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The AI Anxiety (washingtonpost.com)
An anonymous reader writes: The Washington Post has an article about current and near-future AI research while managing to keep a level head about it: "The machines are not on the verge of taking over. This is a topic rife with speculation and perhaps a whiff of hysteria." Every so often, we hear seemingly dire warnings from people like Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk about the dangers of unchecked AI research. But actual experts continue to dismiss such worries as premature — and not just slightly premature. The article suggests our concerns might be better focused in a different direction: "Anyone looking for something to worry about in the near future might want to consider the opposite of superintelligence: superstupidity. In our increasingly technological society, we rely on complex systems that are vulnerable to failure in complex and unpredictable ways. Deepwater oil wells can blow out and take months to be resealed. Nuclear power reactors can melt down. Rockets can explode. How might intelligent machines fail — and how catastrophic might those failures be?"
opposite of superintelligence: superstupidity
There's been a great documentary made about superstupidity..
It's politically incorrect to say this, but most humans are not intelligent. Their behavior follows predictable patterns. Their intellectual life is next to naught.
If you are not intelligent, you are expendable and fungible like any other industry-raised sheep. Born out of industrial breeding, fed with a formula, and led straight to the slaughterhouse. It doesn't take an evil super AI to beat you. You are already beaten by the mechanism that is called the System.
Be intelligent.
> "Anyone looking for something to worry about in the near future might want to consider the opposite of superintelligence: superstupidity"
At least we know what superstupidity looks like and what it does, based on observing Washington, DC. One lesson is to minimize the control and possible impact from failures of these complex but inherently stupid systems. See, for example the office of the vice president - a VP might say some stupid things, but it doesn't really do too much damage.
The new crop of candidates provide another lesson in superstupidity. They aren't exactly a bunch of brain surgeons either.
Anyone worrying about computers outsmarting us and taking over in the near future has insufficient experience with both Windows and Siri.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Since free will is almost certainly an illusion, it's not something you can eliminate. It never existed. We're locked into cause and effect just like all matter.
making most jobs obsolete. That's something that could happen in the near term. Since almost every country bases it's quality of life on the jobs it hands out that doesn't bode well for me, a member of the working class.
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It's not free will that's the problem. And intelligence is not intelligence, you conflate so much. Intelligence isn't the crux of moral choices, it's instinct survival and altrusim. Do you have an altruism algorithm?
What of the war machines, the killing machines? Everyone making them will always claim that theirs is necessary because of course, they're in the right.
Medical apparatus-- who plays God here? My algorithm or yours? AI has dropped millions of tons of rockets into the drink. AI has misrouted millions and millions of mailed letters.
You trust this stuff far too much, and there is much more than "solely based on the aide is like prevneint a child from existing...." to fear. Instead, coders flatter themselves that they can provide the agar, the basic ingredients of intelligence, sit back, and watch algorithms grow into something good for mankind. Horseshit.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Non scientists taking creative liberties and spinning click bait headlines are at least partly to blame for all this impending super AI taking over the world. The remainder falls on Hollywood and the rest of the entertainment industry.
We are at least 50 years off from strong AI as in human level common sense about the world. Even simple automated systems by comparison like autonomous cars fully able to replace humans in all situations are decades off; What we have today is basically a fancy cruise control - the analogy holds for other "smart" systems.
The stupidity we already see in human run systems is mostly due to greed and the average person not only shrugging off rational thinking, but demonizing it to the point of it being taboo. Good luck trying to get people to even follow more than two sentences or a very short anectdotal story. I'm not sure it is even addressable for 50 years as the current population certainly doesn't like thinking and can't be told otherwise.
It's my opinion lots of this fear stems from the fact most people have been doing their best to deny reality and avoid critical thinking at all costs and strong AI will force them to face that fear.
AI won't be our biggest problem, it will merely be a stepping stone. The biggest problem facing humanity is the collapse of the informational time line. In other words, data time travel.
"WTF?" I hear you saying. "Whacko." OK, OK. But hear me out... Einstein, et al, are pretty sure that moving matter across space time, especially backwards in the time line, is unlikely without some pretty extreme technology. AKA likely impossible. However, at the Quantum level, moving information may not be that difficult, thanks to quantum entanglement surviving "time displacement" (even maybe black hole event horizons). Surely AI will help to accelerate the research into these areas. And that will culminate with the ability to communicate with the future. And the future being able to communicate with the past. All that needs to be done is construct the "radio". The future will do the rest and send back blueprints for improvement. Even if the humans aren't willing to do it over a shorter future span, the computers would likely have little emotional concern for doing it...after all, what is time to them but energy burnt towards a computational goal (that has already probably been computed in the future). Once the channel of communication is open, it will be as leveling as the Internet across "space" today.
So, the "Singularity" defined as the merging of human and AI is less likely to be as impactful as a "Singularity" defined as the complete crushing of the Time Line. All of human knowledge, nay ALL knowledge--human and AI--will suddenly be known, instantaneously (or very nearly). Parallel computing across both space AND time. Short of the Sweet Meteor of Death, of course.
Scott
"Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid."
When I heard someone give a talk about this, one of the "risks" given was superstupidity *combined* with AI to give you a factory that won't stop churning out paper clips.
Another risk I think the same speaker mentioned was kind of the HAL 9000 bias -- we have an idea of what we THINK super AI is supposed to look at, and we scoff at runaway AI because obviously nothing comes close to HAL 9000 now.
But why does a dangerous AI have to have this human-like appearance in order to be a dangerous AI?
Take, for example, the banking and securities sector. They rely on all kinds of advanced trading algorithms and analytics, basically an AI (if crude). Since a good chunk of who-holds-what securities info is public information, you basically have an information interchange for separate financial company AIs. How do we know that all these individual financial sector agents aren't already some kind of emergent super AI?
Will we even be able to recognize an advanced AI if we're relying on "I'm sorry, Dave.." as our guide?
AI is [or will be] programmed by human programmers.
At present there are two alarming trends in programming. One, companies are unwilling to pay properly trained Western-educated programmers and are increasingly outsourcing programming to inexperienced programmers in Third World countries. Once these programmers become better at their craft, they demand higher pay and/or move to the West and the companies move to even cheaper countries. Two, despite outsourcing, there are probably not enough competent programmers in the world to fulfill current and future demand, so there will always be many incompetent programmers being utilized, regardless of economics.
While the world's best programmers are true craftsmen, the worst programmers are the ones we have to worry about. Some company looking to save a few dollars will hire a few incompetents and, rather than your word processor crashing causing you to lose a few minutes of work, your AI's built-in curbs will malfunction and it will go rogue. How many programmers in the world today can design a bug-free security sandbox? As AIs become more sophisticated, every programmer will have to be able to do this. AIs have to be contained, yet what intelligent human would willingly consent to being imprisoned? In the battle between an inexperienced programmer from sub-Saharan Africa in 2100 who is the first generation of his tribe to not be a shepherd, and an AI, can you guess who will lose?
Unless we can change the way our field works, we must assume that the worst and least experienced programmers in the world will be working on AI. There is no basic competency required in programming. Companies will simply pay the least amount of money that they can get away with, like they always do. The AI that kills us won't come from research labs at MIT, it will come from the Microsoft outsourcer office in Bhutan.
The machines have already taken over, even without AI. This is because everyone instantly believes what a machine tells them, no matter what. Look at people who have had their identity stolen. A machine says they took out a loan here, and a loan there. Now the creditor is demanding payment. The victim can't convince the creditor that they did not take out the loan because the machine says they did, and the machine is never wrong. Despite the fact that there is no physical evidence that any loan was ever granted to the victim, the machine is believed over the human. No one ever questions how the data got into the machine. No one ever assumes that any mistake was made at any time. Whatever the machine says is assumed to be the truth.
Recently, a friend related this story. He was at a checkout line at Target, and had purchased about $60 worth of items. He handed the clerk a $100 bill. The clerk mistakenly keyed in an extra zero, and the machine dutifully informed the clerk to make change of about $940. The clerk, without hesitation, started to do this and my friend had to stop her and explain her mistake. The clerk couldn't understand. They eventually had to call a manager over to explain the problem. This girl was prepared to do whatever the machine told her, despite the fact that it didn't make any sense.
We don't need AI for the machines to rule over us.
Proverbs 21:19
Being free willed does not mean that one cannot or will not necessarily ever make so-called "decisions" that can be predicted from a knowledge of the state, it only means that one is *capable* of it. However, how is the behavior of a system where one is not capable of it any different than one where the state itself is unknowable? You can apply a variation of the halting problem to establish with certainty that either the universe is not deterministic, or else it impossible within its framework to contrive a test that incontrovertibly proves that it is so.
e.g. If I could know what decisions you were making (a notion that is at least theoretically possible, if the universe were truly deterministic), I could analyze it and predict the answer you would give to a particular question, even if I told you truthfully what the answer to that question were going to be.... however, with your so-called illusion of free will, you could utilize the information that I gave you in the present about your alleged future action, and then deliberately contradict it, invalidating the prediction that I made, meaning that my knowledge about the future state was incorrect, which leads one inescapably to the conclusion that even if the universe is deterministic, it is impossible to know it.
And it is noteworthy that by outward present appearances, we appear to have free will with regards to decisions that we make.
So if, by all the standards that can ever be measured, you appear to be a "free-willed" person, then how is your behavior any different than if you actually *were* a free-willed individual? And if your behavior is identical to as if you actually were a so-called "free-willed" being, what purpose does suggesting that you are not free willed even mean?
Plus of course, one cannot advocate the notion that we are not free willed without also suggesting that we abdicate the notion of personal responsibility... but that's a philosophical debate for another time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> making most jobs obsolete.
That's already happened a few times. At one time, most people worked in agriculture- mankind spent most of our time feeding ourselves. An "economic downturn ", therefore, was when a lot of people starved to death.
After machines such as plows and later GPS-guided combines with largely automated food processing plants did most of the work of producing food, inexpensive food was therefore readily available and humans had time to do things not strictly necessary for survival, like education, producing consumer goods, writing and printing books, comfortable clothes, and creating washing machines and dishwashers. With the efficiency of machines, consumer goods including books, and conveniences like washing machines and refrigerators became readily available to the masses.
No longer scrubbing our clothes on a washboard, we then had time to make and play video games.
The replacement of human labor with machines has been a continuous process for over a thousand years, peaking about 200 years ago. In the process, our standard of living has gone from digging for anything we could eat in the winter to stopping by Walmart to select which of the 160 different fruit and vegetable varieties we want to munch on while we enjoy our Netflix movie.
Then so do subatomic particles. You don't need AI if that's all you want. If subatomic particles do not have free will, then neither do humans. This second option allows physics to be Turing Complete and is much more agreeable.
If computers develop sufficient power for intelligence to be an emergent phenomenon, they are sufficiently powerful to be linked by brain interface for the combination to also have intelligence as an emergent phenomenon. The old you would cease to exist, but that's just as true every time a neuron is generated or dies. "You" are a highly transient virtual phenomenon. A sense of continuity exists only because you have memories and yet no frame of reference outside your current self.
(It's why countries with inadequate mental health care have suspiciously low rates of diagnosis. Self-assessment is impossible as you, relative to you, will always fit your concept of normal.)
I'm much less concerned by strong AI than by weak AI. This is the sort used to gamble on the stock markets, analyse signal intelligence, etc. In other words, this is the sort that frequently gets things wrong and adjusts itself to make things worse. Weak AI is cheap, easy, incapable of sanity checking, incapable of detecting fallacies and incapable of distinguishing correlation and causation.
Weather forecasts are not particularly precise or accurate, but they've got a success rate that far outstrips that of Weak AI. This is because weather forecasts involve running hundreds of millions of scenarios that fit known data across vast numbers of differing models, then looking for stuff that's highly resistant to change, that will probably happen no matter what, and what on average happens alongside it. These are then filtered further by human meteorologists (some solutions just aren't going to happen). This is an incredibly processed, analytical, approach. The correctness is adequate, but nobody would bet the bank on high precision.
The automated trading computers have a single model, a single set of data, no human filtering and no scrutiny. Because of the way derivatives trading works, they can gamble far more money than they actually have. In 2007, such computers were gambling an estimated ten times the net worth of the planet by borrowing against predicted future earnings of other bets, many of which themselves were paid for by borrowing against other predicted future earnings.
These are the machines that effectively run the globe and their typical accuracy level is around 30%. Better than many politicians, agreed, but not really adequate if you want a robust, fault-tolerant society. These machines have nearly obliterated global society on at least two occasions and, if given enough attempts, will eventually succeed.
These you should worry about.
The whole brain simulator? Not so much. Humans have advantages over computers, just as computers have advantages over machines. You'll see hybridization and/or format conversion, but you won't see the sci-fi horror of computers seeing people as pets (think that was an Asimov short story), threats counter to programming (Colossus, 2010's interpretation of 2001, or similar) or vermin to be exterminated (The Matrix' Agent Smith).
The modern human brain has less capacity than the Neanderthal brain, overall and in many of the senses in particular. You can physically enlarge parts of your brain, up to about 20%, through highly intensive learning, but there's only so much space and only so much inter-regional bandwidth. This means that no human can ever achieve their potential, only a small portion of it. Even with smart drugs. There are senses that have atrophied to the point that they can never be trained or developed beyond an incredibly primitive level. Even if that could be fixed with genetic engineering, there's still neither space nor bandwidth to support it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> "Anyone looking for something to worry about in the near future might want to consider the opposite of superintelligence: superstupidity"
At least we know what superstupidity looks like and what it does, based on observing Washington, DC. One lesson is to minimize the control and possible impact from failures of these complex but inherently stupid systems. See, for example the office of the vice president - a VP might say some stupid things, but it doesn't really do too much damage.
The new crop of candidates provide another lesson in superstupidity. They aren't exactly a bunch of brain surgeons either.
Congress-critters ain't stoopid, they're pretty smart. They understand what they need to do to get elected and stay in office. Unfortunately, that rarely means serving the best interests of the majority of the electorate... or even reading, let alone understanding, the legislature they put forward on behalf of their corporate sponsors.
It's not free will that's the problem. And intelligence is not intelligence, you conflate so much. Intelligence isn't the crux of moral choices, it's instinct survival and altrusim. Do you have an altruism algorithm?
What of the war machines, the killing machines? Everyone making them will always claim that theirs is necessary because of course, they're in the right.
Medical apparatus-- who plays God here? My algorithm or yours? AI has dropped millions of tons of rockets into the drink. AI has misrouted millions and millions of mailed letters.
You trust this stuff far too much, and there is much more than "solely based on the aide is like prevneint a child from existing...." to fear. Instead, coders flatter themselves that they can provide the agar, the basic ingredients of intelligence, sit back, and watch algorithms grow into something good for mankind. Horseshit.
Altruism isn't as universal in human cultures as you might think. The Western christian influenced cultures are totally overloaded with altruism, to the point that they are often dysfunctional because of it. Other cultures are much more pragmatic than altruistic.
Consider this; greed, selfishness and lust are essential for the survival of any organism. Nothing lives except at the expense of another living organism. Even cyanobacteria need to occupy space at the expense of other cyanobacteria.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.