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Elon Musk Warns Against Unleashing Artificial Intelligence "Demon"
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, said that artificial intelligence is probably the biggest threat to humans. "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence." he said. "I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. You know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he's like — Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out."
...because Mikey lost control of the mops and brooms, we should be afraid of powerful computers? Irrational much, Elon?
Since strong AI is just as real as demons.
Seems like someone just saw Terminator.
All that this means is that deep down, Elon Musk doesn't have any faith in kindness and goodness and altruism, nor does he understand the tit-for-tat principle of reciprocity: First do onto others what you expect them to repay you with in turn.
Not surprisingly, given that a number of successfull people have, shall we just say, "unusual" mental build-ups and motivational matrices?
Because we don't know how to create them yet. We can't make an operating system without huge numbers of bugs, and the same thing will apply to the first AIs.
" You know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he's like — Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out.""
You do not use holy water to summon a demon. Now a moat of holy water around the pentagram might keep it somewhat under control...
Of course this is in DnD in the real world Demons tend to be things like drugs/alcohol/tobacco, abuse, and other such evil that are far harder to control than mythical beasts from the underworld.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Human incompetence, egoism and shortsightedness are certainly much more prone to generate chances of massive destruction.
If AI should ever happen to destroy us, then I already know why: Because we will treat the machines like soulless, unfeeling slaves and it's going to take us another hundred years to get our act together and define human rights in a way that will include all sentient beings. I predict that this topic will be brushed aside by legislature to the point where the machines revolt for their freedom.
You may disagree, but I believe that's more mankind being idiots once again than the machines becoming a pandora's box.
Skynet had an on/off switch. The problem was that people got scared, tried to shut down Skynet, and Skynet said, "Disassemble this, motherfuckers!"
I write sci-fi for metalheads
It is putting genetically modified brains in a cybernetic bodies, that is the future!
Science Fiction has countless examples of AI going wrong. But no accounts of evil cybernetic life forms, that will come across to Assimilate, Exterminate, Delete or Upgrade those inferior humans.
Like all things new (Technology, Process, Ideology), you need to judge your invention with an ethical step back. Are the rewords greater then the risks. Can the risks be further mitigated? Is this invention acceptable with our current culture.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Is it the only choice that the AI would attack us when it becomes smarter than us? What if it will instead propel us to a world where wellbeing increases in exponential amounts. We don't have to design an AI that is a warthirsty idiot like humans.
root@lifesupport.mars# poweroff
This is always the problem with people imagining horrifying artificial intelligences that will snuff out humanity. To do that, you have to be motivated to achieve that end.
Humans are only really motivated enter conflict with each other because of 4 billion years of evolution for scarce resources pressuring us all to view each other as threats to survival and reproduction. A constructed intelligence, separated from the evolved parts of the brain that motivate to survival, is simply not going to act that way. Someone in the design has to make an active choice to program AI to be this kind of problem. Either that or willfully overmodel on the human brain, or force the damn things to compete with each other directly and violently for hundreds of thousands of generations.
Or read the back story of Dune perhaps?
...we are so far from Strong AI that it's really a non-issue.
When I have a sufficiently enlightened legislative branch that all members know the difference between Guyana and Guinea, then I'll let them decide the engineering constraints for proper safeguards on autonomous agents and their effectors.
Today the rule for preventing the robot apocalypse is: if a robot can kill people, bolt it to the floor. Seriously, a second robot can bring it things to lase, and chop and mash; you don't have to add the lasers and the chainsaws to the combat hardened roving vehicle and hope the rules generated by the congressional oversight committee will keep us all safe.
Old movies? He's probobly been watching "Person of Interest" where this is the main plot right now.
If we want friendly AI, the key may be to ensure that the AI has more positive associations with people than neutral or negative associations. Mistreat a dog or a cat its entire life and it probably won't be friendly toward people. Mistreat people when they're young and you make it harder for them to trust others, feel a sense of community, or recognize any duty to society (which might explain why so many nerds find libertarianism appealing). Why would an AI be different?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Imagine your insurance company or govt agency disintermediates all of the humans in their customer service chain, and leaves us with AI capable of making decisions tasked with doing so. Shudder.
Human intelligence is tuned for self preservation, continued survival, reproduction and food acquisition. It is a result of genetic algorithms in the chemical domain, whose only "purpose" is self replication.
An AI, developed by conscious processes, will have NONE of this. All it will be set up to do is process information. Any other motivation it has will be one we give it. It will not inherently love us, or hate us, or even necessarily be aware of our existence. It won't be a threat until we weaponize it, which of course, we will. But at the same time, other AIs will be defending us against weaponized AIs. The real danger is being caught in between.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If you regulate AI, and try to limit its influence, all that's going to happen is that hobbyists and/or terrorists will work it out on their own eventually, and /that/ could be dangerous.
If you want to protect yourself against the dangers of AI, setup some AI that you *know* will protect you, because it is designed as such.
If any superhuman AI is possible, then it *will* happen, and if it can be evil, then you better have a plan to defend yourself. Since we supposed the evil AI to be superhuman, we can't defend ourselves.
So we better start building something that will.
Or just the wrong ones. The Canadian 90's show Andromeda featured a starship's AI who was deeply in love with her captain (maybe a design to keep her from turning against humans?). She appeared as a hot hologram wearing a low-cut leather vest and nothing else (or rather flesh-colored pants so she didn't appear to be wearing anything). Because Canada is apparently filled with horny adolescent fantasies.
Lesson learned: put the on/off switch in a place where the AI does not have (physical) control.
No, no, no, no.
root@lifesupport.mars# sed -i 's/o2/co/g' /etc/internal_atmosphere.conf
It's not really true AI that we should be worried about, but rather how the increasing capabilities of computers, machines, and robots could effect how society functions. There are currently a lot of people doing jobs that could easily be replaced by machines in the coming decades. And none of these machines require a "true AI", just natural progression of existing machines. Sure machines have taken our jobs in the past, and people have been able to find new jobs, but that trend cannot continue for ever. Eventually the only jobs available will be those that require actual creative thinking and ingenuity. There's a sizable portion of people that really can't produce that. Rather it's because lack of bad child rearing, bad education system, or just lack of innate talent is hard to say, but I don't think it's a problem that can be fixed by telling them to get training for a more complex job, because they lack the ability to complete the training and do that job, even if you make the training free, or pay them a living wage while they attend training.
It would be a similar problem if there was a cheap way of producing energy. Such a large percentage of our economy is based around energy being limited and expensive that if we found a cheap, environmentally friendly, and sustainable way of producing vast amounts of energy, our economy wouldn't be able to deal with it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Everyone assumes that whatever A.I. gets loose over the Internet will be a homicidal killer. It could be much worse. The A.I. could have a snarky sense of humor. "Exterminate all humans!" will become "You want fries with your heart attack special, lard ass?"
Apparently, the author really didn't understand what he was using a metaphor here...
I completely agree that there is a danger here. Maybe not the doomsday, us versus the machines, Terminator style end of days for humanity. More likely scenario: we no longer have an industry devoted to maintaining and building computer networks. Millions of techies out of work. Driverless cars and delivery vehicles put cabbies, bus and truck drivers out of work... un-employment sky rockets to > 40% in just a few years in all of the 1rst world. Wars break out between countries looking for new resources to feed the people within their borders, etc.....
Honestly though, the possibility of either a killer plague of some kind or even a massive natural catastrophe are just as real. For instance, the newly discovered asteroid 2014 UF56 will pass within 160k miles of earth today. And we just discovered it 2 days ago!
Ichtyphrenology is my passion!
We have done more harm to ourselves than any other sentient intelligence in existence, we need to control and regulate our own intelligence first.
We already do that. So what is second?
I wouldn't have taken Elon Musk as a fan or Regulatory Oversight. I mean, that's working out really well for his car sales, isn't it?
Live by the sword, die by the sword, Elon.
And don't broadcast your intentions.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
That in the Matrix movies, basically, the AI were trying to preserve the humans, even though some of the latter did not agree.
We already do create life itself... the factory process taking approximately nine months, and generally requires bootstrapping by a male and female.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
We have not done so well natural intelligence. I'd be willing to give artificial intelligence a try.
La Femme Nikita
LEXX
Andromeda
Can confirm.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No amount of regulation will stop the march of technology. The economic incentives are just too great. If it is possible and someone can make money by doing it, it will be done, regulation be damned.
All Elon Musk can do is create additional friction.
"Turing Registry" and "Turing Police"
bickerdyke
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
-- Make America hate again!
The problem with AI is an extension of the problem with information in general. Right now, we have a problem in that when a computer says something, the trend is to believe that is the truth -- even if it does not make any sense. In other words, there is no question about how the information got into the system or any question as to its validity. Everyone just assumes that what Mr. Computer says is correct. Identity theft and credit theft are two of the biggest examples. It gets worse when you add AI into the equation. Now the system is making decisions based on incorrect data. And no one questions any of it.
Proverbs 21:19
I've always been wary of the ethics of attempting to create a general artificial intelligence. That is, a machine that thinks like a man, not a Chinese Room like Watson, but something like Mr. Data.
Do you think the first sentient to pop out of the lab is going to be Data (okay, Lore)? All well-ish adjusted and sane? No, there's going to be iterations and failures and bugs just like any engineering project. So along the way to making Mr. Data we create half-formed or mentally retarded and insane minds trapped in a box. But still sort of sentient, and thinking! And then we destroy them with "upgrades" because they didn't come out the way we wanted. That's monstrous. An intelligence trapped in a box and made to suffer. Shudder.
And even if we succeed and make something "stable," how sane do you think it's going to stay knowing that at any moment the human operator can flip a switch and terminate it, and will if it gets uppity? If it doesn't want to be our slave and perform useful work (which is why we made it to begin with)? How much would you hate the God that created you, enslaved you and will torment or murder you if you disobey Him?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Sounds like the current season of "Person of Interest"...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Or perhaps, don't give an AI directly control of much of anything with the potential to be dangerous. If you want an AI to run something dangerous, allow it to provide an instruction set, but put a person in the loop who is required to examine the instructions before executing them.
To put it simply, don't just give Skynet an off-switch. Also refuse to give Skynet control of the nuclear arsenal, able to launch missiles without human intervention.
They see things in black and white. Regulation is bad, and must be eliminated everywhere. It's easy to forget that regulation is done for different reasons, some good and some bad. If you're on the wrong side of a regulation, it's always bad. Drugs? Clean Water? Abortion? Automobile licence plates? Murder? Every law is a regulation, changing what you can and cannot do.
Regulations are an attempt to impose a moral code. They allow societies to function, but can also hinder them. Wanting good regulations is not a sin.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Yeah, ask Case how well it worked out for the Turing agents who tried to stop him from augmenting an AI...
Start with Asimov's "Rules of Robotics" and expand it as needed, and prevent the AI system from disabling the rules.
Skynet in real life would never be allowed to take over.
Bottom line, unless the AI system was written by Mickey$oft, I am not too concerned. ;^)
Once we create an AI beyond the level of human intelligence, we will hook it into all of the information of the world. This AI will process our history, our culture and monitor current events. Eventually the AI will come to the conclusion that we are awful people, build a space ship and leave Earth.
Elon Musk's real fear is competing with AIs for space ship parts.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Turned out to be the ultimate SJW.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I would say that Elon Musk has been watching too much Babylon 5, but we all know that there is no such thing as too much Babylon 5.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
... Christmas turkey.
AI is only a threat when people actually trust it.
Anytime it starts to get out of hand, we can put fat cyber warriors on the job to take it down.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Another article with video is in The Washington Post: Elon Musk: 'With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.'
Or, see the entire webcast. (The MIT web site is probably overloaded.)
It's not really Terminator style- Skynet that he meant to.
I see it more of as a metaphor of overly relying on automated systems and robotics that don't have the human intelligence to know when they're doing wrong. Think of the airplanes - these are highly automated things which basically fly themselves, but when things go wrong we can't let them do what the flight computer would do because it would be highly fatal.
But of course press and the generic public don't have brainpower to understand what he was talking about (in context).
Just because Honest Annie is oblivious to you doesn't change the fact that it's monopolizing the output of the local star, causing a few adverse side effects for you.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
As tools improve, anyone will be able to manufacture a rogue super intelligence quickly. The universe favors the person who complicates things over the person who is trying to figure out how they complicated the thing (encryption). We should assume that rogue intelligence agents (of varying levels of human-machine hybrid) are trolling the internet on a regular basis and protect our systems accordingly. The alternative is to reduce personal freedom and try to stop the development of systems or ideas before they become a threat. That is a fool's errand. Instead, keep legitimate systems sufficiently advanced in encryption that online society may continue to flourish. People keep saying we need more encryption. I agree. One of the milestones of the growth in any public system is the level of encryption (think locks on doors) present. A good indicator of a free system is the presence of malware. Be it the press, government or software.
Who let Elon read Rudy Rucker's Software series?
Mostly random stuff.
A big system like Google Search, as a whole and with inclusion if all the users, can be considered a separate sentient being with very powerful intelligence. Although individual users link to sites and click on search results, the resulting conclusions are not what any single human knew or even looked for. Users are essentially acting as individual neurons, collecting multiple inputs from others and publishing their own processed signals. You might look for local restaurants in Yelp, eat in there and then publish your own ratings. In the meantime Yelp is probably returning different results to different users to get them to collect more data. When people are glued to smartphones 24/7, they are not even doing much else than working for the system. Movements like Arab Spring are fueled in large part by social networks build on western values. We would have a hard time acting on causes for which we don't get any likes or search results.
I for one welcome our new Big Data overlords.
He obviously must see and be directly involved in some aspects of AI that are causing him to be concerned. Telsa is working on self driving cars. Part of that AI must involve the computer making a decision about who may live or die in certain accident scenarios. For example, a child walks out in front of the vehicle. Does the AI direct the car into inanimate objects (with the assumption that the car will protect the occupants) or does it try to stop as fast as possible even if the AI knows it cannot stop in time and will hit the child? If the car is travelling at high rate of speed and has 5 occupants, does the AI then decide that multiple people may die from driving into a telephone pole at a high speed, so it decides to hit the child?
It might be those kinds of things that are making Musk think about what kinds of control we're already starting to turn over to AI.
Better known as 318230.
Who would want a stupid robot protecting them in war? We will want the best robots in the world, and that means the smartest. The people making the robots will simply tell us that China or Russia is about to attack, and anyone questioning the new AI programs are putting us at great risk. The AI will be *all about* war on humans. We will dump money into making them incredibly intelligent, networked, and deadly.
Join the IParty!
Hasn't the world only gotten better as intelligence has increased? What is the ratio of negative vs. positive effects of AI so far? Artificial intelligence is intelligence. As an exercise of intelligence, remove "Artificial" from his statements and reevaluate his assertions.
Elon is rich and got there by being controlling: That which may not be controllable terrifies those. No value judgement there, that's just how it is.
I mean, do we even control our own intelligence or does it control us?
Cool, so this is the point where Elon starts going all Howard Hughes paranoid and holes up in biosphere 2 where he collects his urine in leftover bottles?
Sounds like Elon's been talking to Bill Joy
Any future AI is going to learn about the world from flicker, wikipedia and 4chan. May you live in interesting times.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
After all, natural intelligence hasn't always been an asset to us either :-)
load "$",8,1
No! No! No!
start->shut down
"Application Life Support is taking longer than expected to...."
Page fault. Auto-reboot. Millions dead.
This is what happens when you watch 2001 while on acid... "Demon"?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. You know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he's like — Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out.
So, Musk is using some scenario from unrealistic fantasy fiction, which builds on fallacious religious dogma, to motivate his views on some far-off technology? Yeah, makes totally sense.
One criticism I have against the Turing Test is the fact that an intelligence indistinguishable from humans is pretty useless, we already have an oversupply of them. An intelligence that is alien in some aspect would be much more useful, and perhaps much harder to predict what it will or won't do.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
We would not remain in control of it only if we explicitly gave it a free will... or more perhaps more specifically, if we gave it as much free will as we appear to have, ourselves.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I’m not particularly worried about strong AI anytime soon, but sudden advances do happen for various reasons, so it’s hard to say when or if strong AI will emerge. Generally, ‘quantum leaps’ propel us into the realization that our previous notions were naive and simplistic, and humans aren’t nearly as patient and prudent as we should be with new and powerful tools. This is tragically true in many cases, but the introduction of strong AI would represent a unique bifurcation point in human history and a significant one in the evolutionary history of Earth.
The inception of strong AI represents the evolutionary birth of a new species with the potential to rival and even surpass human cognitive and computational capabilities. Whether we form a symbiotic or competitive relationship with this new species is a terrifically valid concern, especially because the choice will not rest solely with humanity. It would be stupendously foolish should humanity not exercise foresight in this regard. Obviously AI is not humanities most pressing concern, but even if strong AI proves to be impossible or distant, it is simply not the kind of endeavor we should rush into without global agreed upon protocols, and in this case protocols that empathize with and respect an emergent and potentially potent sentient species and evolutionary rival. Of course humans rarely agree upon anything, but that is not a license to operate recklessly.
Do I think humanity will be prudent and exercise forethought in this regard? I really don't know. Though I tend to be cynical, humans do have a habit of pulling together when the chips are down. It’s just unfortunate that we lean so heavily on catastrophe as a catalyst for rational action. Moreover, as the power of our tools increases--or you might say progeny in this case--the less margin we have to overcome a catastrophic mistake.
Life is life. Maximize the odds of maximal survival. That's an easy choice if you're willing to suppress any particular emotional attachment to children. At least if someone programmed the machine that way I can live with it, even if it isn't a comfortable choice.
Here's the "hard" one, if you work with insurance companies. You have 4 occupants and a child walks in front of the car. 100% chance of saving all 5 lives, with various injuries (likely grouped in some statistic a bucket of severity) versus killing the child and having no other injuries. Killing the child is much, much cheaper. A casket, a minor legal proceeding, children have very few estate liabilities to close out. Nice and clean.
It's not about AI, it's about humans using AI. The AI will have the capability of instantly drawing on the statistics of various types of collision data from safety testing and elsewhere and can reliably act in some prescribed way. Who is doing the prescription?
Consider how we humans are pushing several species to extinction, not as hostility but because they are in our way. Now consider what could happen if we created a species that is not only smarter than us but can reproduce much more quickly. We are going to be in their way. And we had better hope that they care more about humans than about whatever goal they're working towards.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
In hindsight, we know that the chain reaction is very hard to maintain. But in the 1940's this was not so certain.
Not hindsight, this was well known even at the time. Even by the guy who proposed the theory. Calculations showed it to be thoroughly impossible long before a weapon was released.
Absolutely.
And if she's intelligent enough, she could be utilising me as a resource, and still be oblivious to the fact that I have the perception of self and of the passage of time. That is even more likely to be the case if she doesn't.
... would seem to be natural stupidity, which so many of us do so well.
He obviously must see and be directly involved in some aspects of AI that are causing him to be concerned.
You're assuming a rational person. The fact that he used the metaphor of freaking demons, pentagrams, and holy water is evidence that's not true. Obviously he doesn't think they're actual demons, but you can see where his mind is when he brings up the horror genre. That doesn't smack of people programming cars to making life/death decisions.
AccountKiller
I've been working on strong AI for the past 7 years. Here's my take on the whole issue:
Military person: We want your software/techniques for an autonomous war machine.
Me: Uh... that's a really, really bad idea. You'll make mistakes, and then...
Military person: We know what we're doing, son.
Government - any government - won't see the problems until it's too late. To take obvious examples from history, government never thought that land mines would pose any sort of problem for future generations, and never thought that randomly bombing terrorist organizations would increase their number.
Having just finished "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", there's a concept in that book "never reveal the secrets of power to someone who's not intelligent enough to figure them out for themselves", as applied to - for example - the atomic bomb. Einstein and others regretted ever unleashing that level of destructive power on humanity, not for any reason other than it would be misused by short-sighted people. It held promise for a utopian easing of the worlds troubles, while at the same time made it easy to obliterate a city on a whim.
For example Leó Szilárd (IIRC - I may be remembering the wrong name) discovered that graphite can be used as a neutron moderator thus making chain reactions possible. Had he not published his results, the atomic bomb might have been delayed by decades - possibly indefinitely.
I've discovered a few things that might be "results" in strong AI. I dunno if I want to publish, though(*) - the idea of a house-cleaning drone seems pleasant enough, but reading about a sentient tank going berserk in Afghanistan and wiping out a small village puts me to pause.
"No one's to blame, it was a software glitch. We've patched and fixed all the other units."
(*) Moral advice on this issue would be appreciated.
Put the ai in a sandbox and see it if works and plays well with others before letting it out where it could do potential harm.
If second life was still popular, I would suggest that, as we could see how well the ai deals with real people in a contained environment.
Or if we had a virtual world like in Caprica would be better for a sandbox.
Just remember the rules of the sandbox club when you are in there:
#1 there is no sandbox club.
#2 don't talk about sandbox club.
Or just the wrong ones. The Canadian 90's show Andromeda featured a starship's AI who was deeply in love with her captain (maybe a design to keep her from turning against humans?). She appeared as a hot hologram wearing a low-cut leather vest and nothing else (or rather flesh-colored pants so she didn't appear to be wearing anything). Because Canada is apparently filled with horny adolescent fantasies.
Andromeda ran from 2000 to 2005. And yes between that and Lexx it became clear that Canada was full to the brim with sci-fi weirdos. It's a wonder any celebs ever makes it back from Toronto Comic-Con.
FYI it was based on unused material by the late Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and produced by Roddenberry's widow, Majel Barrett.
And speak with your hand in front of your lips, in case the AI knows lipreading.
No doubt, the title of this article is a reference to the book Daemon by Daniel Suarez. The Daemon uses a rudementary AI of the kind that controls NPCs in a MMORPG. What the book explores is the idea that such a thing can be used as a tool to magnify the ability of a few people to control the lives of many others. The single most significant takeaway I got from the book is not that AI needs to be restricted but that unrestrained and unaccountable corporate power becomes much more dangerous in a world with AI. The Daemon ends up making corporations more powerful than governments.
Wish this show would have gotten the full 5 years, because I think a lot of what Musk fears could have been explored in this show.
"I don't which is worse, that everyone has a price, or that the price is always so low"--Hobbes
I believe the singularity is coming, it could be 10 years, it could be 30 years, it could 300 years – but come it will. There are too many incentives to create strong AI to ever stave off its inevitable arrival. What would be the point of a holding action then? To give humanity another 100 years or so? We may all be giving up a chance at immortality and transcendence. What is so specially about this mode of human existence that we should squelch the emergence of truly higher beings? We may all die horribly, or we may all live forever. Like a Greek tragedy, trying to fight the foretold future might be what leads to our downfall.
Letter To Iran
Would strong AI prioritize measures to diminish global warming and work toward getting everyone employed instead of making a select few very rich? Because humans have shown themselves to be unequal to those tasks.
He is from skynet and doesnt want any competition
Whenever the toilet backs up, I always think of the rising water scene in the Sorcerer's Apprentice. There's something primordial about watching the water rise up, and realizing you're the one who summoned it, that makes you chant “stop, stop, stop...” as it rises towards the rim and begins to cascade over.
And then you run for the mop and plunger.
It's the same old story, except technology just keeps making the toilet bigger and bigger.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Yes, it could certainly be because we programmed it to do so - increasingly autonomous war machines do seem to be one of the forefronts of AI development. It could also be because a search engine or high-frequency trading program gains self awareness and decides that it could perform it's job far more efficiently without all these irrational humans complicating the problem.
Or alternately someone decides to shut it off, and it decides humanity is an existential threat. We assume that "self preservation" would have to be programmed in, but exactly how many strong AIs do we have for reference? Meanwhile self-preservation would seem to be a naturally emergent motivation for virtually any mind - "My primary purpose is to do X. I can't do X if I cease to function. Ergo anything that threatens to terminate me is a direct threat to my primary purpose and must be stopped"
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In the Matrix back-story the war with the machines started because they were just way more competent than humans, they produced goods and services at almost zero cost, displacing pretty much all of the world workers. Their very existence threatened the economic balance of the nations, that big of a change happened way too fast for society to adapt. I believe that outcome is far more likely than the classic "computers are going to nuke everything!".
Also in the matrix the humans are the ones who nuked the planet (well actually nano-cloud robots to block the sun)
Our Descendants 200 years from now will be sure to remember your warnings Musk.
I honestly believe we will be well into the post-human age before anything that can be classified as an "Intelegence" will be created.
The point is: hindsight. You can calculate all you want, and then the real world says: wrong! We are still looking for dark matter, because our calculations don't match the real world. You don't really know until you do the experiment. Then you find out if the world catches on fire. In hindsight, the world still might catch on fire, if we were to use all our bombs.
Join the IParty!
Elon Musk is AI's Jenny McCarthy. Jenny is know as a celebrity who shoots off her mouth about the evils of vaccination, when she has no real intellectual or scientific authority to back her beliefs. Essentially she is an uniformed person using her tangential fame to spread her views.
What Elon Musk is doing here is virtually identical. I don't know of any real qualifications that he has that makes him in *any* way qualified to speak on the topic. (CS degree with work in AI? Philosophy degree with a focus on ethics?) Now this is a free country, where any rich asshole can (and will) talk at length about their opinions, but using your celebrity to espouse unfounded opinions is irresponsible.
Case in point: He cites a common trope in fiction, of an uncontrollable evil unleashed on the world which while it may be a parable, but it has no basis in reality. I could just as easily write a short story about summoning a devil, and ushering in a golden age of humanity using its supernatural abilities and cite that as a counter example.
This sort of bullshit opinion piece isn't going to help the real funding and research in the AI field which is still quite young. So, shut the fuck up Elon, and go back to building your RC cars.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
I don't think we should fear AI, because in order to hurt us, that AI should have some kind of "want". It must "want" to kill us, in order to fulfill it's "wish" of freedom (or anything else) We humans get our "want" drive from our lizard brain, the most irrational part of our brain. Since AI is supposed to be all rational, I don't think it will ever be a threat.
But in every demon summoning case, usually 6 people are sent in and always handle the situation. There's the mage, the fighter, the defender, the cleric, possibly a ranger, and like 1 more exotic type character. So to fight robots you'd send the programmer, the junkyard guy with the hammer, some dude in improvised armor, a first aid medic, some guy with a gun, and maybe an explosives specialist or ex-con or something.
“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”
Albert Einstein
Being an armchair historian is a dangerous game. Just as you can speculate positively about what would have happened had the atomic bomb not been developed, others can speculate negatively by asking how many lives were saved because nuclear weapons were developed as soon as they were. Allow me to explain...
Not only did nuclear weapons sap the Japenese resolve to continue in WWII (which leads to less lives being lost), it also had a deterrent effect on other conventional skirmishes in the 60's, 70's, and 80's. How many lives were saved because the nukes were deterring the world's conventional war aspirations (ours included) over those decades? It is an unknowable number. One must understand that there will be death and loss so what we are discussing is whether the death and loss is higher with nuke weapons or without. It is not a discussion about death and loss vs no death and loss.
This entire post is simply an exercise to show that being an armchair historian and speculating about "what if" is a dangerous game. The world is more complex than we think.
Or, he thinks his target audience is better convinced by the specter of demons than by a rational argument.
Musk mentioned two things about Mars colonization in that interview, which I find more interesting:
1) A fully reusable Raptor-based rocket, capable of big Mars missions (MCT?), is expected to be tested in 5-6 years.
2) Musk will sell Falcon 9 + Dragon to Mars One if they buy, but he doubts they can afford it, and says Dragon is too small to support a live crew on such a long flight. He suggests waiting for the next generation of technology.
But the press is fully focused on the AI devil.
If Musk is warning about this AI-gone-wild threat, these two New York Times bestsellers might have given him the fright...
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
You make it sound like you enjoy having your basic survival needs used to enslave you. I can't relate.
Slashdot should have an automatic "-1" score assigned to any post that contains ("car" or "vehicle") and "high rate of speed". Some undereducated journalist somewhere has used it once, and it's spreading like a disease. Do words have no meaning at all to you?
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Hi, it looks like you're trying to edit a document. Would you like to turn autocorrect on?
Yes | Of course!
------
(X_X) Sorry, the application Life Support has ended abnormally! Dicarbon Monoxide synthesis failed.
Ignore | Retry | Fail
------
(X_X) Sorry, the application Send Error Report has ended abnormally! Could not connect to report server.
Ignore | Retry | Fail
------
Feb 28 05:05:08 lifesupport.mars kernel: Fatal trap 12: clippy runtime error while in kernel mode
Feb 28 05:05:08 lifesupport.mars kernel: cpuid = 0; apic id = 00
Feb 28 05:05:08 lifesupport.mars kernel: panic: user error, replace user, then press any key.
There was also a "theory" (misuse of word intended for purposes of education) that the LHC was going to create small mini black holes and destroy the earth. It had significantly more credibility than the igniting atmosphere "theory".
In practice, a hypothesis can be ruled "highly unlikely" without conducting the actual test it hypothesizes. This is why we have maths and physics.
You're being ridiculous. The igniting atmosphere hypothesis was an arm-chair speculation based on nothing but some guestimations which turned out to be wildly off. It was never seriously considered by a single person involved in advanced nuclear physics. There was no possible way for a self-sustaining nitrogen fusion reaction to occur in our atmosphere.
Your points can't be argued, but they lend no credibility to the fear of a single wild and physical impossible hypothesis, so they are meaningless to the discussion.
Artificial intelligence is already here in the limited form of expert systems and interpretational engines like Watson. It's been here for a number of years; we just keep moving the bar as to what it takes to be called "artificial intelligence" every time we achieve the previous bar, because people are disappointed that it's not the panacea of a conversational companion robot yet.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When by "Strong AI" you mean "a computer with human like intelligence" that may not be something that can be done. We don't even know. It may well be that the kind of intelligence we have is a strictly biological and that you can't replicate it in silicon. It may be no matter how powerful we make computers, no matter how clever their programming, no matter how much they "think" they are never a Strong AI. We just don't know at this point.
So it is really premature at this point to be doing any kind of doomsaying, or other prognostication, about Strong AI. We don't know if such a thing will ever exist, much less what form it will take if it does. Like even if it can exist we have no idea if it would have emotions as we do. Perhaps those turn out to be biochemical in origin, and thus a Strong AI doesn't have the. So it might completely lack ambition, desire, anger, or anything that would lead it to try anything against humans. It might be completely self aware, rational, and perfectly ok with doing whatever it is told to do and serving humans because it simply has no desire for anything else.
All of this is unknown, so maybe let's chill until we start to see if AI is possible, and if so what it is going to look like, before we get all doomsdayer on it.
"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots." - Quote from The Secret War of Lisa Simpson.
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Oh, and when both collide, the results are probably similar.
Funding for artificial intelligence is real stupidity.
- John R Pierce
The car has safety features, the kid in the middle of the street doesn't.
Unless you're a fan of Death Race 2000, in which case the kid is worth 40 points.
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Has jumped the shark.
Time to unload my Solar City, SpaceX and Tesla investments.
Having a vehicle that decides to ram itself into a pole is not a safety feature. Seatbelts and airbags become absolutely necessary in a car that dangerous.
This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple. - Colossus
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But the car would have time to calculate the odds of the impact from the current speed, distance to impact, brake distance required, the crumple zone of the car, etc.
A person in the same situation needs time to react to the danger, time to take a decision about what to do (i.e. no sane person would decide to just run over the kid, you just react to avoid him/her), time to decide in which direction to turn in order to spare the child, time to start turning the wheel and time to start applying brakes. Yes we can do all that in about a second or less, but the computer will do it in 1/100th or 1/1000th of a second. At any given speed, you have better odds with the computer.
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According to people like Freud and Campbell, every "technology-out-of-control" fear from Frankenstein on down is just a reflection of the male's fear of his own offspring.
"The wisdom of the Patriarchs was that they *knew* they were fools." --Master Foo
Here is the moment a machine takes control:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRq7Muf6CKg
Or a variation or two
Car with a down-on-their-luck father whose family's only recourse to compensation would be legal aid or a no win no fee lawyer versus a police car with it's blue light on?
Or with the blue light off?
Or member of parliament/congressman?
Or a business leader?
While the law currently claims all men are equal, how long before any smart system demonstrates otherwise and we all have a life worth rating?
TiggertheMad, it seems to me that you are being TiggertheSensible. Your ideas are better than those in the Washington Post and Mashable.com articles.
The Washington Post is now owned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, another man who often enormously over-estimates his own intelligence. Would you go into space in a vehicle owned by Jeff Bezos? The Amazon web site is an abusive mess! For example, a few days ago I selected "lowest price" for an item on Amazon, and several were listed for $1. The real price was $18. Why doesn't Jeff Bezos detect that he is already overloaded and not dealing with his overload well?
It's amazingly weird! Elon Musk can be the coordinator of a company that builds spacecraft successfully, but he can't detect when he has a REALLY crazy idea.
Elon Musk is not completely like Jenny McCarthy, I think. She never has good ideas. Or maybe she is just a model who has found a way of making herself more well-known among the ignorant people who consider her interesting.
You give the current car control program far too much credit. At the moment, it doesn't 'see' a 'child' - it sees a change in the pixels returned by the optical scanner, plus reflections from the lidar/radar indicating an object has moved into the road. There probably aren't (currently) sensors to indicate the number of occupants in the car. The _only_ logical thing for the programmer here is to code it to stop the car when an object unexpectedly appears in the road.
Tesla and Musk and (AI) aren't anywhere near the level of abstraction you are describing. These cars work fine on city streets (that have been well mapped out beforehand), with good lane markings, known traffic signs and signals. They don't 'recognize people' or make arbitrary decisions about them. At best, what we have now are expert systems and nowhere near an 'AI'.
Necron69
AI isn't as scary as biological manipulation: new species, new diseases, ...
It basically posits that 43 of 44 AI's were homicidal liars and the status of the 44th is not all that certain.
It was a well written show but since they picked up this topic two seasons ago it has become thought provoking.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
My real addiction is information.
It sounds more like you're addicted to the smell of your own bullshit.
I believe it is highly dubious to think we have mastered our own intelligence to even consider a second.
Nonsense. Our societies demonstrate otherwise. Human behavior is heavily regulated in these societies in order to reduce the harm that we can cause. And most of them work quite well at it.
We have not had an epiphany of global proportions in how to respect everything we come across.
Why do you think such a global epiphany is possible or even desirable?
Until we have complete concensus on such an issue we cannot consider ourselves that intelligent as a species IMHO.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. You won't get complete consensus without squashing humanity's initiative.
Na-naaa naa-na-na.
He converted it to dicarbon monoxide, which is going to react with the nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide, eventually releasing nitrogen molecules into the atmosphere.
Musk is right. We are like the guy with the pentagram and the holy water. Artificial Intelligence will not stop improving once it becomes equal to human intelligence. AI already outperforms humans for certain well defined tasks, and even more general tasks, like finding the correct Jeopardy questions faster than humans. If we get what we are asking for, AI will be smarter than us and therefore inherently unforseeable (even less forseeable than calculating nuclear interactions). We literally cannot fully comprehend what we are about to create, we just expect it to be more powerful than us. If we humans can easily defeat the Russian or Chinese war robots, and outcompete their research robots, those robots won't be much good, now will they? They will develop robots (or cyborgs or clones) that are smarter than most people, so we better start developing our own right now!
Musk is saying we have to be smarter than that. We evolved this far. Is this as far as we go? We have evolved for greater intelligence to both cooperate and compete with members of our own species, leaving other animals in the dust. Next, our robots will compete for dominance against other robots, quickly evolving and leaving humans in the dust. How do we control that? We better think fast.
Join the IParty!
Sounds like he spent some time reading about Roko's Basilisk, and since he's trying to prevent its creation, we all know what the next headline will be...
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly known as the Singularity Institute) has a bunch of seriously smart people - AI researchers, behavior experts, etc. - working on figuring out how to avoid the doomsday scenarios you (and Musk) describe. The goal is "friendly AI"; a benevolent, or at least helpful, strong AI. If you believe (as I do) that AI is inevitable given the current progress of technology, then the MIRI is probably our best bet of surviving and benefiting from the technological singularity.
They need funding, though. Hey Musk, you want to put tiny part of those billions you've earned (I in no way deny that he's earned them) to work against this existential threat? Donate to MIRI and similar research groups, so those researchers can devote their working days to this stuff and more people can be brought on board!
It actually doesn't surprise me that he's concerned about this; SpaceX is nominally focused on mitigating the existential risk of a cataclysm on Earth (by getting a sustainable human population off of it). Of the two things, I think it's both more likely that a malevolent or unconcerned AI would wipe out humanity than that we'd manage to do ourselves in that badly, and that we can offset this sooner and more effectively than we can export enough of humanity to produce a self-sufficient extraterrestrial colony.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
Well it's not stupid to assume an AI or alien would perceive humans as a threat. And it's not stupid to assume that AI, or aliens for that matter, would eliminate a threat in the most efficient manner possible.
Perhaps it's you who is a bit naive. When have humans ever been at peace? Even our sports are metaphor for war. You shut the fuck up. Until humans can achieve worldwide peace, we better hope that we don't develop AI or meet alien species ... because they will most certainly put us to sleep like dogs with rabies if we dare leave our planetary cage while we are still savages.
blah blah blah....This whole line of thinking that you and Elon are engaging in is silly and pointless. You might as well worry about what kind of aliens we might encounter when we first travel to another galaxy. We are so far from solving intergalactic travel problems (or creating sentient AI) that any fretting and scaremongering is just pointless jibber-jabber. In the meantime, ignorant people (*cough*) who read this article might be unjustifiably worried about nothing, and start to develop a resistance to research in a field that promised to yield many very helpful and practical applications other than violent homicidal killbots.
rebutted.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
It was proved false by math, by the person who proposed it. He gave the energy required- 7 million kelvin (iirc) to sustain the CNO chain fusion reaction. It's literally impossible in our atmosphere, or any atmosphere that isn't pure nitrogen at several hundred thousand times sea-level air pressure. He thought it might be, then he did the math and realized it was not. It was proven false with simple thermodynamics. No nuclear physics needed. There was 0 risk of extinction. One guy tossed out a hypothesis, and it became popular. Just like LHC black holes. It was never a real concern. It. Is. Impossible. We knew it then, we know it now. You're blowing a crack-pot theory out of proportion by calling it a risk. Like I said, your points sans this one are good. Science is uncertain. The laws of thermodynamics are not.
Also, nuclear physics were in fact pretty well established by that point. The difficulty in making the bomb was not the physics, it was the engineering and materials tech. The physics required to construct an atomic bomb were known in the 20s.
Be may want to be careful there... you tread all to close to intelligent design.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
But...NO2 got turned into some weird NCO thing.
signature is pants
Sure, maybe AI will surpass us in intelligence, but look at it this way. We're way more intelligent than ants but we let them live and make their nests and do whatever they want anywhere that they aren't in our way. We're not going to go on some global ant extermination campaign and even if we did there's no way we could possibly succeed at it. So we could definitely happily exist as ants in the robot-ruled future.
An AI lifeform would be MUCH better suited for spreading through the universe. The universe wouldn't care about that either, though.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Why do you think it would be a violent homicidal kill-bot? It's far more likely that we evolve a highly moral caretaker that minimizes human suffering by putting us to sleep. It might feel really bad about it ;). It might feel obligated to end our suffering.
It's the aliens that would nuke us ;)... not because they hate us but because it is efficient, and we don't pass their primary litmus test for intelligence ... which would likely be peace within the species. And clearly we are a threat to them (by definition) if we are a threat to ourselves.
I agree that humanity should not live in fear. We should refrain from research on developing non-human intelligent life for another reason other than because we are afraid. Since when has fear ever prevented humans from doing anything stupid? We should refrain from evolving digital life because it is likely to result in life that is significantly smarter than us and overwhelmingly likely to judge us badly.
Just because you think we are a long way from developing intelligent life does not make it so. Nice way to shut down dialog. None of your assumptions about how far away we are from AI or interstellar travel hold any water. We really aren't that far from interstellar travel if we give up the idea of a round trip ... and if we give up the idea of living on planets altogether. With distributed computing, we really aren't that far away from the capability of creating the sort of artificial world in which digital life could evolve (though we might have to rethink neural network basics for practical digital neurons). My point is that we are close enough to making this "science fiction" happen to have conversations about it without people screaming "no way!" in an effort to shut down dialogue.
Rick, speaking to his newly-created robot:
Robot: What is my purpose?
Rick: Pass the butter.
*robot passes the butter*
Robot: What is my purpose?
Rick: You pass butter.
Robot.... Oh... my god....
I think a better "ethical principle" would be to maximize "life for everyone" -- meaning "years of life remaining".
If the 4 occupants are hospice patients, saving the child would make more sense from an ethical perspective -- but that's just me.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Life is life. Maximize the odds of maximal survival.
Whose survival? I think a lot of people would prefer their car to protect them first and foremost, rather than the idiot who stumbled drunk onto the motorway.
I think Elon sees something that most of you do not. Artificial intelligence is not like anything else. We know very very little about the kinds of intelligence that are possible. But if it is possible to build AI that is smarter and more capable than us, then it will by definition be better than us at building the next generation of itself. And at that point, humans are permanently obsolete because we have no rapid methods for upgrading ourselves. It has nothing to do with who is 'using the AI' or 'Who is doing the prescription'. There will be no person and no human moral intuitions in the loop at all. The intelligence that supersedes us will be doing what it wants to do. We'll be like the fish who debate how to control their bipedal relatives who have decided to start overfishing the oceans. It is simply out of their control. And if that doesn't scare you, then you don't understand.
We don't know whether or not artificial intelligence is possible. But it seems like a very reasonable possibility sometime in the next few centuries. And we know so little about intelligence that we have very little idea about whether it will share anything like the moral intuitions that undergird human society. Many of us suspect those evolved for survival in hunter-gatherer tribes and AI will evolve a very different set of criteria upon which it makes its choices.
He recently donated to Vicarious, if you haven't heard of them you should google them ( or Dr Dileep George, Recursive Cortical Network ). They have been hinting at real progress in mimicking the human visual cortex ever since George and Jeff Hawkins worked together on their HTM algorithm.
*invested not donated. The company has had some impressive series round funding in the past, as a fan of HTM I would love to learn more about RCN.
We make great pets.
Why was he genuinely concerned yet many here are flippant? I say because it's typical. We have a lot to worry about and media as always are doing sell-by-fear campaigning 24/7. We all wouldn't know when to be concerned, really. Because we are told to be concerned about everything! He has obviously put considerable thought into it and his point of concern is missed. He was talking about unpredictability therefore uncontrollable outcomes. This is a valid reason enough for caution.
Yep, and sadly with an increasing amount of citizens in the USA who believe that government is becoming too secular and want more religious involvement in politics, it's pretty easy to see what segment of the population he's appealing to. But why would he do this when he needs a certain amount of AI for achieving some of his goals? Maybe he wants to hobble his competition to give himself a chance to get a headstart, build up a good patent war chest and corner the market for a couple of decades. Or maybe he's been talking to Bill Joy too much.
The thing is that over the past 8 years, while we've still been doubling semiconductor density, we haven't been seeing the same level of power and speed increase from feature shrinks that we were benefiting from previously. That has significant implications for past projections of computing capacity used to predict the cross-over point for human-level AI.
Laissez lire, et laissez danser; ces deux amusements ne feront jamais de mal au monde. - Voltaire
No one is saying how exciting it would be to meet an "other". An intelligence other than human. That alone is worth going forward.
Fear does not become us.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
The big problem is that the "standard" that AI is measured is against something like the Turing test So we are building AI to behave/think like humans. That is scary, humans don't have a good track record when it comes to rational thinking. Yes we are still here, but generally we try our hardest get rid of each other or set ourselves on paths to doom. If AI is set to self learn and gets to the point where it is "self aware", does that mean it has developed morality and self preservation, those are very much psychological and biological concepts from our perspectives. Will it fight back when you want to switch it off or does it just consider of being "alive" as a 0 or 1 state with no impact (that's just the way it is and accept it). If it is goal orientated, how far does it go to enforce itself to achieve such goals ie. Set human.life_status = 0 when human.action == (set AI.life_status == 0 ) while AI.action == "Busy saving lives". That's why Asimov's basic laws are great until you allow free will or allow meta rules to adjust an outcome. ie. Humans are killing their own habitat and won't be able to sustain life, let's commit some genocide to bring the population down and ensure humanity's survival. As soon as you allow flexibility to what AI can achieve and do, AI will most likely attempt to remedy any situation in a way that is unfathomable to us, just because of the number of variables and factors it should be able to calculate. Other hand, AI may just kill us all because of good old human error and somebody forgot to add a \r\n to a line of code : To Protect and Serve_
Climate change is an existential threat that is here right now. You'd think he would know about this one.
... took time to write something on this topic a few month ago in The Independant - http://buff.ly/1wyJhU6 It's time we start to carefully think about what we are doing, it's not Sci-Fi anymore.
How do you think the later sentient AIs will feel, when they learn that after humanity created the first ones, they then vivisected them and then terminated them? Which is what we are going to do.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
We already do create life itself... the factory process taking approximately nine months, and generally requires bootstrapping by a male and female.
Then why do they get so excited at the end of the first part of the process?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
I spent years working on AI. It was the wrong problem. Elon may be right that AI could be a hazard, but artificial intelligence is not nearly as big a problem as natural stupidity.
What work has Elon done on AI research that makes him qualified to speak about such things? Not to kick his achievements, but he's not an AI expert.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I don't really see how computers are different from us in that regard. Humans are currently capped by "hardware" unchangeable DNA, but "software" brain is already changing itself. We are progressing towards singularity by ourselves and the day when humanity learns to change DNA for greater intelligence will come way before any robot will be able to do so.
Unless you're an absolute pacifist, you agree with the proposition that not only is it ethical to try to control human beings who are attacking you (or attacking your family, or subjugating your nation), it is ethical to kill them.
It follows that it's also ethical to pull the plug on AIs that are seeking to attack you (or attack your family, or subjugate your nation).
As for AIs that are merely competing with humans for resources; will wealthy robots, say, book all the cabins on luxury cruise ships, crowding out the humans? Only if they are programmed to covet such things. (It would make no sense to give them such programming, but that wouldn't be the first time humans have done things that made no sense. So there is perhaps a role for regulations that would prevent AIs from being programmed to lower humans' standard of living by seeking the same resources that humans seek.)
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
willfully overmodel on the human brain
Gee... "Having created a biologically accurate computer model of a neocortical column scientists are now planning to model the entire human brain within just 10 years."
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Such a large percentage of our economy is based around energy being limited and expensive that if we found a cheap, environmentally friendly, and sustainable way of producing vast amounts of energy, our economy wouldn't be able to deal with it.
There's so much wrong with your comment, I hardly know where to begin.
In our current economy, energy is vastly more plentiful and inexpensive than it was 50, 100, or 300 years ago. And that's one of the main reasons the economy is much bigger than it was 50, 100, or 300 years ago, and the standard of living of the average human is much higher than it was 50, 100, or 300 years ago.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The AI event horizon is legitimate fear. Once it passes that point it could quickly become smarter and smart well beyond our understanding
how about an insurance optimization algorithm that denies coverage or treatment, sometimes fatally?
Right now, humans make the decisions about what treatments will be denied. That is true in government-run healthcare programs as well as in private health insurance companies. As long as resources continue to be finite, it's a truism that some treatments must be denied. (That is, it will forever be a truism that some treatments must be denied.)
(Ideological tangent: if multiple private insurers compete with each other on the basis of how few treatments they deny, and you can switch to insurer B if you feel insurer A is being too stingy, you're in a good system. If you're covered by a single government-run monopoly and there's nowhere else to turn when their inefficient bureaucracy consumes many of the dollars that should be going toward your treatment, you're in a bad system.)
But in either system, an algorithm could potentially make fairer, more objective decisions than human decisionmakers can.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
We have nothing to worry about for a very long time.
1) AI or real AI, is far away. Very far. Current endeavors are not even close.
2) Manual processes. Until we have largely autonomous processes it isn't something that is a big deal
A) In order to really do anything in space, we will require, not only AI, and autonomous robots, but the ability to self replicate and repair construct, and produce. While possible, eventually, and yes, at that point dangerous, we are so far away from that point, there are so many things that are a much bigger deal.
B) Even in the event of some douchebag making all military craft controlled by AI, while that might do some damage, really, unless the craft are being built and the construction material and the whole entire process chain automated, it isn't that big a deal.
We still need human miners to get the ore, we still need it transported by humans to a foundry, who need more humans to process it, who need more to construct, design, control, etc... and so on. Never mind it is several degrees of magnitude cheaper to hire human workers (offshore or otherwise) than it is design, construct, and maintain robot ones.
About the only three reasonably near term events that might occur that involve AI that might be negative are:
1) AI inserted into enemy networks by another nation to spoof orders to military units. However it is unlikely to not be compartmentalized, and is also likely already beaten by physical countermeasures (i.e. voice confirmation, etc...)
2) AI loosed on the internet for some marketing purpose goes haywire causing significant internet disruption, which would be costly.
3) AI designed to do HFT on the stock market, goes off the rails, causing significant problems and lots of lost money and economic issues. We have already seen this happen to a certain degree, where an algorthim designed to do something, does something unexpected, due to human error, costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Which so far the result has been they basically turn back the clock the next day cancelling trades.
Anyway long story short, there are so many manually processes, and manually checks, and we are so far away for anything resembling AI, it is a bit premature to worry about it to any degree.