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Why AI Won't Take Over The Earth (ssrn.com)
Law professor Ryan Calo -- sometimes called a robot-law scholar -- hosted the first White House workshop on AI policy, and has organized AI workshops for the National Science Foundation (as well as the Department of Homeland Security and the National Academy of Sciences). Now an anonymous reader shares a new 30-page essay where Calo "explains what policymakers should be worried about with respect to artificial intelligence. Includes a takedown of doomsayers like Musk and Gates." Professor Calo summarizes his sense of the current consensus on many issues, including the dangers of an existential threat from superintelligent AI:
Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field... A number of prominent voices in artificial intelligence have convincingly challenged Superintelligence's thesis along several lines. First, they argue that there is simply no path toward machine intelligence that rivals our own across all contexts or domains... even if we were able eventually to create a superintelligence, there is no reason to believe it would be bent on world domination, unless this were for some reason programmed into the system. As Yann LeCun, deep learning pioneer and head of AI at Facebook colorfully puts it, computers don't have testosterone.... At best, investment in the study of AI's existential threat diverts millions of dollars (and billions of neurons) away from research on serious questions... "The problem is not that artificial intelligence will get too smart and take over the world," computer scientist Pedro Domingos writes, "the problem is that it's too stupid and already has."
A footnote also finds a paradox in the arguments of Nick Bostrom, who has warned of that dangers superintelligent AI -- but also of the possibility that we're living in a computer simulation. "If AI kills everyone in the future, then we cannot be living in a computer simulation created by our decedents. And if we are living in a computer simulation created by our decedents, then AI didn't kill everyone. I think it a fair deduction that Professor Bostrom is wrong about something."
Claims of a pending AI apocalypse come almost exclusively from the ranks of individuals such as Musk, Hawking, and Bostrom who possess no formal training in the field... A number of prominent voices in artificial intelligence have convincingly challenged Superintelligence's thesis along several lines. First, they argue that there is simply no path toward machine intelligence that rivals our own across all contexts or domains... even if we were able eventually to create a superintelligence, there is no reason to believe it would be bent on world domination, unless this were for some reason programmed into the system. As Yann LeCun, deep learning pioneer and head of AI at Facebook colorfully puts it, computers don't have testosterone.... At best, investment in the study of AI's existential threat diverts millions of dollars (and billions of neurons) away from research on serious questions... "The problem is not that artificial intelligence will get too smart and take over the world," computer scientist Pedro Domingos writes, "the problem is that it's too stupid and already has."
A footnote also finds a paradox in the arguments of Nick Bostrom, who has warned of that dangers superintelligent AI -- but also of the possibility that we're living in a computer simulation. "If AI kills everyone in the future, then we cannot be living in a computer simulation created by our decedents. And if we are living in a computer simulation created by our decedents, then AI didn't kill everyone. I think it a fair deduction that Professor Bostrom is wrong about something."
Businesses wanting to make profit will do so at all costs.
There are too many people out there who think that if it's not illegal then it's OK. Computers don't have testosterone but the programmers and their bosses do - or at least the profit incentive.
We are intelligent but our base programming is to reproduce. And being primates, the more dominance we have, the more fucking opportunities we have; which in our modern times means getting as rich as we possibly can.
Meaning, our base instincts will make it into our AIs and we WILL find ourselves being dominated.
That's the arrogance of technologists: they think they are more rational and logical than everyone else and that makes them even more susceptible to human nature.
But, it's one of the few things that could actually kill us all.
This wouldn't even have to be intentional extermination, it could simply be competition with, and lack of regard for humans by a growing system.
The notion that a AI can form an existential threat today is ridiculous.
Many notions that would have been ridiculous 100 years ago, now are used in daily life.
It is vital to have people thinking about the worst case, because in principle otherwise someone on a friday makes a typo allowing their AI access to a hundred thousand times the expected resources, and on monday, it's ineradicable.
If I destroy it first. Try ruling the planet under 10 meters of seawater!
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
If my hedge fund(mythical) filled with people with zero ethics get their hands on a AI that will allow them to manipulate world markets, media, or world events to make them money, then they will do so.
With hindsight there are lots of places where the world turned out to me much more fragile than anyone thought until it snapped. How many times has the snap not happened but we came very close. Thus if you have a good AI at your beck and call to find these weaknesses and you are prepared to exploit them to make some money then how much more miserable would the world be?
I don't only worry about some skynet scenario, but I worry about giving tools to nitwits like hedge fund managers to make more money while not actually producing anything. One magical thing about making money with the first really good moneymaking AI is that you can then start hiring all the world's AI experts while making massive donations to universities to shut down their AI research. I doubt there is a university that wouldn't happily shut down their AI research for a billion or two.
Because we're still no closer to actually creating an AI.
So a law professor whose primary gift seems to be self promotion summarily dismisses the concerns of some of the greatest thinkers/doers of the last half century.
Is there a reason why we should pay any attention to this arrogant twat?
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Rampant AI will not take over the earth, as predicted by Elon Musk in Wired Magazine, because it will be too busy fighting the Grey Goo Nanothechnology, as predicted by Bill Joy in Wired Magazine
*** Suerte a todos y Feliz dia!
YOU go to Ars or some other "reputable" websith
Already to the dark side, has that one turned.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
If the simulation is successful and sufficiently advanced, then we would all actually be AI simulacra of what the AI dev team thought the human experience was like. [Why do so many things taste like chicken?]
Perhaps we are special purpose AI entities that were created to run test scenarios that justify the pre-emptive judgement to extinguish the pestilence that was humanity. We are the test runs that show just how bad it could have gotten had they not saved the planet from us.
Given a sufficiently advanced environment, we wouldn't be to discern otherwise. Perhaps the supercomputing power that is required and was discovered by the 'real' humans required a very specific mass to a sub atomic particle. In our recreation, we can get very close but will lack the precision to be able to detect our cage, or at least construct an AI that could build a method for detecting the cage.
Isn't that a sexist statement? It implies women are less likely to want to dominate and rule. It fits in with that "Google Memo" that got that dude fired.
Table-ized A.I.
This assumes that this is the only way to AI.
And that emergent AI is utterly impossible.
It doesn't have to be perfect at first, it just has to be fast, with the ability to self-modify.
The risk is not (in my opinion) so much someone intending to create a general AI.
It's someone accidentally creating an AI that is very good in a narrow aspect, and not bad enough in other aspects that, driven by unintended goals of its programming exponentially improves itself without the creators noticing until it decides that it'd be better off if it was hidden, as there is a risk to itself.
Then there are any number of scenarios that don't end well.
From intentional extermination, to simply mining the environment for resources without caring about humans other than a nuiscance.
Einstein did not have a degree in physics, thus relativity is invalid.
Einstein offered mathematical proof of his claims. There is a difference.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Have you any idea how much better voice-recognition AI (backed by Google's knowledge graph) is at parsing and giving a decent answer to a good majority of questions now than such technology was even a decade ago?
Or Google/Apple/Facebook's picture content recognition algorithms?
The advance has been lightning fast.
This stuff is going to keep advancing, rapidly. That's what you're ignoring.
Talking to google on my phone is way more useful than talking to your dog, by the way.
A few other things you're missing:
1) Thinking (abduction, induction, bayesian model-updating and predictions/recognition, etc etc) is quite possible to be quite advanced without self-awareness. The two are fairly separate applications. Something can be really really smart, and creative even, without having to be self-aware.
2) The behaviour associated with self-awareness is clearly attainable by simple extensions of the current machine-learning technology. We just need to learn the programming/data-modelling techniques to turn the deep-learning and predicting algorithms on a representation of the computer/robot-as-agent-in-the-world, and have it learn about its relation to things out there that it is learning about. Whether the thing would have the qualia-feeling of self-awareness is entirely beside the point. It could function/behave exactly as if it was self aware, because it would be self-knowledgeable, self-learning etc.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?