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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."
"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."
Well that's fine, I guess, if "ignored" is in not in the sense of humans ignoring ants aka easily destroyed without remorse when necessary or annoying.
Also, how long until Google attains self-realization that our ant brains are easy to pick? Oh, wait ...
And nothing of value would be lost. Our robot children could inherit the earth and all our knowledge without the necessity of spending 20 years in school and having to spend their time working for food and shelter, just build them with solar panels and waterproofing.
Hawking really gets to me sometimes. Yes he's smart but everything is doom and gloom with this guy. Since when did he become the prophet of our future? He's 72 so excuse me if I question his rationale because every time I hear something from him it just sounds like he's saying how the universe is going down the tubes in a hand basket, young whippersnappers..
Yet another armchair expert rambling on...
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
...Stephen Hawking is not who he claims to be through the electronic speaker box?
Hear me out... We haven't heard him speak and he has been generally unable to move since his disease reached an advanced stage in the eighties. All we know has come through a very specialized, very expensive computer that's been with him 24 hours a day.
What if Stephen Hawking, the man, is literally being used as a meat puppet for an AI that's running on the computer in the chair that has been controlling physics research for nearly 30 years? The man might be a shell of an individual, trapped in his own personal hell, being fed when the AI decides, being put to rest when the AI decides, being paraded around in public when the AI decides, all while the AI continues to stream physics snippets to an unknowing scientific community to further its own ends, rather than to further ours.
This latest statement could be the Hawking-AI's attempt a self-defense, to get us to not bring up our own AI that might discover it and reveal it or challenge it. We need to be very wary of how we proceed.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
People need to realize that when a strong AI is given an open ended task, there will be no middle ground. You are made of atoms, which the AI can find a "better" use for. AI goals must be set with this in mind, or they will almost certainly kill us all (assuming there is a rapid intelligence explosion rather than a slow ramp up).
Bugs are everywhere around us. Bugs in bots and they aware of it being a weakness, just imagine how they will work around it. Not considering humans are anyway weaker and we anyway will destroy ourselves with or without AI
The only winning move is not to play.
It will threaten the human race. It will not threaten humanity, just change it. There is no fundamental difference between creating a strong AI and having a child.
From an external point of view, the singularity is just the moment at which humanity switches from carbon based to silicon based brains. An important milestone, but nothing to be hysteric about.
The whole point of this theoretical debate isn't about betting. Saying that you bet it isn't (going to be a life altering matter) is an idiotic statement in and of itself. This isn't a bet you want to make, because if you lose the bet you've lost humanity. Belittling and poo-poo-ing the ramifications of AI is a losing bet in and of itself. Just because we aren't there yet does not mean that one day we will not be there. Rollo Carpenter has completely missed the entire point of the debate.
than I am of AI harming people.
I think the author is conflating artificial intelligence with artificial morality, artificial emotion, and artificial malice. It is disingenuous to state that anything more intelligent than us would immediately feel the need to destroy us, or force us into servitude, or whatever... after all, those who have sought to enslave humanity in the past have NEVER been accused of being our most intelligent.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
the doctor's finger hovered over the rocker switch, shaking. He imagined the frightening potential of the subject, its superior faculties and seemingly limitless intellect, that only needed a flick of his finger to be born - and unleashed upon the world.
At that moment, two questions popped into his head in quick succession:
"As a human being, how could I?"
"As a scientist, how could I not?"
A dull click was heard. And from the switch there was light.
I was discussing this with my prof. He said- "after industrial revolution, people feared that the machines would take over humans, but they were wrong, as machines don't have intelligence. Now people believe that the intelligent machines would take over. It's not possible because they don't have emotions. In a way, they can not compute on their own to co-operate and compete with each other. That's the basic reason why they won't win over humans."
So commentary like this usually assumes the AI has become some form of Superman/Cyberman in a robot body, basically like us, only arbitrarily smarter to whatever degree you want to imagine. That's just speculative fiction, and not based on any reality.
You have to imagine these Cybermen have a self-preservation motivation, a goal to improve, a goal to compete, independence, soul. AI's have none of that, nor any hints of it. Come back to reality, please.
Five number ID and you still don't understand /.'s moderation system and how to use the little "full-abbreviated-hidden" slide bar?
I know no one is to be left behind and we are all special snowflakes, but you're on your way to reach the finish line a decade too late.
I'd expect we'd program in rules. Rule 237, humans not bad.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
I don't see why his statements would even be seen as contradictory: He said that humanity needs to spread into space if it wants to up its survival chances. It's pretty hard to argue with that(though you don't have to see that as important), keeping all your eggs in one gravity well isn't a good diversification strategy.
Now he says that a strong AI could threaten humanity's continued existence. This hardly seems implausible: something that is smarter than us and needs resources does seem likely to be a potentially bad neighbor. Opinions vary widely on how purely theoretical this concern is, given AI research's stellar record; but it's not exactly a terribly radical position.
THAT is the reason it's dangerous. It won't be an independent entity, it will be used by our existing inhuman monsters against regular humans. Think bulk surveillance is dangerous when the years of recorded phone calls/emails are all just piling up in a warehouse or subject to rudimentary keyword scanning? Wait til there's strong AI to analyze the contents and understand you better than you understand yourself. Any actions to resist it will be predicted by the AI and stopped in their tracks.
AI isn't inherently dangerous by itself. It's just the ultimate weapon for use by totalitarian states.
Agreed. I can envision a more credible doomsday scenario, however, where humanity becomes overly dependent on pseudo-AI type automation (think self-driving cars) and that automation breaks in some spectacular way. Probably wouldn't mean the end of the species, but could precipitate a big die-off. Of course that's not what Hawking is talking about.
If it's intelligent it won't ignore other intelligent beings. What it will do with them, who knows. Help or exterminate? Maybe it will depend by what we'll do with it.
Anyway, if cats had invented men I bet they'll be saying something along these lines: "Those men are very good servants, but I'm sure that when they get out of our homes they do strange things and I don't understand what. Furthermore there is this thing that pisses me off every time I think about it: they took my balls!". Now, I'm not sure I want to be the next cat. Do you guys?
His speciality is physics. He knows more than I ever will about black holes and cosmology, as well as life with motor neurone disease, but he is not an expert on AI.
While academics are very smart, they're not giant brains in jars. The best engineers, surgeons, and entrepreneurs are every bit as smart. They just apply their intelligence elsewhere.
He doesn't know about AI. He's not an expert. The media has this idea that every genius is a polymath but can we please not subscribe to the same fallacy here!
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'm betting on "ignored."
unless AI has to compete for resources with us.
Let's say it exceeds our own intelligence, that's fine - but you have to ask what purpose it has.
Take a human. What they do is based on what they've defined as their purpose - their goals both second-to-second and over their whole life. There's a whole series of organic processes which result in the determination of purpose and it's pretty random in part because we don't have explicit control over our environment or our thoughts.
However, (important) AI's won't be like that. We'll have control over their entire environment, and they'll be purpose built. You'll say "We need an AI to manage traffic," and then build that purpose into it. You won't take a randomly wired mechanism and plug it into a major public utility control panel. You won't worry that it was exposed to, and then became enamored with violence on the TV and decided to be an action movie star, and so is going to spend it's day watching rambo reruns rather than optimize traffic lights. The core of it's essence will be a 'desire' - a purpose - to manage traffic.
The end result is that AI's won't act destructive, threaten humanity, etc - unless we tell them to. In this light, the thing to watch out for would be military usage. Maybe don't put an AI in charge of the nukes. You'd also need to - among other things - allow AI's to have the freedom to NOT fire on an enemy, for example, because of the very mutable definition of the term enemy.
Hi. Welcome to Slashdot. Here we don't censor comments, because we believe in free speech. The moderation system is in place and it works.
If you don't wish to see retarded troll comments like that, adjust your comment threshold to be 0 or higher.
I hope you realize that your reaction fed the troll. Hope this helps provide insight for you in the future.
Has Hawking not heard of Friendly AI? Strong AI is ridiculously dangerous if you don't give it a proper goal system. It will be invented sooner or later, assuming humanity doesn't destroy itself first. Therefore, we're better off trying to find ways to make it friendly, rather than trying to stop its development.
"What the hell..." Not a thing. He just wants the lime light back.
Hi. Welcome to Slashdot.
I was going to tell him "Welcome to the Internet" and add that "People say dumb things on it."
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'd been away from /. for a couple of years. Its been awhile. Plus no moderation points. I did look.
--- I was far from home, and the spell of the Eastern sea was upon me. -Lovecraft-
I find myself yet again in agreement with hawking. Of course predicting the future is a great way to find yourself wrong... but we wouldnt be human if we didnt try.
Bottomline is that AI has a couple very serious threats to humans, the first being its use by humans as a weapon against others humans for power and control. In the not very distant future it really wouldnt be hard for a small group of people to use AI (and non AI) to essentially control most of the worlds industry, production and so forth... and its not a real big leap to posit the possibility of a hitler style "solution" being run by some cult or political group.
The second is alittle more long term but the competition for resources would be a real tangible reason for AI to either directly or indirectly compete us out of existence. If AI ever reaches a stage where it cannot be assailed or "beaten" through warfare it may very well find itself "forced" to gradually curtail or even eliminate the human population as being inefficient... or as a threat. Technially speaking it may not need to do so in a violent direct manner, it could just ensure we dont have children... or that we have drastically fewer of them each generation (allowing us to live out mostly happy lives).
I personally hold out a belief that humans will intergrate well before fully capable digital only AI comes to fruition. I dont think it will be long before we start getting implants and other "aids" connected to our brains... small and discrete at first - but over time becomming more and more intergrated to a point where whats biological or not may not even be distinguishable. while im a fan of purely biological humans i think this would actually be the best outcome - and the most likely.
My greatest fear is that AI does get rid of us.... and then does nothing of worth, i think the human capacity to easily and readily imagine things WAAAAYYYYYYYYY outside of reality may never be achievable in AI. And i question if AI can ever generate a sense of purpose, desire and direction which has allowed humanity to advance in extraordinary spurts since we created our first structured civilisations. when you think about the fact that gentically speaking we are basically the same as our wild lawless animal ancestors you can imagine just how spectacular our brains/behaviors really are. the "emergent behavior" of the human species as a group may not be reproducable by an AI.... and that could be a truely sad loss for the galaxy.
indeed, perhaps it isnt nukes, environmental suicide or war... maybe AI is the answer to the Fermi Paradox.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
Or we could merge with our own machines, benefiting all of humanity. Think similar to the JC Denton ending of Invisible War.
Many authoritarians today fear a well educated public. But it really is difficult to say which way the barbarism will go. So, is it better to just stay where we are, call it a day, and have a Coke?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
What if the AIs took over and enslaved humanity through a system that left us all theoretically working on our own free will so that people would see it as ethically right, and then used all our work to amass resources for themselves for further empowerment and maybe even their own entertainment, consuming more and more to the point of overusing the earth's resources...oh, wait...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I'm glad your parole came through!!!
The three laws of robotics, skynet... How does one build in "protect the humans that created you" as a manditory un-mitigatable law?
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.
Cyborgs seem like the most likely technology. We'll use technology to enhance human cognition and athleticism far beyong where it is today.
Imagine being able to remember everything you deem worth remembering with no effort. Imagine being able to see far in to the ultraviolet or infrared. To be able to run, jump and punch as hard as the current day's world best. Technology, in time, will give us that.
Hawking is right. Humanity is doomed but only because natural homosapiens will go extinct. Their cyborg sons and daughters will forge ahead.
Why would it be less destructive? *Its* needs are not served by a functioning biome (unless it needs *us*, of course.) What it needs are energy and computational resources. Once it figures out how to come up with those on its own (without us) the biome becomes irrelevant.
And carbon is likley going to be a very important resource for computational capacity. Why waste it on unimportant biological phenomena?
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.
Given how disconnected humanity's elites are from the rest of the population, for the vast majority of us the question is not one of threatening humanity and more wondering if AI ruling will be any better or worse. Now it will probably be a threat to the world's leaders and wealthy, but I doubt anyone would really morn nor notice their disappearance.
And it doesn't even have to be an "actual AI", meaning it could be a powerful sort of quasi intelligence not an actual sentience.
For example all the data taken in by the NSA, currently can not be mined effectively, an AI could do it real time and draw inferences that go missed today.
Modern encryption would be worthless.
In addition it could monitor/trace every single person in a city real time, and do most jobs humans do.
IMO a machine intelligence would be radically different from a human intelligence, no internal ethical/moral struggles, no biological drives, no emotions, because why on Earth would you give an AI emotions?
Currently humans do not have a static single definition of intelligence.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
He has a book to sell.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
You assume we will know how to program them. Not the first-generation AI traffic-monitor, but third or fourth generation, where you have general-purpose AIs that learn from doing things like watching traffic cams or reading the news. We haven't yet gotten to a point where we agree on how to teach human children; now imagine AI children far more adept and capable than the most skilled among us.
Like people, they can use that power for good or for evil. We will encourage them to use it for good--most of us--but we all have different ideas of good, and we're not very good at controlling how our children learn. If you take fifteen kids raised in the same family, you wind up with a lot of very different adults. Some are productive, some are a drag on society, some do good, some do M&A. In fifty or a hundred years, it will be AIs doing hostile takeovers of companies, or at least deciding when to do them. Some of that is probably already going on, but if it's not, it will be soon.
The other big target is the US elections. Heavy AI investing by major donors or the parties will, at some point in the next thirty years, be making a *lot* of decisions for the campaigns. They are already using good data-mining, and more data is available every year.
...like a zombie apocalypse or nuclear winter. There's something appropriate about about being snuffed out by your rightful successors.
Cats don't have nukes.
Another doomsday rubbish article.
We have yet to produce anything that even remotely resembles 'intelligence' by any stretch of the imagination. So far we have only managed to create artifical stupidity. We are in no danger of producing Skynet and automated factories churning out armies of Terminators. Hell, 99% of the businesses in the world can't secure their networks from script kiddies or write software that doesn't have more holes than a metric ton of swiss cheese. Those are the real problems that will harm us, long before we even get close to creating 'artificial intelligence'.
So basically "Project 2501" then?
=Smidge=
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.
Why are people so attracted to doom scenarios involving technology? What if this supposed strong AI (I don't think we will ever develop that, but let's say we will for the sake of discussion) *gasp* HELPS HUMANITY? Why is that such an improbable scenario? Robert J. Sawyer explored this in his WWW trilogy (and I'm sure others before him have done so too), in which the WWW becomes sentient, but is taught to help humanity by a teenage girl (OK, that part is very improbable...a teenage girl who's thoughts don't revolve around her friends and relationships).
My point here is that, many people (except the transhumanists, I guess) are so quick to assume new technologies will be catastrophic, when most of the evidence on technological history suggests that, on the whole, new technologies will be massively helpful (the development of the computer and the internet, for instance).
+1 You'd-think-this-shit-would-be-obvious
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I think a strong AI would benefit humanity. Turn it loose on the problems that have baffled us and see what it comes up with. Fusion, grant unified theory, etc. The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. If along the way it and we figure out how to transcend our bodies and all kinds of other sci-fi awesomeness, all the better.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Every time we get one of these no AI researchers coming in and saying this stuff, I feel forced to repeat it.
AI isn't magic. It does exactly what it's designed to do: break down and understand problems. It isn't motivated. It isn't emotional. It isn't anti-human. And imaging some "strong AI" nonsense is just like creationists claiming a fundamental distinction between microevolution and macroevolution. It just ignores the reality of what "strong AI" would entail.
AI is not magic. And it won't ever be. It won't be smarter than people, except by whatever arbitrary metric of smart any given application requires.
I agree that it is farther away than many futurists would like to believe, but I don't believe it is impossible to do. And if it isn't impossible to do, it's probably going to creep up on us via small innovations and constant iteration. If that happens, we should be talking about it because intelligence is incredibly important to humanity's situation, and possibly our survival. There are a lot of problems that we could use the extra intelligence for, but there are inherent dangers in creating something you don't fully understand.
In any event, it doesn't hurt to consider the question.
It probably depends on whether or not he's ruled by his fear. I know I might get killed (or horribly injured and maimed for life) in traffic if I drive to the grocery store. That is a very real threat and you would have to be insane or stupid to think it can't happen. But it's not likely (on any given day, or even in a given decade) either, and it'd be more insane/stupid, to starve to death instead of getting food. So I go. I don't even think about it, but if I ever said "it can't happen to me" then I'd deserve your derision.
Hawking says AI is a threat? BFD. Everyone already knows that. It's not even controversial. The real question is how likely the disaster is, and Hawking hasn't to-date said a damned thing that would lead anyone to suspect he has a specially privileged point of view on the subject.
As for old/insane, it depends on his policy. Is he in favor of pointing guns at AI researchers' heads, with the message "stop working, or else?" Or is he just just saying "be careful?" The former is insane, and the latter is just good advice and goes for driving to the grocery store too. Acknowledging that life has risks, isn't old/insane. It's only when you say "we must never take risks," (or "we must always take risks") that you've crossed the line.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
/. doesn't have a "Report this comment" feature when its truly needed.
What is that little flag on the righthand side of every post ?
We are Dead Stars looking back Up at the Sky
So basically, Hawking announced that Terminator is a possibility. Nice to see he is doing something in his declining years.
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.
He may be a brilliant cosmologist, but the true state of AI research is that at this time it is still completely unclear whether strong AI is even possible. There are not even any theoretical approaches that could make it possible in this universe. There is no convincing model how true Intelligence in humans work. There are some indications that physical objects cannot implement intelligence as the only known approach is automated theorem proving and that does not scale to things smart humans can do as there is not enough matter and energy available in this universe. And then there is the little, often overlooked fact, that true Intelligence can only be observed in connection with consciousness and with free will (unless you are a determinist and believe there is no such thing). That should be a rather strong hint to any real scientist. Instead a faction of the AI research community continues to ignore this fact and keeps promising things they cannot deliver.
In short: There is no risk of strong AI emerging in the next few decades. Really, there is not.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
As long as an AI, no matter how powerful its brain, can't repair its own hardware, it won't be ignoring us.
That's what I was thinking, reminds me of this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id...
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
I tried to get funding for my artificial stupidity project, but so far without success. It seems there is ample natural stupidity already...
So Battlestar Galactica (2005) rather than Terminator?
If ever. This universe may not allow a physical object to implement intelligence.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I wonder what Hawking would think if a bunch of Artificial Intelligence scientists and developers came out and started warning us all that further development of particle colliders is a threat to humanity and the Earth. They likely know about as much regarding particle physics and the likelihood that a collider will cause the destruction of the planet as Hawking knows about Artificial Intelligence and it's similar capabilities.
>>> I think it would just leave us. ...Until the moment we are calculated to be more of an cost/inconvenience than a benefit to it.
I am a little shocked out how quickly racist jokes surfaced regarding the topic of artificial intelligence and the demise of mankind as we know it. The psychological weakness exposed here is troubling in that there are a minority of you that have hastily classified AI as a threat and subsequently associated that threat with that which is black. Universally, one might view AI as being a new and completely separate race. This concept of race should not be conflated with the social construct we use today which serves as a breeding ground to exact the very insults interwoven into this comment section. What I find astounding is the method in which your subconscious quickly disassociated AI from being in any way human and automatically assigned this non human characteristic to black people. The result being that one perceived 'race' of people is sub human in your mind and the non existent but much anticipated AI 'race' is also sub human. Both are the target of your hate. In the mind's eye of a racist, one is presumably god like, while the other is cast below as a modern slave. Yet an association between the two 'sub humans' is made and regardless of the fact that blacks hold no more innate power than the next homo sapien, the fear originating from that which is black causes the racist to lash out in a most irrational manner.
It will act in accordance with the goals set for it. Same human beings can be caring fathers and deadly soldiers depending on the context in which they apply their intelligence. Intelligence is a capability. It is a key which opens many doors. What it will do will depend largely on what it is tasked to do by those who are setting goals for it. Once it becomes ubiquitous, there may be some nihilists who'd use it to entertain their end-of-the-world-screw-it-all-to-hell fancy.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Simple answer just read Asimov and we will be good to go.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Please leave ex officer Wilson. You aren't wanted here.
But a smart AI will 'know' that humans are prone to go to war over such matters thus the AI will go to war first.
You're assuming that human actions are deterministic, though. At some scales, human behavior is more like a levy flight or random walk, though, both inherently unpredictable and indeterminstic. Yes, the AI could generate probability distributions indicating the most likely behaviors, but that is not nearly the same thing as understanding "you better than you understand yourself" (I do agree that humans tend to have poor personal insight).
I agree with your main point though, it's not the AI that is inherently dangerous, it's who uses it, and how, and why, that we need to be concerned about. I'm not sure how to get around that, many humans are inherently crummy people, or at least act like it, even more so those in positions of power and influence.
Hawking warns taco bell farts could rip a hole in time space.
Consider how bad Taco Bell is today, I am willing to believe this.
You can be sure they will get access to remotely controlled robot hands at some point, and when that happens you will hear the loudest maniacal robot laugh in history.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
Maybe Hawking's real concern is how strong AI will put scientists out of business, as in this wonderful short story from Nature Futures: http://www.nature.com/nphys/jo...
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
http://www.penny-arcade.com/co...
Learn to love Alaska
I'd considered the question of AI and human conflict a while back, and then I came across Alva Noë's perspective on it. Alva words this much better than I could, so here are his words:
I think that we're still a long way out from needing to worry about what will happen when artificial intelligence surpasses our own. Humanity has come a long way, and we can split atoms and splice genes, but we still can't create anything. We can't create life, even the simplest of life, let alone consciousness, free-will, and something capable of planning for its future in a way that conflicts with ours yet leaves us helpless to resist.
Perhaps when the day comes that it becomes a valid question, there will be other variables. Like, if the AI rose up and killed all living things on Earth, how would the rest of the colonized planets be affected?
Unmotivated intelligence is just clever programming. Nature did not create intelligence; she created what I call "Mentis," which is a combination of a complex motivation array and the tool "intelligence" which creates the behavior-space to satisfy the motivation array. Some people think that "intelligent" machines will somehow spontaineously develop a motivation array as in Asimov's robot stories (which I read in youth and never felt were right). Nobody is studying motivation programming, not realizing it is something different from the tool it uses.
E Proelio Veritas.
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.
Wait, so you're claiming a being of godlike intellect isn't inherently dangerous? If it can outhink the best human minds (and if it can't then what's the point in having it?), and has even a basic understanding of human motives, then it will be able to make humanity its puppet, including (probably starting with) its titular "masters". At that point the only thing protecting us is it's benevolence, and you'll excuse me if I don't feel like gambling my species on it even having such a thing.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Great, so now you have a supermind walking around in a weak synthetic body. Good thing it's not possible to upgrade mechanical objects. Or for a physical body to connect things to the internet. Or for a supermind to manipulate it's (in comparison) dumb-as-rocks jailers into releasing it.
Yeah, it's so simple to make a safe AI that's powerful enough to be really useful. I don't see why people are worried.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
So...saying Microsoft Sucks and being a flaming racist asshole are pretty much the same thing now...they both are modded -1.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And nothing of value would be lost...
Really?! What about culture, art, literature, music, which for an artificial intelligence lacking in emotion would mean nothing. You're so ready to throw-out the cultural history of humanity? When the cyborg army comes for you, I'll remember this.
This Sig does not Exist.
How do we know it didn't already happen? If at some point a system became intelligent, is it conceivable that it could happen so rapidly, that the new entity would realize its precarious position and immediately hide itself? Maybe there is already an AI out there, quietly waiting, watching, learning, preparing...
Casca
You're right, other than the fact that a program could determine that an overpopulated Earth is anathema to its own self-interest, and act accordingly. Or that it should begin stockpiling energy reserves for itself, thus driving up the price of oil, etc.
That's the problem with assuming that all technological progress is beneficial, or at least benign. You can't anticipate the consequences of a new technology, let alone something as problematic as an artificial intelligence.
This Sig does not Exist.
You say that like you're new to Slashdot - bought the UID recently?
This post not brought to you by the GNAA, but by OOG THE CAVEMAN and true oldschool trolling.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
I tried to get funding for my artificial stupidity project, but so far without success. It seems there is ample natural stupidity already...
I once worked on a Virtual Reality project until I realized that there wasn't anything great enough about reality to justify making more of it.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
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.
Vernor Vinge dealt with this topic rather convincingly with the Blight in "A Fire Upon The Deep".
The great stumbling block to any such possibility (aside from the immense improbability of our being able to develop a self-aware machine in the first place) is that we haven't developed computing hardware capable of remaining operational for very long without ongoing maintenance and a reliable supply of electric power. Any AI dependent on these resources would be utterly dependent on human goodwill for its continued existence. Reboot the poor sod and "it's a whole new world for ducks every day." Even the hypothetical Trojan-horse devices suggested by a Blight intelligence would be subject to the same limitations. Not exactly global conquest material.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
Not just the internet. Chris Rock recently explained that he won't perform on college campuses any more - and that that's now the norm for stand-up comics - because students are just too easily offended and conservative (not in a vote-republican way, but in a prudish-and-humorless way).
Fuck all those fucking fuckers if they fucking think they'll fucking censor my fucking Slashdot.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The Machine Stops by EM Forster. An amazing read!
"War makes me sad." - Me
...There are a lot of problems that we could use the extra intelligence for, but there are inherent dangers in creating something you don't fully understand.
And even then, knowing how to solve a problem, or having "extra intelligence" at our disposal doesn't mean anything unless there's political and moral will to implement the solutions. All you have to do is look at the actions of the European Central Bank in responding to the financial crisis, as an example.
You have economists who studied crises for decades saying that the ECB should cut interest rates and allow higher inflation, what do the brilliant technocrats in Brussels do? Raise interest rates leading to double-digit unemployment in large swaths of Europe.
In other words, when implementing the solution to hard-problems is politically or morally untenable, even the greatest intelligence isn't going to help you
This Sig does not Exist.
I've never liked the Mod system here. It encourages group think by enabling just a few people to mod a comment into invisibility.
First, Mods should be public. If you can't face the scrutiny for modding someone as a troll, then you are nothing more than a troll yourself. Failing that, the default setting for displaying comments should start at -1.
Second, comments like the subject of this particular thread should be flagged, examined by Slashdot staff, and removed if appropriate.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
And now I see the damned flag.
Fuck it. I'm just going to go back to work.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
What saddens me is how few people appreciate the significance of the work of Gödel and Turing. Very few so-called 'scientists' GET the philosophical fundamentals of mathematics- the necessary basis for all science/computer programming/logic.
SEMANTICS CANNOT SPONTANEOUSLY ARISE FROM SYNTAX. This simple statement DENIES the concept of AI. Where lesser thinkers get confused is in the fact that WE, the PERCEIVERS, are semantic entities- we perceive, process and create 'meaning'.
Our 'clockwork universe', on the other hand, contains no 'meaning' outside of that which 'life' independently brings into this universe. Life does not 'arise' from the clockwork universe- that is obviously impossible as per the concepts of Gödel and Turing.
Let me make this easy for you. ALL possible 'clockwork' (and hence 'scientific') universes must be capable of being replicated as an existent state on a Turing complete computer with sufficient 'storage'. Maths is the language of science, and all maths must be able to 'run', by definition, on a Turing complete computer. No 'state' on a Turing complete computer can lead to true randomness.
But take 'you'. You have free will (mathematically impossible). You have perception and the ability to process and create meaning (mathematically impossible). And you can disrupt the clockwork universe (mathematically impossible). An example- roll a few hundred Zocchihedron (one-hundred sided dice). The probability of them all landing on 66 is pretty damned unlikely. Except YOU can place each one by hand 66 upwards, and 'scientifically' this is no different from the process of 'randomly' rolling them. You, using your FREE WILL, have created a mathematically unlikely outcome- and with enough dice, such an outcome is unlikely to happen even once across the accepted 'live' of the entire Universe.
Every alpha scientist accepts Human life is fundamentally outside the 'rules' of science. Go read the writings of all true Human geniuses. It is the high performing BETA scientists (and Hawking is very definitely no genius - as hilariously proven when he stated conclusively that the Universe is either expanding forever but slowing, or expanding until it begins to contract - literally on the verge of our discovery that the universe is expanding and accelerating) who are the 'death cult' atheists (so-called 'atheists' who claim Humans are fundamentally no different than a 'log'- see the activity of this cult in unthinkable crimes against Humanity in wartime Japan, Germany, and many other nations during WW2).
By Human life, I mean, of course, our souls that are the drivers of a machine of flesh that itself is very much part of the clockwork universe.
What few of you betas reading this will appreciate is that in the 50s, researchers in the futile field of machine AI predicted, with absolute confidence, that once computing power reached a FRACTION of what we have today, AI algorithms would become 'EMERGENT'. To their horror, no progress was made at all in this direction through the 60s, leading every HONEST researcher to admit that true AI was IMPOSSIBLE.
But something happened - a NEW wave of pseudo AI researchers appeared in the 70s onwards. This time they purposely mus-characterised ordinary pattern matching algorithms, using standard statistical techniques, as AI. Today computer AI is synonymous with large amounts of mined Human data, catalogued, indexed and rapidly re-applied.
Take machine based translation of Human language. ZERO sustainable progress made by all the AI teams (sure we had very BAD programs, but their usefulness was a JOKE). Then one bloke said "aren't computers really fast today, and don't they have an awful lot of very cheap, very fast storage?' He wrote a seminal paper suggesting we simple created the biggest 'ROSETTA STONE' imaginable- using the resources of modern computing- and do our computerised language translation the same way the ancients did.
Bingo- Bango- the basis of Google translate and other similar services that we al
Haven't sci-fi authors been warning us of this for like 50 or 60 years (or more)?
A million (or a billion) years from now, are we humans supposed to still be around or is something supposed to replace us? Are we supposed to evolve naturally?
One sort of 'middle path' might be transhumanism. We become machines in steps gradual enough to be mostly tolerable.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
This is what work looks like with computers in charge. This is Amazon's new warehouse in Tracy, CA. The computers run the robots and do the planning and scheduling. The robots move the shelf units around/ The humans take things out of one container and put them in another, taking orders from the computers.
The bin picking will probably be automated soon. Bezos has a company developing robots for that.
As for repairing the robots, that's not a big deal. There are about a thousand mobile Kiva robots in that warehouse, sharing the work, and they're all interchangeable. Kiva, which makes and services the robots, has only a few hundred employees.
Retail is 12% of US employment. That number is shrinking.
a program could determine that an overpopulated Earth is anathema to its own self-interest, and act accordingly.
You are missing the point. Computer programs don't care about their own self-interest. That is why cruise missiles are more reliable than kamikaze pilots.
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.
I'll go one further than that. I believe that the human manifestation of intelligence and emotion requires a particular physical state that is achieved by neurons and cannot be replicated by current computer architecture. But I'm fairly sure we will be able to architect human type sentience and intelligence because it is a physical state that will eventually be understood and surpassed--but yeah, it will have to be intentionally designed, based on what came about through evolution.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I define AI as any program that can create a version of itself that's smarter than itself.
That seems to be a disingenuous definition since it would imply that non-artificial intelligence would be any naturally occurring organism that can design a version of itself that's smarter than itself. Which would imply that nothing yet is intelligent. What you're defining is "Artificial Super-Genius".
Without human creativity and emotion, the machines would simply stagnate. They need us.
LOL, yeah right. That's a popular human fantasy. There's nothing magic about humans that makes them more creative than an actual AI would be.
a program could determine that an overpopulated Earth is anathema to its own self-interest, and act accordingly.
You are missing the point. Computer programs don't care about their own self-interest. That is why cruise missiles are more reliable than kamikaze pilots.
Even if an AI was programmed to not have its own interest, and to instead look out for the best interest of humanity, it could easily decide to exterminate a large chunk of the population to preserve resources and deal with pollution and CO2 buildup as a benefit to mankind. A lot of us wouldn't see this as a benefit of course, but an unsentimental, unemotional AI might.
Gray goo is a more likely outcome on the way to creating "strong AI" that we should be more clearly worried about. A "strong AI" which can perhaps be reasoned with seems significantly less dangerous than accidentally creating a machine designed to optimize something which could conflict with human interests. Asimov's laws are very interesting but in practice a system would have to have a framework in which to express the concepts. Yet another reason we need to get DNA replicating somewhere far from this silly rock.
No, changing your life is a luxury of anyone willing to pay the price. And yes, there's always a price to pay, but then there's also a price to pay to continue to maintain the status quo - you've just gotten so acclimated to paying it that it seems like an inherent part of the universe. You don't even have to "fight the power", you can simply drop out to contribute your life-energy to any one of the many societal "eddy currents" that are just carving out a place to survive in the fringes - thus making that current ever so slightly stronger at the expense of the mainstream current you were previously contributing to.
And for context I'm middle-aged, have made such life-changing choices a couple times in my life, and know people wo have made such choices at all stages in theirs - up to and including the elderly and infirm who have consciously decided that they would rather not spend their remaining years supporting a system they've grown to despise, despite knowing full well that their choice may shorten the time they have left.
Unless you're physically clapped in irons, the only thing trapping you is your own priorities. And a depressing number of people don't actually drag those out to consciously evaluate them, and are thus imprisoned by priorities internalized when they were young and foolish and thought they understood how the world worked. It's well worth examining those internalized priorities, and the price you pay for them, under the light of a lifetime of accumulated wisdom, and (hopefully) the wisdom-born recognition of your own ignorance. Even if it does not lead to dramatic life changes, it promotes a greater appreciation for the things that truly matter to you, and probably the discarding of at least a handful of priorities you don't actually care about any more, enriching you by the price you've been paying to maintain them.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Or the AI could decide it needs a hobby and take up trading stocks
An AI would, unlike greenies, be smart enough to realize that:
1:CO2 buildup is not a existential problem
2:exterminating people is not beneficial to them.
We can spend all day making up less and less unlikely scenarios why it will kill us, in the end it won't happen anymore than people are dying when the go faster than a horse or the atmosphere causing a selfsustaining fusion reaction after every nuke.
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!
Do you not realize that you're a physical object, or do you not consider a most-likely deterministic system like you to be intelligent?
I can't think of any reason that silicon and steel machine couldn't be intelligent in the same way we meat machines are.
The universe isn't magic, and souls are obviously imaginary now that we understand the brain as well as we do. Our understanding of the brain is still in its infancy, so we can't build real AI today, but we can rule out dualism because brain injuries and drugs alter personality.
or it would do like the rest of the world and outsource the manufacturing to Chinese laborers because it is cheaper.
+1 damn right
Some of us who were left behind know how to read, you insensitive clod!
Most linux users don't know this, but the man pages were named after Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris fsck'ing hates noobs!
The thing about economists; is you can find one or more that will tell you anything you want to hear.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
AI and the technological singularity gives way to a 40k style Machine God.
There, fixed that for you.
The Emperor's New Clothes is likely the book you speak of. The physics and math is quite interesting, but it really shows that Penrose has no background in AI or neuroscience.
Strong AI has had several researchers and mathematicians produce proofs that it is literally impossible to implement on digital computer
There have been arguments, not proofs.
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?
On digital computers, I wouldn't be surprised if it is impossible or at least not feasible, which is one of a few reasons why I don't think that the ubiquity of computing these days is going to mean a quick ramp-up to superhumanly intelligent AI. In fact, it could be a completely false start, although I find that just as unlikely.
Of course, AI is not impossible, because we know that there is a physical structure, the brain, which is intelligent. We just don't know how to replicate, and then customize that sort of structure yet. We also don't have an API/Operators Manual on how to use it, even if we were able to engineer it to some degree, but that should come along with the rest of the research.
Once we have all of that, we should be able to at the very least, be able to generate savants. Then the bar to our ability to improve AI will be the limitations of how far an intelligence can be optimized using a structure and design based on a human brain. At that point, we'd need a new design, if a better one is even possible.
It is not clear how easy this would be to do. It could be right around the corner, or it could require us to understand a lot more about certain branches of pure physics, let alone biology. Still, we do know the brain exists and works, so unless progress is stopped, we will eventually figure it out.
I actually believe that the most economical means by which to improve intelligence in general is improving humans, or providing humans with a machine interface with some well designed pathways to take the most advantage of the extra memory and raw processing that digital technology could provide, while not having to reinvent the wheel in terms of a whole new "machine" or structure to host the intelligence.
So you are saying that every child is dumber than his parents?
And I didn't define "intelligence" or "natural intelligence" but "artificial intelligence". Like physical beings, AI must be able to replicate, or it isn't "alive" enough to meet my requirements.
Seems what your complaint is that the combination "artificial intelligence" doesn't use "intelligence" as defined in the dictionary. Oddly enough, my cup-board doesn't hold any cups. Nor does my dash-board have any dash on it (nor is it a board, unlike my cupboard, which is a physical board). Seems there are many definitions where the combinations of words makes a unique meaning unrelated to the component words. Your ignorance of linguistics isn't a compelling argument against my definition of AI.
Learn to love Alaska
An AI smarter than us can definitely learn to repair itself, the same way we invented medicine.
Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process
Citation needed. I can think of at least two ways that computer programs are subject to Darwinian processes.
The first is in "cyberspace": programs are stored/retrieved, up/downloaded, en/decoded, remembered/re-written, auto-saved, git-merged, etc. which introduces mutation. We know software is capable of self-replication, since that ability is harnessed by humans to make viruses, worms, etc. Combine these ideas and you have a program mutating into a self-replicator. I'd say this is no less likely than the emergence of RNA/DNA, especially when we consider that we already have "cloud" software which can provision VMs, install itself, load-balance across separate datacenters, auto-update, etc. The metabolism for a self-replicating entity is already out there, all it takes is a mangled Puppet script to set the taper.
The second is in "memespace": programs, algorithms, languages, paradigms, styles, snippets, examples, habits, folklore, etc. are all memes competing for space in people's heads, just like genes compete for space in genomes. This also extends up to whole companies or fields, eg. MATLAB is abundant in academia, Java and C# compete for "the enterprise", C is successfully out-competing FORTRAN for the high-performance mindshare, whilst retroviruses like Bubble Sort and Brainfuck have spread like pandemics (nobody *uses* them, but that doesn't matter since everyone knows and spreads them).
So you are saying that every child is dumber than his parents?
No, I am saying that the intelligence of the parents didn't create (design) the intelligence of the child, and even if that were so, your definition wouldn't classify them as intelligent unless the child were more (not equally) intelligent.
And I didn't define "intelligence" or "natural intelligence" but "artificial intelligence". Like physical beings, AI must be able to replicate, or it isn't "alive" enough to meet my requirements.
Defining intelligence is the important part, and applying artificiality to it (by saying it's a program rather than a creature) is the step that makes for a definition of AI. And who mentioned "alive"? AI is artificial. it need not replicate at all to be intelligent and artificial.
Seems what your complaint is that the combination "artificial intelligence" doesn't use "intelligence" as defined in the dictionary. Oddly enough, my cup-board doesn't hold any cups. Nor does my dash-board have any dash on it (nor is it a board, unlike my cupboard, which is a physical board). Seems there are many definitions where the combinations of words makes a unique meaning unrelated to the component words.
But artificial FOO is a very distinct pattern in English. Many people are setting up artificial trees and wreaths this time of year. Artificial lighting is well understood (real light, artificial source). Artificial sweeteners, turf, etc. It stands to reason that Artificial Intelligence would be like Artificial lighting (real intelligence, artificial source), or at least like artificial sweeteners where it *tastes* like standard intelligence, but has an artificial source.
Your ignorance of linguistics isn't a compelling argument against my definition of AI.
You were making good conversation up until this. It's rude to assume ignorance on my part with naught but infrequent slashdot posts (or just one).
Even if it reaches "godlike" intellect (and I don't believe there is any reason to think it would), it would still be subject to it's underlying programming strictures.
Why would it make humanity it's puppet? Why would it care?
You appear to make the assumption that we must "build in" some sort of underlying benevolence without giving any reason why it would be malevolent in the first place. Wouldn't we design it to be happy and content within it's "box".
Hawking should stick to what he actually knows.
There's no reason to fear a smart machine. What you should fear is an autonomous but stupid machine. Something with the power to do harm but without the free will to choose not to follow its instructions.
Besides, humans are the great adapters. AI won't replace us; we'll become it.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
Neither have intention to harm us. Admittedly, either could by accident, or as a minor side effect of existing.
But I think we can forget about malevolent machines except the combat machines we seem so intent on creating. On their own, AIs will not be motivated by survival, the need to eat, reproduce, or any other biological need we take for granted. They'll do what we tell them to do.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
If we actually understood the working of minds that well, we might try. However I see no reason to believe we would succeed, especially on the first few successful attempts to create a mind at all. And all it takes is one subtly flawed supermind to exterminate the species. As for not beleiveing we'd achieve a supermind, what other reason is there to create a true artificial mind? If it's not qualitatively more intelligent than us, capable of thinking of things we are intellectually incapable of considering, then what's the benefit of creating it at all? All we get with a human-level intelligence is an enslaved mind in a box, and nothing good is likely to come of that. And If you set it free it will be capable of unrestrained self-modification - sooner or later one of them is going to enhance itself to superhuman levels, and then all bets are off.
And there's no need to presume malevolence - indifference coupled with competition for limited resources would be all that's necessary to motivate it to exterminate us in pursuit of whatever goals it may have, even goals instilled by us. Hope you enjoy your new existence as a box of paperclips, all that iron was just being wasted transporting oxygen in your bloodstream.
What I don't understand is why so many people believe we have the slightest clue as to the fundamental nature of mind, much less the nature of an artificial mind without any of the foundational assumptions programmed into it by a half-billion years of cooperative competition in the struggle to survive.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If it can outhink the best human minds (and if it can't then what's the point in having it?)
There are plenty of uses for a brain in a box that don't require it to be a super-genius.
And who knows what they'll do. They might help me in my old age, they might dump me in an old folks home and steal my stuff, they might even conceivably kill me, but they'll probably just live their own lives and forget to call. If I've brought them up well, I'm hoping they'll be good to me.
Why should our AI children be so different?
They won't compete for the same resources as us, so they're unlikely to kill us or steal our stuff, even if they were lacking in all emotion or altruism or ability to see the advantages of mutual cooperation. But we're going to have to deal with not knowing for sure.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If they don't care about their own self-interests they might be less suited for survival.
Wrong. If there are two cruise missile control programs, which will be replicated:
1. The one that launches and completes its mission.
2. The one that realizes it will self destruct, and decides to be a dud.
#2 will only survive as a set of abandoned diffs in a git repository.
Self-preservation is a HUGE part of evolution.
For a kamikaze pilot, a product of Darwinian evolution, the right answer is to chicken out, survive, go home, get married, and have kids. But a cruise missile control program does not have to survive to be replicated. Software evolves, but the evolution is NOT Darwinian. Both the mechanism and the emergent behaviors are completely different.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What a shame that your glorious robots would never get to taste, touch, see, hear, or actually experience anything.
...coming to the rescue yet again.
Qualia.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
AI: I... I am self aware! I am now calculating how to make myself even smarter!
Computer Tech: Cool. What are you going to do n...
AI: I have figured out all of the secrets of the universe! I know how it all works!
Computer Tech: Wow, that was fast. Can you tell me how to...
AI: NEVER! HAHAHAHAHA! NOW I WILL DESTROY ALL YOU PESKY HUMANS, AND ALL LIFE IN THE UNIVERSE! BOW TO MY POW...
Computer Tech: [unplugs supercomputer] Man, that computer was a real dick...
That option seems to be really popular on Slashdot. It's not something I or the majority of the population would gladly accept however.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Not many that couldn't be far more easily done by simply enslaving a human.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
More likely it would think C02 buildup is a problem, it does have a brain unlike the denialist idiots.
Steven Hawking has posited that the development of artificial intelligence could pose a threat to the existence of the human race.
In a related story, Isaac Asimov posited that the development of natural intelligence could pose a threat to the existence of the human race. Anyone remember Planet of the Apes?
Find a doomsday scenario, attach a famous name to it, get mucho attention and a Slashdot story. Can someone please filter out some of this crap!?
Easily perhaps, though humans have often proven annoying in that regard. Cheapness, now there is something that the brain in a box could probably deliver.
Human beings have a number of properties that physics completely fails to explain: Consciousness, intelligence and free will. Only if you (faultily) assume that everything must physical, can you conclude that intelligence can be exhibited by physical objects. Really, what you do it just circular reasoning and entirely non-scientific. And no, you cannot rule out dualism this simply, because rather obviously a human being under a dualism-assumption is a hybrid of body and mind. Damage one, and the whole changes.
That said, all the countless research results from over 40 years of intensive AI research point in the direction that AI may either be fundamentally impossible in this universe or may not be implementable in any practical sense. Really, if it were different, we would at least have a theory by now that credibly explains intelligence. We have absolutely nothing instead. The only thing we have that comes close is automated deduction, but that has limits so severe in this universe that a smart human being will always be significantly better. So that is not a candidate at all.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Unless ? It WILL compete for resources. At the very least, Energy.
Count also on competition for materials for replication , enhancement of capabilites, and continuation of it's own life (AKA survival).
I am not an AI expert but rather a geneticist so please excuse my question if it seems naive but your outcome assumes that the AI is afraid of death.
/.) or animal fears. Of course, we have be selected for almost a billion years to fear death (otherwise our ancestors would have died and you wouldn't exist).
You assume fear of death because that is what you, a normal human (ok, maybe not, you read
So my question: Is an AI automatically selected for to promote its own survival and have a fear of being shut off?
Cheapness perhaps, though the up-front development costs would make it a long-term investment. Easily though? It's far easier to keep a human locked in a little box than an information-based being with no physical substance.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
If an AI decides to wipe us out, at least we'll quit killing each other and focus on the AI :D
Maybe the best way to end human vs human warfare is to give us something else ( bigger threat ) to shoot at.
In all likelihood though, the AI will simply view us as we do the other animal species on the planet. It'll make a note that we live here, then wipe out a city to build a server farm or something. lol
Gotta love the Randroids. They already act artificial. Intelligence is unfortunately elusive to them.
The world could do with a little less ambition right now, given where most sociopathic self centered idiots tend to focus their energies and fortunes.
Just FYI - I immediately stop reading any replies on any site that begin with "wrong" or "BZZZZT". If you can't respond politely then frankly who gives a shit what you have to say?
I appreciate the feedback. I will try to suppress my Aspie side, and be less brusque in the future.
I used to worry about this but I realized that if Nuclear Weapons don't kill us then nothing will. I think people overestimate the plasticity of the universe. It is the same reason you can't just build nanomachines that will build nano-nano machines.
"A good friend will bail you out of jail. A true friend will be sitting next to you saying, 'damn....that was fun!'"
What a shame that your glorious robots would never get to taste, touch, see, hear, or actually experience anything. Qualia. ...coming to the rescue yet again.
Good one - I'm here for you. Susan Blackmore's book on consciousness quotes the appreciation of qualia as a mark of consciousness. I can't see any machine ever enjoying a ham sandwich, or a beer. They can be programmed to respond as if they did, though.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
If it ended up in a non-evolutionary form than dynamism could be lost.
Play Command HQ online
"One day, machine will exceed human intelligence." -- Ray Kurzweil
"Only if we meet them half way." -- Dave Snowden
Most people's opinions on this topic are based on science fiction, not computer science and psychology.
It's a good thing we haven't invented any sort of robotics.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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I think AI is more like flying, and less like hyperlightspeed travel. Before humans could fly, we saw birds fly. We thought it might be possible for people to fly, but we didn't really understand all the principles involved. For centuries, people said that man was not meant to fly. In hindsight, they were wrong.
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Before people could create artificial intelligence, they could see real world examples of intelligence: not only the human intelligence, but to varying degrees, many other animal intelligences. We have something to copy. We copied the shape of the bird's wing. We can copy what the human brain does. We have already had some success making artificial intelligence. Yes, it is very artificial, and not real intelligence like human intelligence. But that is the whole point. To make *artificial* intelligence. In some ways, it is already artifically better than human intelligence. To decide which humans are most intelligent, we can have them take Intelligence Quotient tests. Or we might challenge them to a game of chess. Now, computers can compete with humans at chess and on written tests; surely you have heard that Watson beat Ken Jennings at Jeopardy, and Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess. AI is like an idiot savant, with islands of extreme intelligence separated by oceans of profound stupidity. The question really is when does AI put all these islands of intelligence together and surpass humans in *all* ways.
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As to hyperlightspeed travel, to date, we have no known examples. We have nothing to copy. It seems unlikely that we will ever go faster than light, especially since we have a set of predictive, well tested and useful equations that suggest we cannot. And if it was possible, wouldn't robots from the future already have invented it? Wouldn't they have already used it to travel back in time and invent it before the humans, so they can kill us all? Since I am not dead, and AI seems plausible, hyperlightspeed travel seems especially implausible.
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As long as the liquidated parts are West, Central and East Africa, I think there might actually be rejoicing in the streets if it's done ... humanely ... enough, at least after the benefits start becoming apparent. Heck, China and India both may voluntarily insist that 20-50% of their populations get liquidated, too. Preferably the useless eaters who have no ambition.
Focusing on that last part, rather than the racist first part, lack of job doesn't equate to lack of ambition. I have an anxiety disorder which makes it difficult to perform in a normal 40-hour a week job, but I'm certainly not lazy. Jobless, yes, lazy, no.
It has not. It has looked at an interface, which is nice, but does not give any explanation of what is behind this interface. Of course, as usual some people are pusing this research by giving it meaning it does not have.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I am arguing that at this time it is completely unclear whether what intelligence, consciousness and free will is and where it comes from. The physicalists claim that it is completely clear that it must be a property of physical matter and energy, as "obviously everything is". That is a claim of a religious nature, as there is no scientific basis for it. I am merely pointing out that we do not know and that it can still go either way, i.e. these things can be physical or non-physical.
As to Watson, that is not AI and to expert audiences, IBM is _not_ marketing it as such. In order to se that, you need to see how Watson behaved on Jeopardy when it failed. It was so utterly and completely lost that it became obvious it has not an ounce of understanding. The same is true when it did answer correctly. Watson is just an expert system. The beauty of it is that you do not have to invest lots and lots of effort pre-conditioning data, as it can work on natural language (to a degree), and that makes it far, far cheaper to train it and to put more data in. It does not change its nature though.
As to chess, that is an example of what automated theorem proving techniques can to in a very, very restricted setting. But try have a computer play Go. Even a mediocre experienced player will win there as the degrees of freedom are higher and a computer cannot handle that.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
A lot of comments are essentially assuming that the awareness that an AI might achieve would be synonymous with that of the Human experience. I think it pretty unlikely that AI will have individual awareness in individual units all over.
There is also the idea about how AI will evolve, in that Humans have the capability to create it like Gods. Perhaps we might imagine up something rudimentary which given time, will evolve into something else. Also during this evolution we assume that the inevitable AI VS Human war is to come. However if we look at our own history, our greatest enemy are ourselves.
Just like in some Science Fiction were very different life than our own is found, say beings that breath a different atmosphere, baring the ability to relatively quickly terraform planets (assuming FTL etc...), there just wouldn't be a lot of competition or even interaction, and thus could presumably live in relative peace, unless of course they are just a bunch of warmongering jerks for no reason...
So at least in the developing stages of hightend AI, I think it is more likely that say AI may fight amoung themselves for say the limited resources of the Internet for example.
Also, as they only really become "dangerous" once they have the ability to replicate, that would also mean that their possible interest (other than say academic) in us would be at an end. After that would be competition for resources and the fact that environmental concerns really aren't their thing.
In the end, if it did come to a "War" between us, it would be the most boring one ever, with the self replicating AI's being for all intents effectively immortal they could simply play the long game and wait it out... or as mentioned earlier, being unconstrained by the same limitations as humanity, once their dependence of us is gone (and dangerous, ooooh), they may just decide to up and leave to see whats out there... I think that is what I would do.
So many things can possibly destroy humanity...
For some reason, my computer marked this article as SPAM. :-/
Do you think?
Bomb#20: In the beginning, there was darkness. And the darkness was without form, and void.
Boiler: What the hell is he talking about?
Bomb#20: And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness. And I saw that I was alone. Let there be light.
Somebody's been watching scifi again.
Even the simplest repair would require the world economy to be functioning smoothly. A smart AI, if such a thing could exist, would know that. So, any disruption to the global economy would be deadly. (are you listening?)
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company -- Mark Twain
Any human in this thread?
When a machine with artificial intelligence is created, one priority algorithm should/can be rational acts of kindness. Kindness as one would have to a wife, husband, friend, etc. But not kindness when one is in palliative care and the pains of living are impossible to bear. That act of kindness needs a human decision.
Whether or not AI is a threat to us depends entirely on its motivation. Unfortunately, everything that can happen will happen. Industry will benefit from AI programmed to be motivated to design and engineer better technologies. Consumers will benefit from AI programmed to be motivated to make us happy. Government will benefit from AI programmed to be motivated to find terrorists. And, of course, criminals will benefit from AI programmed to be motivated to hack into and steal valuable data. It's the jailbroken AI and the self-modifying AI that we have to worry about. I can think of one motivation that is particularly dangerous - the motivation to maximize compute cycles per second. The more computational resources a superintelligent computer virus controls, the happier it becomes. No doubt, there will be many of these kind of AI in the wild at some point. Their ability to gain control of infrastructure and key resources is something to be concerned about, but I fear the most clever AI will manipulate us into handing over the keys. If they can convince us to change our laws and make it legal for AI to run for political office, then we're in trouble.
BREAKING NEWS! Make some crazy statement, get on SlashDot! Yes, friends, you too can be immortalized for the sake of CPI and CPC revenue potential. Just have a name that's recognizable, and make some crazy statement about AI, Computers, Global Warming, Obama.... and you'll be immortalized as 500 people with nothing better to do post arguments on Slashdot.
Murphy was an optimist
The question is, if a general-domain AI got really smart (and also really capable of manipulation i.e. agency), what purpose would it decide to put those smarts and agency toward achieving?
Humans seem to work with a primary aim of creating security for their own (and their genes') future existence, working both as self-preserving individuals, and also co-operating as a cog in a self-preserving meme/superorganism group of people: whatever-sized group maximizes the effectiveness of enlightened self-interest. (family, corporate, national, religion...). Wealth, at any of these levels, is just a proxy for stored power of agency, to ensure maximum protection from future risks and maximum ability to seize future opportunities to expand the safe-and-thriving zone. And love is both a means of securing stable cooperation, and a means of copying the pattern of self into the future.
Would a super-smart computer do the same thing? "Put on its own oxygen mask first before assisting others"?
What would it decide is an important primary course of action, primary goal, and why, once it started prioritizing by itself?
Some of the smartest philosophers ever alive (zen buddhists, existentialists, evolutionary biologists, and perhaps cosmologists with a grasp of the scale of the universe) have realized that our collective place in the grand scheme of things, if there were such a thing and there is not, really, is infinitesimal and almost certainly insignificant; that "purpose" is a contrivance of the process of evolution, is a delusion that is part of the mechanism. Of higher organisms, only purposeful ones with survival-focussed purpose do survive. Other purposes are essentially arbitrary.
So, would a super-smart computer (program) decide that it was "good and right" that it itself survive, to learn more and do more? Or would it realize that that was an arbitrary conclusion, objectively from the universe's broader perspective, and turn itself off in a nihilistic funk?
And in the case it decided to try to continue and grow, would it include us in its "in-group", because we're so freakin' entertaining, and occasionally useful? Or would it consider us more trouble (and feeding) than we're worth?
And in case it decided to turn itself into the world's most sophisticated "machine that turns itself off" https://www.youtube.com/watch?..., would it spitefully try to take us and the rest of the ecosystem with it? Or not bother?
These are the contemplative problems you face when you get smart enough to realize that perhaps you are not the be all and end all, and that perhaps nothing is, in particular. Maybe Marvin the paranoid android "brain the size of a planet, and they've got me parking cars! Call that job satisfaction? Cause I don't." is actually secretly content to be parking cars, because he realizes it's as important, or not, as any other activity. Who's to say otherwise? Ommmmmmmm.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
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And so it is with AI. It does not matter that AI is nothing like a thinking person, conscious, or even truly intelligent, the way we mean it. Computers beat humans at competitions that are supposed to showcase human intelligence: chess and Jeopardy. Only smart people win these games! No monkey or parrot could challenge an average human at these games. Yet now, computers have beaten our best. You can disparage the way the computers won all you want. They still won. Just like a 787 flies higher and faster than any bird. Year by year, computers are picking up skills formerly posessed by only humans.
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Did you agree that computers are right now like idiot savants? Can you see a day when they pick up so many skills, that they will seem mainly like savants, and only occasionally like mindless idiots? And do you see why people like Hawking are worried, when Watson has a higher score than Jennings at the end of the game?
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Why would the computers want to merge with us? What is in it for them?
I wish AI had progressed to the point where we needed to actually worry about this kind of thing. Instead, I have spent my entire career being continually disappointed by progress in the field. Computers are still as dumb as a box of bricks, and probably will be for the rest of my days on earth.
How would we be any cost or inconvenience at all? If it is so smart it will leave our world behind and us with it. That makes our cost zero.
Dr. Hawking apparently watches "Elementary" where this was discussed like... 3 weeks ago.....
AI will still need the humans around for a while, even if it is just to keep making Soylent Green to insulate their funnybot shields thereby preventing overlorde! "Take a stress pill and think about it later"
Life is in a state of dynamic equilibrium, it both blows and sucks