Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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 worrying about computers outsmarting us and taking over in the near future has insufficient experience with both Windows and Siri.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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
We are at least 50 years off from strong AI as in human level common sense about the world.
The focus on dangers of creating strong AI is the worst part of current AI hysteria. Strong AI will most likely come decades or even centuries after modern day AI has massively reshaped our workforce and society in general.
The AI we should be worried about include self driving cars, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and robotics. These technologies could combine to make a majority of humans unemployable. The don't do this by making humans unnecessary. They do it by making certain humans so productive that average people have no economic value. It is AI's ability to empower the most educated in our society that is the greatest "problem".
This could either lead to a utopian world if we can enact a form of basic income for everyone, or a very distopian world if we allow income inequality to grow unchecked. Unlike strong AI which most researchers agree has a very low chance of occurring soon, the AI systems I am referring to are almost guaranteed to massively disrupt our economy in the next few decades.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
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.
> "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.