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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."

14 of 564 comments (clear)

  1. Now thats incentive by Majestix · · Score: 5, Interesting

    To stay alive for the next 30 years.

    --
    --- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
    1. Re:Now thats incentive by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 5, Funny

      See, they legalize cannabis, and this is what you get... :-)

      --
      "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
      Never been known to fail..."
    2. Re:Now thats incentive by Spazmania · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Louis Del Monte estimates that...

      Who?

      The average estimate for when this will happen is 2040, though Del Monte says it might be as late as 2045. Either way, it's a timeframe of within three decades.

      I hope that's a in-joke. Like construction that's forever two weeks from done and jam two days a week (yesterday and tomorrow), three decades has been the estimate for "true" AI since the 1970's. Every year, it's just three more decades away.

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    3. Re:Now thats incentive by MRe_nl · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's all like, interconnected, man.
      I smoked Mexican pot once
      and now I'm gay.

      --
      "Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
    4. Re:Now thats incentive by Spazmania · · Score: 5, Informative

      I don't like this kind of reasoning. Science should never be about authority.

      Good point. Here's what his linked-in page ( http://www.linkedin.com/in/lou... ) says about him:

      Louis A. Del Monte is a Internet marketing/sales expert, award winning physicist, author, featured speaker and CEO of Del Monte and Associates, Inc.

      During his college & graduate school, Del Monte supplemented his income working as a professional magician at resorts in New York's Catskill Mountain region.

      His first pride, foremost in his profile? His ability to sell you. Also important? His skill as an illusionist. Missing from the summary? Any hint of software development work of any kind, personal or professional, let alone AI.

      Science mustn't be about authority but it mustn't be about salesmanship either. There's an obvious credibility problem here and no way to test his claim save waiting until he's old, decrepit and has already received the maximum benefit from anybody choosing to listen to him.

      Guy's speaking out of his tailpipe and it looks to me like he really is a sales expert.

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      Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
  2. Well by Jorl17 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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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    Have you heard about SoylentNews?
    1. Re:Well by NemoinSpace · · Score: 5, Funny

      Not multi threads, that's for sure. Of course computers will take over the world. Programmers leave all those unused cores lying around doing nothing and that's trouble. You gotta keep those registers full, and i mean all the time. Either that or just feed them some chip-porn. That'll keep em busy.

  3. AI is always "right around the corner". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!

    1. Re: AI is always "right around the corner". by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Lol you cutie. You think Siri is AI. Wow you are so naive and cute for thinking that.

    2. Re:AI is always "right around the corner". by bzipitidoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Researchers once thought chess made a good proxy for intelligence. Not every smart person is good at chess, but it seemed every good chess player was also smart. They worked for decades to make chess programs that could beat good chess players. When that started happening, it was obvious that the programs had no general intelligence at all. They were good for chess, but had to be reprogrammed even for very similar games like checkers. When the ultimate triumph of beating the world chess champ happened, it was more of the same. No real intelligence, just faster hardware and refinements to the search algorithm.

      The conclusion is that chess is not a good measure of intelligence after all. We don't have a good grasp of what intelligence really is, let alone how exactly to measure it. IQ tests have all kinds of problems, not least that the typical IQ test is very narrow. Maybe wealth or number of children or friends could correlate with intelligence, but there are lots of problems with that too. Is it smart to have wealth beyond one's present and future needs?

      --
      Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
    3. Re: AI is always "right around the corner". by Knuckles · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The machine has no fucking clue about what it is translating. Not the media, not the content, not even what to and from which languages it is translating (other than a variable somewhere, which is not "knowing". None whatsoever. Until it does, it has nothing to do with AI in the sense of TAFA. (The alarmist fucking article)

      --
      "When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
  4. Re:"machines will view us as an unpredictable" by blackbeak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Humans are a species that "is unstable, creates wars, has weapons to wipe out the world twice over, and makes computer viruses

    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!)

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    Everything and its opposite is true. Get used to it.
  5. Re:AI is always by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Algorithms are not AI. Everything you describe is simply a matter of following a human-generated set of instructions. That is not AI.

  6. Re:AI is always by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.