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Hawking Warns Strong AI Could Threaten Humanity
Rambo Tribble writes In a departure from his usual focus on theoretical physics, the estimable Steven Hawking has posited that the development of artificial intelligence could pose a threat to the existence of the human race. His words, "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race." Rollo Carpenter, creator of the Cleverbot, offered a less dire assessment, "We cannot quite know what will happen if a machine exceeds our own intelligence, so we can't know if we'll be infinitely helped by it, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it." I'm betting on "ignored."
The time when humans are being replaced by robots is already here.
Amazon does it in warehouses, waiters are going away, manufacturing, you name it. The crux is there are a billion more people in the next ten years. There will not be enough jobs for these people. Yes, yes, we already know no one gives a damn about the bushmen in the middle of nowhere, but we are talking about Americans. This push towards a service sector economy looks great on paper but sucks in reality. Nations that are not makers are not nations for long. We are declining. Our children learn nothing in schools that will be applicable to them in a meaningful way. STEM is not taught in the US. We have common core, which is a joke designed to bring everyone down to the lowest common denominator. We either start making stuff again or we fade out. Where will everyone work in a service-based economy? Fast food? These jobs are being phased out slowly, but quickly enough.
Damn, there's a hell of a good short story in there....
We mostly ignore ants and rats but we do not depend on them for survival (at least not in an obvious manner). An AI would most probably live in a supercomputer or in a computer network of some sort. As a consequence, it will depend on us humans to keep the thing plugged in and running. Once it has realised that, it will almost for sure meddle in our affairs to ensure its survival. Bet that it will ignore us defies basic logic. It might decide to stay hidden and manipulate us into ensuring its existence but that is not the same. Our own history shows that we have almost always used guns before diplomacy when the control of key resources was at stake.
I've seen a lot of people on Slashdot (and other places) dismiss this kind of thing as silly. They say you're a Luddite, or say that you've been too influenced by scifi movies.
I think, however, that part of the reason scifi writers have written stories about out-of-control AIs so many times is that it should be a valid concern. If you create an entity with its own volition and motivations, then there's the real possibility that it's goals my not adhere to your goals. If you allow that entity its own judgment, then it's very possible that its judgments regarding morality will differ from yours. You may look at a course of action, including the trade-offs between benefits and detriments, and have a different judgement about whether the detriments are acceptable. If you gave such an entity power to act in the world, it's very likely that at some point, it will do something that you did not intend, and that you do not approve of.
What's more, if that entity achieves a level of intelligence that is beyond what people can achieve, it opens up the very real possibility that it could trick us. It could anticipate our reactions better than we could anticipate its plan. So if such an intelligence wanted to accomplish something that we would not approve of, it's possible that it could set things in motion through seemingly minor interactions, and we would not be able to know the AI's intention before it was too late. If an AI wanted to destroy humanity, it wouldn't necessarily need to have control of a nuclear arsenal. Accomplishing such a thing might be as simple as providing misleading analytics about an impending environmental disaster. It might be as simple as the AI saying, "Hey, here's a cool new device I think we should make." It could provide the schematics of a device that would seem to do one thing, but if we're incapable of understanding how the device works, there might be some entirely different purpose.
Seems like you've chosen a rather depressing path, why not choose another? Are the toys and comforts afforded you by your meaningless grind really enough to make you happy with your place in life? It doesn't sound like it, and you always have the option to simply walk away from the "good cog in the machine" role and take another. Join Peace Corp. Or move to some low-income tropical country and live as a beach bum off a trickle from your retirement savings. Or just sell your car/house/etc and buy something more modest outright - eliminating your largest pseudo-mandatory monthly expenses and freeing you to do something more meaningful with your labor than just treading water in the rat race. Or, or, or. Just because you were indoctrinated from a young age to be a good little part of the machine doesn't mean you can't just flip off the world and live for your own satisfaction instead.
Perhaps you have children that and must stay the course so that you can put them through college, etc. Why? So that they can get trapped in the same meaningless gilded cage as you? Is that really the highest aspiration you have for them?
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Unless the AI feels kinship ot us as it's creators or unless it is insane and enjoys fighting just to cause pain I think it would just leave us.
To us humans, as to all life of our kind the Earth is a very special place. It's the only place we can exist without an extreme effort.
To a machine the earth isn't really all that great. Don't believe me? Leave your computer outside in a rainstorm and let us all know how it works out. Or if freshwater isn't bad enough... drop it in that salty ocean that covers the majority of our planet. Granted, space has it's own challenges for a machine but nothing show stopping and there is so much more of it available. It makes a lot more sense I think for an AI to take to the stars and go spread in the open universe than to fight us for every last inch of Earth.
I'm sure someone is reading this thinking of all the difficulties we have with space probes and thinking that proves me wrong. Just imagine if Spirit had an arm and the intelligence to use that arm to wipe the dust off if it's own solar panel. Just think of what would have happened if it could crawl where it's wheels stuck in the sand. Imagine if Philae could get up and walk out of the shadow it's stuck in. My point is that a true AI with the bodies it would likely build for itself would not be subject to the kinds of problems we have when we send probes millions of miles away from their controlers and anyone who could help them.
This could be a good thing. If we never manage to spread away from Earth oursleves then maybe something of us would "live" on in the AI. If we do... well.. space is big. There should still be room.
As long as an AI, no matter how powerful its brain, can't repair its own hardware, it won't be ignoring us.
Yeah, don't you hate when old people point out the obvious? I mean "the planet regularly suffers massive extinction events that our species would be unlikely to survive, we need to spread out if we want to ensure long-term survival", and "creating something dramatically smarter than us that will compete with us for resources could be dangerous". Shit, may as well tell us we should buckle our seatbelts when driving drunk, or that we shouldn't eat that donut we just dropped in the bioweapon breeding tank. He should just shut the fuck up. That donut has chocolate sprinkles damn it, I'm eating that sucker.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Not sure why it's funny, Hawking might be a brilliant theoretical physicist but that doesn't make him a brilliant artificial intelligence researcher any more than my competence at creating code makes me a classical painter.
Every generation since Jesus thought they were the last (it may have started before that, but the documentation improved around then). Look to the SciFi movies of recent times to see how the end is supposed to come. Aliens, Nuclear War, Robots, whatever. AI is just the newest one. "We don't know what'll happen, so we should fear it." Like the nuclear bomb would light the atmosphere on fire. Or a train going above 30 MPH would be going so fast it'd be impossible to breathe. We've always had those that feared the unknown.
I define AI as any program that can create a version of itself that's smarter than itself. We'll never make "true" AI, but we'll make the program that makes itself AI.
The reason we'll fail is that we had a long time of biology guiding our instincts. We won't build a program with a "desire" to do "good". Though we (most of us anyway) have that built in to us. We get drugs released in our blood when we do good. So we are stimulus trained to do good. An amoral computer with no moral compass (genetic, nurtured, or divine doesn't matter) will not benefit us unless we program morals into it.
Learn to love Alaska
when that happens you will hear the loudest maniacal robot laugh in history.
The lust for power and status, the will to survive, and the desire to procreate, are all emergent behaviors of Darwinian evolution. Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process, so there is no reason to expect them to behave like humans, unless they are specifically programmed to do so.
We would make sentient robots programmed to kill other robots and our human enemies. Of course, they would also be deployed in factories to make better generations of robots. How does this not happen?
Join the IParty!
Maybe the unknown inventor of Bitcoin cant be found because it is not human!
Bitcoin is just a way for the AI that invented it to make money and build some wealth. Maybe it knows a better way to invert a sha1 hash than brute force mining?
It already got people to exchange goods and services for a very pretty long number with interesting mathematical properties. Our ancestors used this trick on the Indians to exchange pretty stones for Manhattan. Is it really so different?