Is OpenAI Solving the Wrong Problem? (hbr.org)

hype7 writes: The Harvard Business Review is running an article looking at the recently announced OpenAI initiative, and its decision to structure the venture as a non-profit. It goes on to ask some pretty provocative questions: why are the 21st century's greatest tech luminaries opting out of the system that made them so successful in order to tackle one of humanity's thorniest problems? "Implicit in this: You can do more good operating outside the bounds of capitalism than within them. Coming from folks who are at the upper echelons of the system, it’s a pretty powerful statement." And, if the underlying system that we all operate in is broken, is creating a vehicle without the profit motive inside of it going to be enough?

Comments

I don't understand the concern, personally.

[mark-t]

Absolutely anything that you would have to worry about an artificial intelligence doing that might be troublesome to our society, you would have to also need to reasonably worry about a malicious person doing exact the same thing, albeit perhaps only more slowly. Yet I don't see people who fear the so-called problems that AI is feared to potentially cause worrying about that sort of thing. Can anyone explain why that is without drawing on the idea that because we don't fully understand something, there must be something inherently mysterious or supernatural about it?

Re:I don't understand the concern, personally.

[Agent0013]

Absolutely anything that you would have to worry about an artificial intelligence doing that might be troublesome to our society, you would have to also need to reasonably worry about a malicious person doing exact the same thing, albeit perhaps only more slowly.

An artificial intelligence could make a million identical copies of itself. I don't see how a malicious person could do the exact same thing. Perhaps they could have a million children, but that is a stretch, and it would be way, way slower. They also would not be identical.

Re:Hobbies

[ShanghaiBill]

Believe it or not, some people just like doing certain things, regardless of monetary reward.

That is not what this is about. Some people, including Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, etc. believe that AI is a potential danger to humanity. Although capitalism is great at maximizing profits, it is not so great at collective moral responsibility. So they think a non-profit is a better vehicle for ethical AI.

Personally, I think they are being silly. Real human-level AI is still a ways off, and corporate AI is focused on solving practical problems rather than creating Skynet. Besides, AI is not something you can keep bottled up. Anyone with a GPU can do it.

Re:Hobbies

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

Personally, I think they are being silly. Real human-level AI is still a ways off...

But at which level does A.I. can potentially become a problem, for us or something else?

We're already living in a world where toaster-dumb A.I. is being added to all sorts of IoT widgets and it's already causing a lot of headaches.

Re:Hobbies

[VernonNemitz]

A true artificial intelligence would be equivalent to a human person --and a human person is not allowed to be owned. So, if the goal is to create a true artificial intelligence, and the result cannot be owned, isn't it simply logical that the creation be done outside the ownership-leads-to-max-profits capitalist system?

Re:Hobbies

[datavirtue]

You could just make them dumb as a poor person and then you could own them. Problem solved.

Re:Hobbies

[dpidcoe]

We're already living in a world where toaster-dumb A.I. is being added to all sorts of IoT widgets and it's already causing a lot of headaches.

I think that when people talk about potential AI problems in this context, they're talking about the BS misconceptions from Hollywood about what AI is and/or is not. Not some poorly thought out, poorly implemented, and poorly secured IoT toster.

Re:Hobbies

[HiThere]

The IoT garbage that's currently going on has little relation to AI. The increased removal of classes of jobs does.

The problem is that AI isn't inherently moral, in any useful meaning of the word, unless it's designed that way. If it's designed to improve corporate profits, then that's what it will do. Mind you, I agree that no current system can be given that kind of broad directive. But the word there is "current".

I still expect that we will achieve human equivalent AI by around 2030. I've occasionally pushed that as far away as 2035, but it keeps resetting itself. But note I said "human equivalent". That's a term that needs a bit of defining. What I mean by it is that the AI will understand the description of a task about as well as the average (median) person would, and will be about as successful at designing a solution. For some tasks this has long been possible...but only by specialized machines. I'm talking about a program that will be able to handle (in the sense described above) any reasonable task. (I'm not including being able to implement the solution, as that's partially a mechanical task, and depends on the body implementation. But while for some tasks it may well be superior, I wouldn't expect it to be generally superior within that time frame.)

Please note: I do not believe that any such thing as "general intelligence" exists. I believe instead that there are certain modules of intelligence, and that some of them enable the interaction of other modules. Being more specific requires knowledge of design features that I'm uncertain of, and which may vary in different implementations. But while the muscular coordination required to play a piano is correlated with mathematical ability, they clearly aren't the same thing.