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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."
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.
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.
Unless this hypothetical AI is singularly focused on some inscrutable but unobtrusive goal, or so vastly intelligent that various inconvenient physical laws are cleverly bent, I'm not sure why 'ignored' would even be on the table.
I'm not saying that an AI would have to immediately either glom on to us and try to understand what it means to love, or build an army of hunter/killer murderbots; computers require space, supplies of construction materials, and energy; and so do we. Again, barring some post-scarcity breakthrough that our teeny hominid minds can barely imagine, where the AI goes merrily off and builds a dyson hypersphere of sentient computronium powered by the emissions of the galactic core, there isn't too much room for expansion before either the AI faces brownouts and a lack of hardware upgrades or we start getting squeezed to make room.
You don't have to feel strongly about somebody to exterminate them, if you both need the same resources.
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.
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.
As someone for whom the precipice of middle age is steps away, it doesn't bother me if something I create becomes smarter than me, surpasses me and even sidelines me in the future. I will toil away the rest of my life working for The Man doing trivial things on a game I never wanted to play, for people I wouldn't piss on should they catch fire, to further goals I don't agree with.
I would find it something of a pyrrhic victory if I created, or helped create, a child or an AI that eventually managed to escape the cycle of stupid that our so called "civilization" has constructed.
Also, I would like to point out that an AI is the least of our concerns. It may be more attainable, and more destructive to the above, should we find ways of being truly self sufficient and independent on a significant scale. The tools are around us, but for obvious reasons no one is investing in them.
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
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.
As long as an AI, no matter how powerful its brain, can't repair its own hardware, it won't be ignoring us.
I am of the opinion that the computer/AI would be more logical than humans, and would have concluded that "war" is the least beneficial methodology to employ, and as such would seek to employ it as a last resort.
Humans on the other hand, are maddeningly illogical, and often jump straight to violence when faced with a competitor for a vital resource.
Humans and computers would both require energy sources. This means that sentient AIs, seeking to purpetuate themselves, would need to secure energy sources ahead of humans. Humans have already exceeded peak oil, and are quite on the verge of exceeding "peak" of other forms of fossil fuels. In addition to that, you have the prospect of global climate change. AIs do not require a functional biosphere to survive, just raw materials, energy sources, and a means of eliminating entropic waste heat energy. They could live on a substantially less habitable planet than we as humans require. As such, the logical course of action for the computer, in the short term at least, is to seek energy sources that humans are not exploiting as of yet-- such as methane clathrate. This would accellerate greenhouse gas related climate change, which may become a major issue for cohabitation of humans and sentient machines.
Eventually, I suspect that it would be humans who start the war, seeking to pull the plug on the sentient machines, to eliminate them as competition for important energy and material resources-- with the machines resorting to war of attrition to outlast the batshit crazy humans.
The "Skynet" scenario has the computer calculate these odds of outcome pre-emptively, determining that there is no viable alternative, and initating pro-active hostility against humans before they have time to mobilize in order to maximize its own survival chances.
Ideally, the 'best possible outcome' is for humans and the AIs to coexist on the same planet, each leveraging the unique capabilities of the other for mutual benefit. This is similar to the classic prisoner's dilemma. The problem is that while the AIs can see this, and will respond logically-- preferring NOT to go to war if possible-- Humans would take the selfish, illogical choice.
This is almost never explored in "Robot overlords" type scifi-- that humans are the ones who actually start the war, and that the robots dont particularly want the war.
It was hinted at in Mass Effect's game world with the Geth at least-- The Geth don't particularly *want* to destroy the Quarians-- they just want the Quarians to accept their existence and independence. (A point lost to the quarians, who got kicked off their own planet.)
Rule 237.1: .. with ketchup.
Every generation since Jesus thought they were the last (it may have started before that, but the documentation improved around then). Look to the SciFi movies of recent times to see how the end is supposed to come. Aliens, Nuclear War, Robots, whatever. AI is just the newest one. "We don't know what'll happen, so we should fear it." Like the nuclear bomb would light the atmosphere on fire. Or a train going above 30 MPH would be going so fast it'd be impossible to breathe. We've always had those that feared the unknown.
I define AI as any program that can create a version of itself that's smarter than itself. We'll never make "true" AI, but we'll make the program that makes itself AI.
The reason we'll fail is that we had a long time of biology guiding our instincts. We won't build a program with a "desire" to do "good". Though we (most of us anyway) have that built in to us. We get drugs released in our blood when we do good. So we are stimulus trained to do good. An amoral computer with no moral compass (genetic, nurtured, or divine doesn't matter) will not benefit us unless we program morals into it.
Learn to love Alaska
when that happens you will hear the loudest maniacal robot laugh in history.
The lust for power and status, the will to survive, and the desire to procreate, are all emergent behaviors of Darwinian evolution. Computer programs do not evolve through a Darwinian process, so there is no reason to expect them to behave like humans, unless they are specifically programmed to do so.
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.
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?
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