Reply to post: Nonsense.

How exactly do you rein in a wildly powerful AI before it enslaves us all?

theOtherJT Silver badge

Nonsense.

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

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