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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.
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.
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.)
You are misunderstanding me. For starters I did not suggest selling his house/car/etc in order to rent, I suggested doing so in order to buy a smaller, more affordable model that would require far fewer resources to maintain, in the process dramatically increasing the number of income sources that would be sufficient to provide for the much lower maintenance costs. I would suggest the same thing if he were renting. Does your home have more than one small room? Go ahead and work out exactly how many hours you have to work every week just to pay for rent/heating/light/etc. in each room. Then do some real soul-searching and ask yourself if having that room enriches your life as much as working an extra N hours per week at a job you hate impoverishes it. Rinse and repeat for every gadget, outfit, hobby, and affectation in your life. And remember that you are almost certainly overestimating the benefit. Lock the room for a month, stick the gadget in a drawer. Actually test your hypothesis about how much happiness you're really getting from it. You'll almost certainly find that it's far less than you imagined.
One of my own transformative moments was due to a moving miscommunication - I arrived at my gorgeous new home with a 20' moving truck packed to the gills, only to discover the previous resident wasn't moving out until the *next* month. So I put all my stuff in storage and spent the next month living out of a backpack with my vagabond brother in his 24' RV. And while I did miss a few things, I wasn't actually substantially less happy. All the luxuries of a large, private living space didn't bring nearly the benefit I had thought they did. The next time I moved it was to a substantially smaller home, and I doubt I'll ever live alone in such a large home again, the benefits don't even begin to justify the expense.
And yes, I know lots of jobs don't give you the flexibility to just work fewer hours - that's one of my own ongoing frustrations. But consider - if you were just getting by, and then cut your expenses by 1/3, then that means you only have to work two years out of three to pay for your lifestyle. That in turn gives you the freedom to quit your job at a moment's notice without concern, which in turn also makes *staying* at that job far more pleasant: you're not trapped, you're just putting up with your asshole boss because it suites your purposes for the moment. You may even find that the resulting freedom and confidence transform your work relationships - Since your boss has little leverage over you, you are free to treat him more like an equal - and if he's halfway decent at his job he's probably far more interested in making himself look good and lining his own pockets than he is in making you miserable, which assuming you're good at your job gives you an opening to establish a working relationship based on mutual benefit instead of intimidation. And yeah, that's all from personal experience.
And yeah, I know when you're struggling just to put food in your belly it's easy to dismiss such high-minded bullshit. Also from personal experience. But that doesn't make it any less true.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.