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The Men Trying To Save Us From the Machines

Posted by Soulskill on from the i-bet-the-borg-queen's-name-was-Siri dept.

nk497 writes "Are you more likely to die from cancer or be wiped out by a malevolent computer? That thought has been bothering one of the co-founders of Skype so much he teamed up with Oxbridge researchers in the hopes of predicting what machine super-intelligence will mean for the world, in order to mitigate the existential threat of new technology – that is, the chance it will destroy humanity. That idea is being studied at the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and the newly launched Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, where philosophers look more widely at the possible repercussions of nanotechnology, robotics, artificial intelligence and other innovations — and to try to avoid being outsmarted by technology."

3 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. No matter how smart something is.. by blahplusplus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    ... it is still bound by energy requirements and the laws of nature. All this fear mongering is bs. If you look at the evolution of life on earth, even tiny 'low intelligence' beings can take out huge intellectual behemoths like human beings.

    Not only that, you have things like EMP and nukes, not even the best AI is capable of thwarting getting bombed or nuked. Intelligence is a rather demanding, costly and fragile thing in nature. All knowledge perception has costs in terms of storage, time to access, problems of interpreting the data one is seeing and whatnot.

    Consider the recent revelations by the NSA spying on everyone, there are plenty of easy low tech measures to defeat high tech spying. The same way there will be plenty of easy low tech ways to cripple a higher intelligence which is bound by the laws of nature in terms of resource and energy requirements. Anything that has physical structure in the universe requires energy and resources to maintain itself.

    1. Re:No matter how smart something is.. by icebike · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I find it interesting that you mention taking out smart machines with simple measures (most of them not thought out very thoroughly) in the same post as you mention NSA spying, and how "easy" it would be to defeat that spying.

      (Side note: if you think you can defeat the NSA, good luck with staying on the grid, any grid, and having even a shred of success).

      A super intelligent machine would not stand alone. It would not be the world against the machine. And when you see the word Machine, read that to mean the network machines
      The machine would be (nominally at least) owned by some group. (The NSA is as good a candidate as any for this role).
      And the machine would protect this group, and this group would protect the machine, and the machine would have no single point of vulnerability.

      Google is already in such a position. Trying to knock Google off the net is a fool's errand. A concerted effort by any given country would be futile. It would require all countries to act at once.

      But when the country has vested interests in the machine, such action will not happen. The machine will have the protection of the country as well as its human over masters/servants. Now you not only have to take out the machine, its minions, but the country itself. And if more than one government back the machine? Such as NATO, or CSTO? Then what? Now you have to take out entire military alliances.

      You vastly underestimate the survive-ability of such a creation because you wrongly assume it will be all of mankind against a single machine.

      --
      Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
  2. Consider super intellligence by DeathGrippe · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Nerve impulses travel along nerve fibers as pulses of membrane depolarization. Within our brains and bodies, this is adequate speed for thinking and control. However, relative to the speed of light, our nerve impulses are laughably slow.

    The maximum speed of a nerve impulse is about 200 miles per hour.

    The speed of light is over 3 million times that fast.

    Now consider what will happen when we create a sentient, electronic being that has as many neurons as we do, but its nerve impulses travel at the speed of light.

    In terms of intelligence, that creation will be to us as we are to worms.