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Stephen Hawking: AI Will Be Either the Best or the Worst Thing To Humanity (betanews.com)
At the opening of the new Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence (LCFI) at Cambridge University, Stephen Hawking offered his insight into the positive and negative implications of creating a true AI. He said, via BetaNews:We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity. So it's a welcome change that people are studying instead the future of intelligence. The potential benefits of creating intelligence are huge... With the tools of this new technological revolution, we will be able to undo some of the damage done to the natural world by the last one -- industrialization. And surely we will aim to fully eradicate disease and poverty. Every aspect of our lives will be transformed. In short, success in creating AI, could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. But it could also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers, like powerful autonomous weapons, or new ways for the few to oppress the many. It will bring great disruption to our economy. AI will be either the best, or the worst thing ever to happen to humanity. We do not yet know which.
This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die.
I'd argue that as far as I've seen, practically every single project or experiment labeled "AI" is really just fake intelligence.
In other words, you've cobbled together a mechanism so a standard human language formatted query (spoken or written/typed) can be parsed out and searched in a useful way through extensive databases of information and a sensible result spit back, again in a manner that mimics a human's way of communicating the result.
This is a pretty cool thing, as we've seen by how handy the "personal assistants" like Cortana or Siri can be on our smartphones.
But IMO, Hawking is talking about achieving a way to simulate the way a human brain actually thinks. That's something we're NOWHERE near doing successfully, and I'm not even sure it's realistic to pretend we could with today's computer technology.
For starters, it's becoming more and more clear that humans don't really file away tons of information in our brains like a computer does on a hard drive in a database. A big part of what we "remember" goes to "short term memory", meaning we'll try to keep it in our heads for a little while -- but as soon as it becomes something we don't need to recall again for a period of time, it starts fading away and eventually is forgotten. At the same time though? Our brain seems to make lots of other connections to these things. (Even though you forgot, say, an old phone number of a friend you haven't called in years? When you see the number again, you may recognize it from a list of other random phone numbers and remember that's the one you USED to remember. Computers don't do that.)
The entire concept of being "reminded" of something is pretty foreign to how binary computers compute... They either have or don't have information. They don't struggle to remember and occasionally recall things, and/or realize they used to know them when reminded.
A lot of famous people weigh in on the impact of AI. How many of these people have educated themselves to actually understand AI before making claims based upon sci-fi-like assumptions of what it could theoretically be?
Having used machine learning systems the last few months I've come to realize two things:
1) Machine learning and "AI" is much more about augmenting humans than replacing them with simulations
2) A perfect storm of computing hardware and machine learning software is occurring that will have as big an impact in the next 10 years as personal computers, the Internet and mobile technology
Greed is the root of all evil.