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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."
You're one of them aren't you!
I can't do that.
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.
Unfortunately the most successful reporters are the ones that sold out their professionalism on their first day.
A sensationalist headline and article easily trumps a sane, balanced and informative one in attracting views/viewers therefore money. Welcome to the new age.
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.
The same fears started when people first started with saying that AIs could someday become sentient.
Aside from iRobot, nearly all SciFi indicate the problem post-singularity is when the humans try to kill the AI first. Sometimes because the AI starts it, other times, just because the AI is an AI and should be feared. iRobot was the AI staging a complete overthrow of humanity, "for our own good". That has been a recurring theme as well.
I know people complain about looking to fiction for answers to reality, but SciFi (at least the good stuff) is as much a thought exercise about technology as "fiction", and thus is often relevant.
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