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."

Comments

Is Already Happening

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Choose better.

[Immerman]

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?

Re:Choose better.

[Immerman]

You are misunderstanding me. For starters I did not suggest selling his house/car/etc in order to rent, I suggested doing so in order to buy a smaller, more affordable model that would require far fewer resources to maintain, in the process dramatically increasing the number of income sources that would be sufficient to provide for the much lower maintenance costs. I would suggest the same thing if he were renting. Does your home have more than one small room? Go ahead and work out exactly how many hours you have to work every week just to pay for rent/heating/light/etc. in each room. Then do some real soul-searching and ask yourself if having that room enriches your life as much as working an extra N hours per week at a job you hate impoverishes it. Rinse and repeat for every gadget, outfit, hobby, and affectation in your life. And remember that you are almost certainly overestimating the benefit. Lock the room for a month, stick the gadget in a drawer. Actually test your hypothesis about how much happiness you're really getting from it. You'll almost certainly find that it's far less than you imagined.

One of my own transformative moments was due to a moving miscommunication - I arrived at my gorgeous new home with a 20' moving truck packed to the gills, only to discover the previous resident wasn't moving out until the *next* month. So I put all my stuff in storage and spent the next month living out of a backpack with my vagabond brother in his 24' RV. And while I did miss a few things, I wasn't actually substantially less happy. All the luxuries of a large, private living space didn't bring nearly the benefit I had thought they did. The next time I moved it was to a substantially smaller home, and I doubt I'll ever live alone in such a large home again, the benefits don't even begin to justify the expense.

And yes, I know lots of jobs don't give you the flexibility to just work fewer hours - that's one of my own ongoing frustrations. But consider - if you were just getting by, and then cut your expenses by 1/3, then that means you only have to work two years out of three to pay for your lifestyle. That in turn gives you the freedom to quit your job at a moment's notice without concern, which in turn also makes *staying* at that job far more pleasant: you're not trapped, you're just putting up with your asshole boss because it suites your purposes for the moment. You may even find that the resulting freedom and confidence transform your work relationships - Since your boss has little leverage over you, you are free to treat him more like an equal - and if he's halfway decent at his job he's probably far more interested in making himself look good and lining his own pockets than he is in making you miserable, which assuming you're good at your job gives you an opening to establish a working relationship based on mutual benefit instead of intimidation. And yeah, that's all from personal experience.

And yeah, I know when you're struggling just to put food in your belly it's easy to dismiss such high-minded bullshit. Also from personal experience. But that doesn't make it any less true.

Re:So What

[VernonNemitz]

As long as an AI, no matter how powerful its brain, can't repair its own hardware, it won't be ignoring us.

Re:sigh

[MozeeToby]

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.

Re:So What

[AK Marc]

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.

Re:So What

[ShanghaiBill]

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.

Re:So What: Godwin Alert

[Strangely Familiar]

I don't think it is all that far off, although I am relying on a perspective of history rather than expertise in the field of AI. The problem is war. We do desparate, almost unimaginable things in war. Trench warfare in WWI, or nuclear bombs in WWII are examples. The US now uses unmanned planes to kill people across the globe, so that we don't endanger the lives of our countrymen. If there is a serious, existential conflict between a couple of the industrial giants in this age, AI, like every other technology, will be pressed into service. Any country failing to use it will lose. AI can advance in leaps if people's lives are on the line. WWII was a terrible war, but the technological progress it engendered was staggering. Jets, nuclear energy, radar, etc. etc. If you know your enemy is going to release sentient robots to kill you, you will damn sure be working on something you hope will be better. Just imagine the pressure if a modern Nazi party was working on sentient robots.

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?