Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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?