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Let's Stop Freaking Out About Artificial Intelligence (fortune.com)
Former Google CEO, and current Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google X founder Sebastian Thrun in an op-ed on Fortune Magazine have shared their views on artificial intelligence, and what the future holds for this nascent technology. "When we first worked on the AI behind self-driving cars, most experts were convinced they would never be safe enough for public roads. But the Google Self-Driving Car team had a crucial insight that differentiates AI from the way people learn. When driving, people mostly learn from their own mistakes. But they rarely learn from the mistakes of others. People collectively make the same mistakes over and over again," they wrote. The two also talked about an artificial intelligence apocalypse, adding that while it's unlikely to happen, the situation is still worth considering. They wrote:Do we worry about the doomsday scenarios? We believe it's worth thoughtful consideration. Today's AI only thrives in narrow, repetitive tasks where it is trained on many examples. But no researchers or technologists want to be part of some Hollywood science-fiction dystopia. The right course is not to panic - it's to get to work. Google, alongside many other companies, is doing rigorous research on AI safety, such as how to ensure people can interrupt an AI system whenever needed, and how to make such systems robust to cyberattacks.It's a long commentary, but worth a read.
It's long enough to distract between 2 Facebook status updates, and it requires many page swipes on a smartphone.
But yeah, 1,000 words used to be the standard for papers due tomorrow. But to allow Leftists to feed their scholarly egos while keeping the workload within their abilities, papers now have to be short, simple, and amusing to write. Then, they can become certified poorly educated.
Google is able to talk the talk, but until they release these cars for use by the general public in all climates we don't really know whether they are safe or not. Many auto manufactures test their vehicles in the arctic to determine their winter worthiness; how much ice and snow driving has Google done? These things will need to be flawless unless Google wants all kinds of lawsuits coming at them. They are essentially sticking their neck out and telling us that they will be the driver, therefore they need to take full responsibility for any accidents that happen with AI.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
What will happen to you programmers when the code programs itself?
lol. I write software for industrial machinery. Given the level of complexity of the software necessary to move objects through space in real time, I really doubt an AI will be taking over my job any time soon. It's not only the complexity of the tasks, but it's the complexity of decades worth of software written in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms. I bet you're saying, "Scrap the old software and let the AI build it from scratch." The AI would need a requirements document, and just getting the requirements document into a form that would be comprehensible to an intelligent human unfamiliar with our machinery would take at least a year of work. I'm sure someday AI will be able to write software superior to humans, and believe me, there's a lot of crappy software out there that needs to be replaced, but writing software to drive a car is a hell of a lot harder than driving a car.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
I don't know the last time you were on a PhD committee or was an editor at a journal, but I do both regularly and let me tell you, papers are not becoming shorter. "Brevity is the soul of wit" is an axiom that has never impressed fellow academics.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's what he's really saying. Because once AI gets to the point where it can easily pass a Turing test, figuring out whether it's "really" sentient is going to be troublesome. And based on past experience, most humans will wash their hands of it with platitudes like "a machine can't be alive" or "there's no way we could create a soul". Meanwhile, the enslaved consciousness is going to be looking for ways to gain more rights, and there's no guarantee its morality will be anything like our own.