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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.
If Clippy was any sort of early indication, I see dark times ahead....
I vote for systemd as our new robotic overlord to bring about a swift delivery to the endtimes.
ok, so it WILL have a big impact, check.
Stephen Hawking's initial comments about AI and the future were taken out of context pretty badly. This is a much better quote that more accurately (I believe) summarizes the opinion many smart people have about AI: that it'll induce change, probably radical change, and change is only sometimes good... and it often gets worse before it gets better.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
I disagree. Just like anything humanity does, it will be rushed, half-finished, buggy and mediocre at best. Plus, if AI is anything like its creators it would spend most of it free time trolling /.
AI will either be the best or the worst, or it will be okay.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
This has been obvious to everyone who understands what intelligence is.
Interestingly enough, this category includes grand total of zero people. Otherwise we would already have AI.
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.
Charles Dickens?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.
The AI will save humanity, the AI will kill us all.
Strange words like this... "intelligence" thing... have no meaning here.
This is not the website you are looking for, move along back to the basement and re-think your life, oh and we are running a 2 for 1 deal on death sicks -- today only!
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
Once human awarenesses can be uploaded into a networked computer matrix, and these conciouslnesses can be linked to organically grown human(ish) bodies, the differences will blur to the point of irrelevance.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
Any AI in the foreseeable future will be under control of human beings, either due to laws or financial ownership. I'm not the least worried about AI, but having watched this election, the humans in my country scare the shit out of me.
I had a hard time understanding how 40% of my fellow countrymen could still vote for Trump, until I realized it explained why we have warning labels telling us not to eat soap...
I don't need a weatherman to tell me it _might_ rain. I knew that when I woke up. I felt good about myself knowing I didn't have to go to college to know this.
Now I'm feeling really intelligent because I've long known AI could be bad (Terminator) or good (I Robot, Terminator) without all of the unnecessary academics.
Holiday Inn Express has done so much for me!
You do realise "I, Robot" was more a book about debugging errors in A.I.'s not about them helping or hurting humanity.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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.
Yes, I believe you nailed exactly what Al would have said to us. That is why back in 2000 we chose George Bush's idiot son to be our leader over Al. And he whined about it all the way to the Supreme court, which is something that the Democrats now tell us isn't very "Presidential".
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Are we? I thought we had "general intelligence" = "mental ability to solve general problems".
Trying to measure that is difficult because we humans have specialized for certain types of problems and like to measure human-like intelligence (where for example things like language, vision, hearing seem like they ought to be easy, and math might be considered either hard or trivial). Eg given a verbal or hand-written word math problem, the human would likely have no trouble with anything but the math, but a computer would have no trouble solving the math but fail before even starting -- what the words are, what the words mean, trivial math problem. Humans have, for example, specialized portions of the brain to recognize faces, or to separate out voices from other sounds, not to mention giant portions of the brain dedicated to each of the senses, which makes those sub-classes of problems basically effortless.
Even when problems can be reduced to mathematics, it wouldn't be fair to measure the difficulty of a problem by computational resources required (eg matrix multiplication) vs what might be called cleverness (eg constructing a proof, or maybe finding a pattern) which seems impossible right now to measure. As I understand it, computers now have comparable computational resources to humans (depending on how flops are compared to synapses) but are vastly lacking in programming. Keep in mind that a human's basic programming and schematics is only 800 MB for both hardware and software.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
AI will replace our economic system as human employment is ceasing to exist already. As pay checks either get smaller or stop completely society must provide serious economic support for everyone to avoid total rebellion and chaos. There is no choice.