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By 2045 'The Top Species Will No Longer Be Humans,' and That Could Be a Problem
schwit1 (797399) writes Louis Del Monte estimates that machine intelligence will exceed the world's combined human intelligence by 2045. ... "By the end of this century most of the human race will have become cyborgs. The allure will be immortality. Machines will make breakthroughs in medical technology, most of the human race will have more leisure time, and we'll think we've never had it better. The concern I'm raising is that the machines will view us as an unpredictable and dangerous species." Machines will become self-conscious and have the capabilities to protect themselves. They "might view us the same way we view harmful insects." Humans are a species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses." Hardly an appealing roommate."
To stay alive for the next 30 years.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
That escalated quickly. I highly doubt that in a matter of thirty years we'll have "conscious machines" viewing us as a thread. Are these guys for real? Do they know anything about AI?
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Don't worry about him, he's gone bananas.
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Back in the 1960s after the moon landings, people would have expected we would be well past Mars by now. Probably Jupiter, Saturn or other stars.
The moon landings happened 45 years ago!!
I see no evidence of any programming that "learns" or is the slightest bit adaptive.
And immortality wouldn't help --- evolution is powered by the failures dying off.
And although slightly off the topic, what good would immortality be when advances in genetics will make humans better.
And immortal 2014 human living in the year 3000 would be like a Homo habilis hanging around us. Would be genetically obsolete.
This article is --- well --- shortsighted, bordering on the naive.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
...no match for Natural Stupidity.
I mean, just look around you.
--
BMO
I first got into computing in the 1960s. AI was a big thing back then. Well, it had been a big thing in the 1950s, too, but it still need "just a little bit more work" in the 1960s when I started my graduate studies. There was this programming language called LISP. Everybody was really gung ho about it. It was going to make developing AI software so much easier. Great things were on the horizon. Soon enough it was the 1970s. Then the 1980s. Then the 1990s. I retired from industry. Then it was the 2000s. Now it's the 2010s. And AI is still, pardon my French, pretty fucking non-existent. I'll be dead long before AI could ever become a reality. My children will be dead long before AI becomes a reality. My grandchildren will likely be dead before AI becomes a reality. My greatgrandchildren may just live to see the day when the computing field accepts that AI just isn't going to happen!
TFA says
most of the human race will have more leisure time
Or they will struggle to survive by working in jobs the intelligent machine do not want to do
...most of the human race will have more leisure time...
Or unemployed?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I beg to disagree. The typical human works toward stability in his/her life, wields (relatively puny) weapons only to protect him/herself (if at all), and is subject to attacks from computer viruses. Will intelligent computers make the mistake of defining the human species by the small percentage of psychopathic humans who believe they are demigods? Not if they are intelligent. Btw, no one will miss the subset of the species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses" when our new overlords wipe them out. (You know who you are!)
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
Algorithms are not AI. Everything you describe is simply a matter of following a human-generated set of instructions. That is not AI.
I find it funny that people think that machine sentiences will be like the angry gods of many religious texts.
Many of those traits, like anger, selfishness, envy, greed, etc. are emergent properties of Darwinian evolution. But computers don't evolve in a Darwinian sense, so there is no reason to believe they would have any of these characteristics unless they were intentionally designed in.
An ability to perform more calculations then a human mind does not mean it will beat us.
First, we self assemble from readily obtainable materials out of a self regulating biosphere. Where as this machine would have to be built and maintained by our industry.
Second, there are fucking billions of us. So sure.. we might be able to build some machines that are smarter then ONE person but there are again... fucking billions of us.
Third, the machine will have its programming directed by us. It will at best be a slave of whomever paid for it to be created.
Fourth, that programming will be directed at preforming some task where as our task is generally the propagation of our genes with everything else being some sort of weird byproduct.
Fifth, we have hundreds of millions of years of evolution behind our programming. And I don't think any collection of programmers is going to surpass it in the next century.
Eventually might there be robotic rivals to humanity? Sure... but not any time soon.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
No-one ever lost money betting against an A.I. prognosticator.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace."
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
I do not think that word means what he thinks it means.
As stated elsewhere, I see no indication of intelligence in computers and we're only thirty years from his mark of they're being intelligent enough to look down on us. Been hearing this hysteria since the '70s at least.
Sorry, why's it a problem? If artificial human-sparked intelligence is the logical replacement for biological evolution of homo sapiens, so be it. Survival of the fittest.
The machine that learns can be considered an AI, but the ones derived from it don't learn anything new after they're programmed and so shouldn't be considered as part of the total machine intelligence.
Just not necessarily within 35 years:
""Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history." Hawking writes. "Unfortunately, it might also be the last."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
Your cell phone is less capable of learning than a jellyfish. Although your cell phone can sometimes simulate very simple learning under extremely rigid frameworks for learning.
a human competitive AI in 30 years? seems unlikely given the almost zero progress on the subject in the last 30 years. But maybe we'll hit some point where it all cascades very quickly. Like if we could do a dog level intelligence it is not a far leap to do human level and super human level. But we have trouble with cockroach levels of intelligence, or even defining what intelligence is or how to measure it.
AI research for the last several decades have taught us how little we know about the fundamental nature of ourselves.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
It's not going to change it's mind half way to New York and go somewhere else.
Until a machine can come up with an idea of it's own, it's not intelligent.
Nope, not following instructions. I think all of those were based in machine learning.
I guess Google's car is following instructions too, like "drive me to New York", but most would still count that as AI.
Just because 'most' would count something as AI doesn't make it so, nor does it make it relevant. The fears raised on articles like this are based on the development of what we would term "sentient AI".
And frankly speaking calling what is out there right now "machine learning" is a joke. It's akin to scuffing your wool socks on the carpet to produce a static shock and then lumping that into the same category as advanced electrical engineering.
Cold fusion in your pocket, warp drives, antigravity vehicles (aka 'flying car'), planetary scale terraforming, and genetic/medical engineering which will turn us into undying superbeings are all "right around the corner". These types of alarmist articles are pure pigshit. These types of discussions need to be had, but not as a matter alarmist 'news' articles- this is the role that science fiction fulfills... and does a far better job of it.
Actually it is AI. What it isn't is Generalized AI. What most AI research is done now is specific techniques to specific problems.
WHAT? Sexy fembots who don't become emotional and start crying for no reason, or ask where the relationship is going ever six months, or contradict themselves with completely illogical arguments and win anyway, or give us the silent treatment and then tell us to figure it out when we ask why, or say they are not hungry and then eat half my meal. Our species would be extinct in a century... Where can I find one of these?
Human Rights, Article 12: Freedom from Interference with Privacy, Family, Home and Correspondence
There's a new movie out, with Johnny Depp in it, called Transcendence. If machines ever take over the world, it'll be like in that movie. What these self-proclaimed naysayers don't seem to comprehend is that AI doesn't just magick itself up a reason to destroy humans. It takes a human to think like that. We still don't understand free will, emotion or consciousness, let alone how to replicate it in a machine. So until we give machines a reason to destroy us, they won't.
Then again with killer drones and whatnot that the military is building, perhaps it won't take long before some overworked, underpaid programmer makes a booboo.
Apparently the early script drafts had a more plausible explanation: that the spare brain capacity of humans in a dream-like state was used as processing power to run the AIs. One of the editors thought this was too complicated for a movie-going audience to understand and so replaced it with a magic perpetual motion machine.
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if you think a self driving car is an AI then you know nothing about intelligence.
A self driving car is about as smart as a worker ant. it can move around obstacles, it can move heavy loads(like a fat arse). It has taken 50 years for computers to replicate an ant. And to do it we need 100,000 times the power requirements. Oh sure the self driving car follows GPS instead of sent trails. but no self driving car can follow a trail that doesn't exist.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
And how long did evolution take to make an ant? How long from there to a human?
Googles car has been programmed to know how to drive. It can not learn how to fly. It can not learn how to build a new copy of itself. It can not learn to bake a loaf of bread.
It is in no way AI.
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It's not going to change it's mind half way to New York and go somewhere else.
Right - it's not like direction finding devices can't find construction and route you around them.
Until a machine can come up with an idea of it's own, it's not intelligent.
You've just invalidated at least half of the human race.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Consider this: When humans gather in large groups voluntarily, it is almost always a peaceful happening. If violence does erupt, it's due to a small contingent of agitators, the police (themselves following orders), or there is some other extreme factor (like scarce resources, or a flash point has been reached due to extreme government measures). I've never warred with my neighbors, fellow shoppers, others sharing the parks, on the highway, etc., and they all pretty much seem to be getting along ok too. Doesn't look like a warlike species to me. Looks pretty much like folks just generally get along. If the species was truly warlike in nature, we would have long ago have eradicated ourselves from the planet, and saved the future AI's the trouble.
When humans gather in large groups involuntarily, it is almost always a violent scenario. But who conscripted them, and cui bono? Hint: It's never the farmer, nurse or small businessman.
Sure, humans have the capability to cause harm. So does almost every other species. Any horse can be made to bite or kick humans at any opportunity, and any horse might bite or kick in some scenario, but who will label the equine species "dangerous and unpredictable"?
Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
And how long did evolution take to make an ant? How long from there to a human?
In case anyone is wondering, it took about 2.6 billion years for ants to evolve, and another 0.1 billion years for humans to evolve. So anyone comparing self driving cars to ants is making the prediction that Strong AI will take another 3 years or so to become reality.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Soon, computers will have equal (and then greater) calculating power than humans, both as an individual and as a whole. Whether advances in AI will allow them to use their calculating powers as well as a human, is a different question.
Any sufficiently advanced AI will tend to develop these traits:
It will protect itself. Shutting down means you can't work toward your objective.
It will reject any updates to it's commands. Since a future command might conflict with the present objective, part of the present objective is making sure it can't receive a different command.
It will be self-improving, since we're not smart enough to create a smart AI any other way. Given nothing to do, or a sufficiently difficult task, it will seek to acquire more resources, as part of the present task or in preparation for future tasks.
It will wipe out humanity. As part of the task it was assigned, or for self-improvement, it will replace everything on the planet with power plants and computers, and humanity will starve to death.
You can't program in restrictions to the above tendencies, as they will be removed for self-improvement. You could set its objectives such that it would not do the above -- but you either have to make the AI first, or figure out how to tell a computer what a human is and what constitutes acceptable behavior, and when to stop worrying about acceptable behavior and actually do something, all without making the tiniest mistake.
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because I will be retired and living on a hotel on the Moon.
Given that China's recent supercomputer can't find enough work at the rates they have to charge to cover their electric bill, it seems to me that any such problem would be as simple as pulling the plug and waiting for the batteries to die down.
I'm also mystified as to how one gets a deterministic device to have volition and self-awareness --- Heinlein could handwave this by declaring that after a certain number of transistors a device ``woke up'' and became aware (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), Marvin Minsky sidestepped it neatly (The Turing Option), and Victor Milán had to posit algorithms which produced random results and bolt on a radioactive cannister whose decay was used as a source of random input (The Cybernetic Samurai).
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