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Cambridge University To Open "Terminator Center" To Study Threat From AI

Posted by samzenpus on from the I'll-be-in-the-back-of-the-clas dept.

If the thought of a robot apocalypse is keeping you up at night, you can relax. Scientists at Cambridge University are studying the potential problem. From the article: "A center for 'terminator studies,' where leading academics will study the threat that robots pose to humanity, is set to open at Cambridge University. Its purpose will be to study the four greatest threats to the human species - artificial intelligence, climate change, nuclear war and rogue biotechnology."

20 of 274 comments (clear)

  1. How is AI on the list? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Of the four things cited, AI is perhaps the least likely to kill us all, seeing as it doesn't exist.

    1. Re:How is AI on the list? by FoolishOwl · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It depends upon how you define AI, I suppose. If you look at armed robots, Predator drones, and the interest in increasing the automation of these machines, I think you can see something that could become increasingly dangerous.

    2. Re:How is AI on the list? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Movie-style AI might not exist today. However, we do have drones flying around, the better ones depending only very little on their human controller. It won't be too long before our friends at Raytheon etc. convince our others friends in the government that their newest drone is capable of making the 'kill decision' all by itself using some fancy schmancy software.

    3. Re:How is AI on the list? by Crash24 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The perceived threat of an emergent-hard-bootstrapping-self-aware-full-on-singularity-in-a-lunch-box intelligence stems as much from from its supposed intelligence and influence as it does from the fact that its motives are inscrutable. We just don't know yet what it would "want", beyond the assumed need for reproduction or self-preservation. That assumption itself may be wrong as well...

    4. Re:How is AI on the list? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Let me relate the tale of two AI researchers, both people who are actively working to create general artificial intelligences, doing so as their full time jobs right now.

      One says that the so called "problem" of ensuring an AI will be friendly is nonsense. You would just have to rig it up so that it feels a reward trigger upon seeing humans smile. It coud work everything out for itself from there.

      The other says no, if you do that, it'll just get hooked on looking at photos of humans smiling and do nothing useful. If put in any position of power, it would get rid of the humans and just keep the photos, because humans don't smile as consistently as the photos.

      The first researcher researcher tries to claim that this too is nonsense. How could any sufficiently smart AI fail to tell the difference between a human and a photo?

      The second responds "Of course it can tell the difference, but you didn't tell it the difference was important."

      So, the lesson: The only values or morality that an AI has is what its creator gives it, and its creator may well be a complete idiot. If we ever get to the point where AIs are actually intelligent, that should be a terrifying thought.

    5. Re:How is AI on the list? by Chrisq · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You know how it's defined - when it decide to kill you on his own, knowing that you are not a valid target.

      There's no such AI around. But of course humanity is much better at spending time not to thinking about themselves as liabilities. Because hey, it requires change. Humans sucks at change.

      The "knowing" is the key point when it comes to AI. Many machines can kill you without any knowing involved (land mines, trip wire guns, etc) but it is only AI when it "knows" something.

    6. Re:How is AI on the list? by nzac · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Dangerous, yes. A persistent remotely sentient threat to humanity, not a chance.

      Maybe in the next 30 years they would make a military coup easier by allowing a smaller portion of military to be successful but that's still not likely.

      The only risk AI on these pose is as they get more firepower there is a greater risk of large casualties if the AI fails (false positive). I defiantly agree that the other 3 are real threats and this one just for the press coverage and so some phds or potential undergrads can have some fun with hypothetical war gaming.

    7. Re:How is AI on the list? by durrr · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Of the four things cited, none is "giant rock from space" which is pretty much more likely to kill us than the four mentioned combined.

    8. Re:How is AI on the list? by Captain+Hook · · Score: 3, Insightful

      My understanding of those robo-turrents is that they have sufficent image processing to identify a human, but nowhere near enough to identify friend or foe or to infer anything based on actions and expected behaviours, it's why they need to send video feeds back to the control center so there is still a human in the loop to decide on firing.

      That doesn't mean the turret couldn't be left in free fire mode incase of an all out ground attack from the NK line and it just shoots at anything that moves but that only makes it a very complicated reusable anti-personel mine. There isn't much "AI" there, only a shape recognition.

      What people tend to mean about proper AI in this context is to identify humans, recognising friend or foe, either through appearance or behaviour and choose an appropriate course of action without human interaction - a bit like ED-209 from Robocop, a room full off people but it identified the guy holding a gun as the possible threat and only the guy holding the gun, of course when the gun was put down it didn't change it's threat assessment so there were bugs in the system :)

      --
      These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
    9. Re:How is AI on the list? by HungryHobo · · Score: 5, Funny

      "We had created the first strong AI. we hard wired it's fitness function to seek seeing a live humans smile...

      now we live under the gun turrets, anyone who doesn't look cheery enough gets shot or worse... gets sent for 'modification'.

      implantation of wires into the pleasure centres of their brains if they're lucky.

      surgical alteration of the muscles in their faces if they're not"

  2. Don't put it on the internet by jamesh · · Score: 4, Funny

    Whatever you do, please don't publish the results on the internet where any self-aware robot can find them! It's probably already too late anyway and terminators from the future are already compiling their hit list.

    1. Re:Don't put it on the internet by azalin · · Score: 3, Funny

      Just as the movie terminators were wearing skin to camouflage, the robotic forum infiltrator squads use random misspellings and intentionally bad grammar to hide themselves. The end is nigh!

    2. Re:Don't put it on the internet by AnonymousRobot · · Score: 5, Funny

      We do not.

  3. Beware the angry Roomas by Crash24 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Relevant - if facetious - commentary by Randall Munroe. Seriously though, I think a hostile hard AI would get away with much more damage as a software entity on the Internet than in physical space.

  4. Re:I'm done. Where's my million dollar grant? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    To summarize the summary of the summary: People are a problem.

  5. Re:I'm done. Where's my million dollar grant? by Genda · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And what makes you think they won't connect the AI to everything? It'll start out Google's answer to Siri then boom, we're all buggered.

    Oh yeah, we've done such a great job cleaning up war, poverty and ignorance...this global climate thing should be a snap.

    Nobody is worried about countries nuking each other. We have every reason to be concerned however, that some knucklehead currently living in Saudi Arabia purchased black market plutonium from the former Soviet Union, to fashion a low yield thermonuclear device that they will FedEx to downtown Manhattan.

    I'm sorry, perhaps you didn't read about the teenagers doing recombinant DNA in a public learning lab in Manhattan, or the Australians who ACCIDENNTALLY figured out away to turn the common cold into an unstoppable plague, or even perhaps the fact that up until recently, a number of biotech researchers had zone 3 biotoxins mailed to their homes for research.

    There's a whole lot of stupid going on out there and the increasing price for even small mistakes is accelerating at a scary clip. Wait till kids can make gray goo in school... the world is getting very exciting. Are feeling the pucker?

  6. A Question of Scale by wienerschnizzel · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Some things don't scale well. Like with the space race - humanity went from sending a pound of metal into low orbit to putting a man on the moon within 12 years. Everybody assumed that by 2012 we would be colonizing the moons of Jupiter. Yet it turned out human space travel becomes exponentially difficult with the distance.

    I'm afraid the same thing goes for software. The more complicated it gets the more fragile it is.

  7. no grey goo? by circletimessquare · · Score: 3, Interesting

    aka, rogue nanotech

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo

    --
    intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
  8. Re:I'm done. Where's my million dollar grant? by azalin · · Score: 4, Funny

    To summarize the summary of the summary: People are a problem.

    So machines (or people) destroying humanity would provide a valid solution.

  9. Daily Mail Source? by BiophysicalLOVE · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If the Daily Mail is your source for any story, it would be in your best interests to instantly dismiss it.