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What AI Experts Think About the Existential Risk of AI
DaveS7 writes: There's been no shortage of high profile people weighing in on the subject of AI lately. We've heard warnings from Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking while Woz seems to have a more ambivalent opinion on the subject. The Epoch Times has compiled a list of academics in the field of AI research who are offering their own opinions. From the article: "A 2014 survey conducted by Vincent Müller and Nick Bostrom of 170 of the leading experts in the field found that a full 18 percent believe that if a machine super-intelligence did emerge, it would unleash an 'existential catastrophe' on humanity. A further 13 percent said that advanced AI would be a net negative for humans, and only a slight majority said it would be a net positive."
The summary really emphasizes the minority opinion, "and only a slight majority said it would be a net positive." As if "only a slight majority" is not the majority opinion.
Nearly everything kills for its own benefit. Nonsense "feel good" junk aside, there's no reason to assume a race of strong AI, superior to us in every way, would be the exception.
It doesn't much matter right now, though. It's inevitable (assuming you don't believe in magic), but likely a long way off.
"The Sony hacking incident last year was ample demonstration that our information systems are becoming more and more vulnerable, which is a feature, not a bug, of the increasing transfer of our infrastructure into digital space."
Sorry guys, I can't stop laughing. This writer is a clown. The Sony incident demonstrates Sony is incompetent. It was never a threat against the humanity, only against the gang of fat butts at Sony Pictures.
Achille Talon
Hop!
Nosense. That's just hero worship mentality. Very much like listening to Barbara Streisand quack about her favorite obsessions.
Bill Gates' opinion is worth more than the average person's when it comes to running Microsoft. Elon Musk's opinion is worth more than the average person's when building Teslas and the like. Neither one of them (nor anyone else, for that matter) has anything but the known behavior of the only high intelligence we've ever met to go on (that's us, of course.) So it's purest guesswork, completely blind specuation. It definitely isn't a careful, measured evaluation. Because there's nothing to evaluate!
And while I'm not inclined to draw a conclusion from this, it is interesting that we've had quite a few very high intelligences in our society over time. None of them have posed an "existential crisis" for the the planet, the the human race, or my cats. Smart people tend ot have better things to do than annoy others... also, they can anticipate consequences. Will this apply to "very smart machines"? Your guess (might be) as good as mine. It's almost certainly better than Musk's or Gates', since we know they were clueless enough to speak out definitively on a subject they don't (can't) know anything about. Hawking likewise, didn't mean to leave him out.
Within the context of our recorded history, it's not the really smart ones that usually cause us trouble. It's the moderately intelligent fucktards who gravitate to power. [stares off in the general direction of Washington] (I know, I've giving some of them more credit than they deserve.)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
On the contrary, the primary concern is that people who think it will go well are over anthropomorphizing. If general AI is made, there's no reason to think it will have a motivation structure that agrees with humans or that we can even easily model. That's the primary concern. I agree with most of the rest of your second paragraph is accurate in the sense that it general AI seems far away at this point. But the basic idea that AI is a threat isn't from anthropomorphizing. I recommend reading Bostrom's excellent book "Superintelligence" on the topic.
Everyone is missing the key thing here. The question asked was "if a machine superintelligence did emerge", which is like asking "if the LHC produced a black hole..." There's nobody credible in AI who believes we have the slightest clue how to build a general AI, let alone one that is 'superintelligent'. Since we lack even basic concepts about how intelligence actually works we're like stone age man worrying about the atomic bomb. Sure, if a superintelligent AI emerged we might be in trouble, but nobody is trying to make one, nobody knows how to make one, nobody has any hardware that there is any reason to believe is within several orders of magnitude of being able to run one, etc.
So, what all of these people are talking about is something hugely speculative that is utterly disconnected from the sort of 'machine intelligence' that we ARE working on. There are several forms of what might fall into this category (there's really no precise definition), but none of them are really even close to being about generalized intelligence. The closest might be multi-purpose machine-learning and reasoning systems like 'Watson', but if you actually look at what their capabilities are, they're about as intelligent as a flatworm, hardly anything to be concerned about. Nor do they contain any of the sort of capabilities that living systems do. They don't have intention, they don't form goals, or pose problems for themselves. They don't have even a representation of the existence of their own minds. They literally cannot even think about themselves or reason about themselves because they don't even know they exist. Beyond that we are so far from knowing how to add that capability that we know nothing about how to do so, zero, nothing.
The final analysis is that what these people are being asked about is virtually a fantasy. They might as well be commenting on an alien invasion. This is something that probably won't ever come to pass at all, and if it does it will be long past our time. Its fun to think about, but the alarmism is ridiculous. In fact I don't see anything in the article that even implies any of the AI experts think its LIKELY that a superintelligent AI will ever exist, it was simply posited as a given in the question.
"Malo periculosam, libertatem quam quietam servitutem." -- Jefferson