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The Future of AI: a Non-Alarmist Viewpoint
Nerval's Lobster writes: There has been a lot of discussion recently about the dangers posed by building truly intelligent machines. A lot of well-educated and smart people, including Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking, have stated they are fearful about the dangers that sentient Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses to humanity. But maybe it makes more sense to focus on the societal challenges that advances in AI will pose in the near future (Dice link), rather than worrying about what will happen when we eventually solve the titanic problem of building an artificial general intelligence that actually works. Once the self-driving car becomes a reality, for example, thousands of taxi drivers, truck drivers and delivery people will be out of a job practically overnight, as economic competition forces companies to make the switch to self-driving fleets as quickly as possible. Don't worry about a hypothetical SkyNet, in other words; the bigger issue is what a (dumber) AI will do to your profession over the next several years.
Put the smartest people on Earth in a room, with access to all the world's current knowledge, for 20,000 years.
When those people emerge from that room, what would they be able to teach humanity?
About the same that AGI would teach us after being "conscious" for 7 days.
I can also make a program that returns 42 in less than a microsecond. I guess I've up staged them all.
Put the smartest people on Earth in a room, with access to all the world's current knowledge, for 20,000 years. When those people emerge from that room, what would they be able to teach humanity?
Skeletons can't teach, nor do they emerge from rooms.