intelligence becomes pure Good (to us, not to bacteria!). But hey, it could also turn evil. Sigh, I'm feeling a bit feverish already, where's me pills!
That will be designed by the human equivalent AI(s) we build. I don't think we should ever allow that to be built, because we will have no idea what it will do, because we won't have any way of knowing the true motivations of the AI(s) who designed it.
But build it we will, eventually, because we're curious by nature - in this case perhaps similar to a three year old wondering why you keep telling him not to stick a paper clip in the outlet...
Dunno, an AI could probably run the show better than politicians. ...... Anonymous Coward
It is somewhat amazing that anyone/anything thinks politicians run anything and are not fully dependent upon media and communications which surely run everything currently quite badly.
And quite why media and communicating moguls don't aspire and conspire to present a completely new show has one thinking of an inherent lack of both in-house and outsourced intelligence in their operations/exclusive executive administrations.
Words create, command and control worlds and with pictures only the blind cannot see future directions and worldly wide wise productions.
And the BBC needs to up its IT and Great IntelAIgent Games Play with the placement of competent and fit for future grand purpose, General and Creative Directors.
J'accuse ..... and reasonably expect much better and novel leading AI beta programming programs ……. Perfectly Immaculate Picture Shows.
And corporate failure to provide what the future offers in one[’s] jurisdiction leaves the market open to colonisation by others au fait with that which is required and readily available for use.
15 years ago I was an undergraduate student.* One of our courses was a joint session with the Philosophy, Computer science and psychology departments about the development of artificial intelligence.
I remember it like this:
The computer science professors were all absorbed by the incredible technical developments being talked about. They were so excited by the technology itself. How cool is it to make new minds?
The psychology professors were excited too. They expected to be able to use those developments to learn more about what makes us the way we are. (After all, all the _really_ interesting psychology experiments are illegal to perform on real humans)
The philosophy professors, who spent more time out in the world interacting with actual people, mostly sat there and said "Yeah, but none of that is ever going to work, because all that stuff will have to be created by people, and people are fucking idiots."
15 years later and not a single one of the predictions about what AI would be able to do in 10 years time has come true. Not. One.
We still can't even make a counterstrike bot that doesn't play like you're fighting either a drunk labrador retriever, at one end or the god of war himself at the other, and the scope of that problem is really, REALLY small compared to making a useful general purpose AI.
*I'll leave it to the room to decide which subject I was studying at the time
Human intelligence evolves as much as is necessary to get the jobs done. The surplus of PhD astrophysicists shows that we don't need more intelligence as much as we need more data, and that takes time (and money, the big stumbling block) to gather.
It's a mistake, though, to compare our needs to those of future intelligent machines. They may be intelligent, but that doesn't mean they'll think as we do, or have the same needs and concerns. There's no way to predict how they'll evolve, and that's the reason to fear unplanned development. You don't know what's in the bottle until you pull the cork, and then it's too late -- unless you have a plan.
Intelligent machines will care less for humans than humans care for machines. Most Reg readers have an emotional appreciation for hardware of some type; we feel bad when we see a Lamborghini destroyed by an inebriated driver. We can't expect an intelligent machine to feel the same way about a human it destroys, intentionally or inadvertently. In that sense, intelligent machines will be more closely related to Great White Sharks than humans.
We can't and shouldn't stop AI development, but a parallel effort to understand the possible consequences and responses is absolutely necessary.
That's great, so long as we never connect them to the internet, where they could hack computers all over the world to keep backup copies of themselves, run clones or even create "children".
You want to take bets on the likelihood of keeping them permanently isolated from it? Being a search engine infinite better than google - by using google like we do and presenting us with a summary of what we are really looking for rather than devoting hours of our limited human time to 'research' (i.e. googling various combinations, finding something like what we're looking for and piecing together information from a half dozen sites) is probably one of the primary uses for them most of us would have.
"Presumably a sufficiently advanced machine could figure out a way to either disable or seize control of such a mechanism."'
I think this nicely answers the question. If an AI is truly advanced, it WILL find a way around puny human attempts to control it. Watch the movie AutoMATA for what I mean. Human's days are numbered!!
Movies are not exactly "science" so are less than relevant. …. Anonymous Coward
Movies and broadbandcasts and the media deliver science and nonsense and everything else to everybody and is more than just relevant and revealing, AC, and is it responsible and to be held accountable i.e. blamed for all of everyone’s woes, for here is a tale which identifies them as possible foes to be vanquished and made over/taken over …… http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/bbc-scandal-reveals-mainstream-media-manipulation/
IT can do it with IT betas better i.e. media and mass body manipulation/population brainwashing/informed educated entertainment, and it is foolish to deny such programming is not presently being exercised both badly and madly .... and needs fundamental and radical reprogramming.
No.
We have already escaped annihilation through sheer dumb luck a few times. I think lady luck is going to shit on us any time now.
Especially as nuclear disarmement is nowhere in the books. The US has found USD 1 trillion behind a sofa for "nuclear upgrades". Nobody gives a fuck, either.
I've never understood why Gibson is revered by the computing cognoscenti. A glance at his "explanation" of the term "Count Zero Interrupt" would show otherwise. Total gibberish.
In the late 80s, while attending I-Con, I was flabbergasted to hear a "knowledgable" critic on a panel quote from Neuromancer and describe what he'd read as a "completely new narrative technique". Replace the throwaway tech references with acid-trip observations on the scenery and you'd be reading from The Einstein Intersection, which Samuel R Delany wrote twenty years earlier.
Gibson was rntertaining for a while, but absent the cyberspace idea (an admittedly brilliant re-tread of the Land of Fairie/limbo/Hades way of suspending the laws of Physics) there's not much staying power in the stories from where I sit, typing on my Ono Sendai deck.
... is that it isn't going to be academia building these superintelligences. It'll be business(es) for a nation state. Given how nations behave why would anyone think that it will behave with all humans, rather than, say, looking after the Israelis and killing all other people, or at best being indifferent. Or the Chinese, or perhaps targeting anyone who doesn't have an Australian passport or visa in (or even en route to) Australia, or Russia, or Trumpvainia, or whatever other crazy place you wish to postulate.
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The most interesting part is that researchers are enslaved to the idea of the average representing the actual, which is where the researcher can only operate on the level of generalization rather than the specific--thus deriving absolute rules. The logic behind this could just possibly be flawed, but I'm a mere non-scientist non-researcher idiot.
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