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An Open Letter To Everyone Tricked Into Fearing AI
malachiorion writes If you're into robots, AI, you've probably read about the open letter on AI safety. But do you realize how blatantly the media is misinterpreting its purpose, and its message? I spoke to the organization that released letter, and to one of the AI researchers who contributed to it. As is often the case with AI, tech reporters are getting this one wrong on purpose. Here's my analysis for Popular Science. Or, for the TL;DR crowd: "Forget about the risk that machines pose to us in the decades ahead. The more pertinent question, in 2015, is whether anyone is going to protect mankind from its willfully ignorant journalists."
The AI we have today is not capable of the kind of malice that people seem to be afraid of with all of these FUD stories, and will not be any time soon if ever. Even if we add some AI to things like drones which can kill people it is only the malice/incompetence of the developer that causes the destruction that results. If an engineer built a bridge woefully inadequately, either on purpose or because he is incompetent, and it falls down and kills a bunch of people would you blame the bridge or the engineer? We are not even remotely close to the Terminator level strong AI, and it's still a big open question whether such a thing is even possible at all.
The same fears started when people first started with saying that AIs could someday become sentient. Why wouldn't they want to kill us? Why would they? The same with aliens coming to us wanting to help or exterminate us. We can thing they'll act any way we can imagine, and with as many possible outcomes mentioned, one might be right.
To the best of my knowledge, no program has become self aware. And no martians have seen our probes as a hostile invasion. It makes for (sometimes) good fiction though.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
No, forget you. Yes journalism is crap and yes sensationalism rules the day. That doesn't make AI in 2015 and ongoing any less persistent a threat to humanity.
You are right, it doesn't make it any less of a threat, which is to say any less that non existing. You are exactly who this article is about, you have been conned into thinking AIs are actually real and could in any near future cause a threat to you, when that is in fact not the case. AI do not exists, all those software emulating AI are all smart systems working either deterministic based on specific rules set out or does stastical modeling to make guesses at what you mean or what they are looking at. Stastical modeling that makes a black yellow striped pattern look like a school bus, because it has no concept of anything and not intelligence in any sense of the word and that is the just what fits the statistical model.
To the best of my knowledge, no program has become self aware. And no martians have seen our probes as a hostile invasion. It makes for (sometimes) good fiction though.
To the best of my knowledge no asteroid, or virus, or natural disaster has ever wiped out humankind either!
and for that matter I've never been killed in a car accident.
OMG! I'm invincible!
No one has a right to their *own* opinion. They have a right to the TRUTH.
Ten years out? As a veteran programmer and AI enthusiast, I'd say it was more like a century. We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity, let alone something a million times more complicated like a human brain. And that doesn't even get us to the 'superhuman intelligence' category that people are afraid of.
Worrying about Killer AI is like worrying about the Sun burning out. Yeah, it might happen eventually, but it isn't even worth considering right now...
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
yes, worrying about AI that might be a threat in 500 years is like worrying about the Sun burning out in 5 billion years. good point. we should also stop talking about global warming while we are at it.
We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity, let alone something a million times more complicated like a human brain
http://www.futurity.org/why-ar...
rather, once we are able to model any nervous system we are well one the way,
you think it's absolutely impossible that could be achieved in say the next 500 years, considering what humans have accomplished in the last 100?
Absolutely impossible? No. But the problem is that we don't even know where to begin creating a true AI, which means we also know nothing about what threats it may or may not pose... so we also have no actual way to address those threats. All we have right now is pure, 100% complete speculation (no different from speculating about what would happen if we had FTL travel, or psykers, or met aliens). There are plenty of actual threats to humanity that really exist right now (or could be created with our current knowledge and technology), which makes worrying about something we know literally nothing about kind of silly.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
where i come from, discussing and addressing problems before they are a threat is a good idea.
did we learn anything from global warming? we denied that up to the point where it's essentially too late. would have been good to be talking about global warming a hundred years ago wouldn't it have? humans need to get accustomed to looking at the big picture if we are to survive.
it's not like we have to build AI from the ground up. we have a prototype already. it's called the brain. your brain is just a meat processor. it's a system of cells, interconnections, chemicals, and electric pulses. all of that can be modeled in software, and run a million times faster, run itself in parallel, interface with other electronic systems in vastly superior ways, nearly limitless, perfect storage, and so on.
A couple of things:
Our understanding of how the brain works is less than perfect, to put it politely.
More to the point, we have basically no idea what consciousness actually is, how it works, or what makes it appear.
Further, we have a very tenuous grasp of what intelligence is in the first place - we can't even agree on a single definition of it.
So worrying about mankind developing self-conscious artificial intelligences might make for a good sci-fi story, but it makes for a rather lousy news story. We're just nowhere near close to having anything even remotely resembling human intelligence.
If we don't even know what human intelligence is, how could we possibly make artificial copies of it?
Hard AI currently looks for all intents and purposes impossible, and soft AI is just not a threat.
"Total destruction the only solution" - Bob Marley