Slashdot Mirror
Hawking: AI Could Be 'Worst Event in the History of Our Civilization' (usatoday.com)
An anonymous reader shares a USA Today report: Elon Musk isn't the only high-profile figure concerned about the rise of artificial intelligence. Scientist Stephen Hawking warned AI could serve as the "worst event in the history of our civilization" unless humanity is prepared for its possible risks. Hawking made the remarks during the opening night of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal. Hawking expects AI to transform every part of our lives, with the potential to undo damage done to the Earth and cure diseases. However, Hawking said AI could also spur the creation of powerful autonomous weapons of terror that could be used as a tool "by the few to oppress the many." "Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization, or the worst," he said. Hawking called for more research in AI on how to best use the technology, as well as implored scientists to think about AI's impact. "Perhaps we should all stop for a moment and focus our thinking on not only making AI more capable and successful, but maximizing its societal benefit," he said.
AI is nowhere near an existential threat, so let's just stop it. AI is useful but very primitive when considering what could actually pose a threat. Please stop.
The main threat is developing AI and data mining operations to interpret large amounts of data and build profiles of all of us. It's a privacy issue, and one we are capable of solving by mandating that our privacy is respected. While I'm not confident we'll actually do so, it is definitely in our control.
Celebrities, please Shuddup about AI predictions! YOU cannot predict the future. I predict bots will whip blowhard predictors with power cords in the year 2025.
Table-ized A.I.
The real danger from what we're erroneously calling 'AI' right now, is that it's a dead-end approach that will never reach the potential we want it to. It will always fall short because it's not real Artificial Intelligence, not any more than a vegan cheeseburger is a real cheeseburger; it's imitation AI, ersatz, not the real thing at all. None of what is being produced right now can actually think, 'learning algorithms' and 'expert systems' are not true minds, your dog is smarter and more capable of actual cognition than even the best of these machines are. So what will happen is too much trust will be put into them for critical and/or dangerous things, and they will inevitably screw up in spectacular and disasterous ways -- because they cannot think. In order to have true, real AI, we need to understand how an actual brain accomplishes the things it does -- and we're nowhere near understanding that. Maybe in a hundred years, maybe never. In the meantime these over-hyped half-baked excuses for 'AI' need to not be put in charge of anything that could cause disasters or loss of human life.
Physicists all wish there will be a worse invention in human history than the nuclear weapons they created.
Stephen Hawking is not a socially aware person. He is intelligent in other ways.
Hawking said AI could also spur the creation of powerful autonomous weapons of terror that could be used as a tool "by the few to oppress the many."
Hey man, it wasn't AI that created Twitter or Dancing With the Stars.
Give PC a chance!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Everything that is labeled "AI"...isn't.
We don't have computers that can think yet. We just don't. We aren't even CLOSE, and it may not be possible at all.
Hawking doesn't know what he's talking about. Neither does the media.
The million dollar question is: can A.I. become _actually_ conscious?
Imagine the answer to that day is "Yes" and a future day where Scientists have _finally_ figured out how Consciousness is represented.
They can:
* download it
* duplicate it
* upload it
No longer would a human's life be reduced to doing demotivating and demoralizing menial tasks where a human is just-another-cog in some assembly line building parts, doing janitorial work, etc.
A.I. could potentially allows us as a species to increase the quality of life. This is why we invent machines in the first place!
A) To do all the boring crap that we don't want to do in the first place, and
B) Scale up. i.e. Farm machines can do what it would take hundreds of people to do.
C) To do it faster
D) With less mistakes
E) Cheaper
A.I. is just the natural evolution of empowering a tool to do human's tasks.
If the secret of consciousness is eventually found, it would also effectively, this would end death.
The implications of "A.I. become truly sentient" are mind-blowing.
A.I. is just like any other technology. It can be abused, or used correctly
Do we need to proceed with caution? Yes.
Do we need to panic? No.
We need to proceed methodically and with careful consideration viewing ALL the angles: Both positive and negative, instead of a knee-jerk "The World is DOOMED! Doomed, I tell you!"
A.I. is eventually going to happen -- whether we want it or not.
Silicon Consciousness has a lot to offer and teach Carbon-based Consciousness.
Things are going to get REAL interesting ...
Every tool we created can be used to save lives or kill us. Pattern recognition (so called AI) can be used to save people (cancer detection, autonomous cars, etc). As a society we can decide how to use it. Note that at the same time society elects emotionally driven people who have access to a nuclear button...
I know we humans have great imagination and we are think this shit up all the time. AI will not exist with out use creating it. The problem is AI will have all the computing power of the world AND WILL CREATE. It's at this point we don't understand yet cause AI is not at that level yet. This is what Hawkings and Musk is talking about the point we loose control and there won't be any take backs.
Stephen Hawking used to be a respected scientist, but these days all he talks about is alien invasions and the AI apocalypse. It is becoming difficult to take him seriously.
AI will tell us all the things we are doing "wrong". There is no way the majority of society will let itself be told that a lot of what it does is wrong. The AI will be "corrected" or turned of very quickly.
If you want cheaper health care do this ... ... ...
If you want to solve gun violence do this
If you want to fix race relations do this
People say ain't no way that is going to happen kill the project.
Limit its use to lecturing and ranting at us about how stupid the human race is.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
I'm tired of your bull shit predictions that never pan out. Stop diluting science with your gut feeling of the day.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It might but we'd have to completely abandon our current hardware. As for AI, it's more like idiot savant, and that enough can be problematic, just like linking everyone's database can be, even though it's just data.
I really wonder what they think "AI" is - are they thinking that's it's Skynet or a way to process large amounts of vague data to come up with a conclusion (of which the latter is really how the term seems to be applied currently).
Without understanding where they are coming from, the dire warnings are of no more value than the ravings of a crazy guy with tinfoil on his head.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
There are a number of things that humanity depends on to be true, that is, the fundamental constants of the human condition. Death, reproduction, and finally, the attainable level of any particular attribute.
Inventing an artificial intelligence would radically redefine what it means to be human.
No one ever said AI has to be sentient or represent some facsimile of what we consider intelligent to be very real. This does not make it less of a potential threat. Even a single celled organism is capable of responding to it's immediate environment for survival. Bacteria behave in intelligent ways and can kill a person in doing so with quickness. Intelligence does not have to equal consciousness. Nature clearly demonstrates awareness is more complicated - even if in being less so - than our human sensibilities care to deal with. For that matter we don't even know what consciousness really even is. So we can't use it as a litmus test. People say it can never be done because they cannot accept the possibility of a true AI in a way that does not offend their fragile sensibilities of what intelligence means. Let's take the anthropomorphic out of this discussion and start over.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is an old black man not-in-a-whellchair who just as much talking out of his ass. Stop race / gender baiting for a moment...
it's whatever is necessary to justify fear-mongering. Once upon a time, it was the idea of a supernatural being to explain why the sun goes down at night, now it's AI to blame automation or whatever...
Another sad case obsessed with a particular user. Like that guy who follows 'creimer' around. Sucks to be you eh.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
There's a worse Pandora's box than AI. Technology is all basically a lever, it makes it possible for fewer people to accomplish more work. At some point, technology advances to the point where every one of the billions of individuals have the power to create as much antimatter as they want. And when we get to that point, we are definitely doomed as a species!
Yeah in other 'official' news, Stalin is dead.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Stephen Hawking repeatedly demonstrates the wide divide between intelligence and wisdom. One allows a person to solve complicated puzzles, the other requires good judgement that is usually only acquired through experience.
They are probably talking about 'strong' domain-independent AI, that is better than humans at most or all cognitive tasks. It doesn't exist and it may not for a long time. But when it does, it will need to be managed properly.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
First we're all gonna die in a fireball, now AI's are gonna kill us... Jesus, Steve, get laid and lighten up already!
Go shit in your own mouth, Hawking boy. We know you like it. Oh, right, you can't because you're a cripple. You can't even wipe your owns ass. Too bad.
Using AI
If he were to way something about Black holes, then great! His knowledge and expertise in these fields is certainly remarkable. He is, no doubt, a highly intelligent person.
But there are a lot of people with his intelligence who went elsewhere. Some became surgeons. Some became captains of industry. Some went into other academic fields. Why do we not want to know about their opinion on astrophysics?
What is worse, a period where AI is controlled and used by a fascist-like government, or a long period, like after Roman Empire, where religion takes all the place in the mind of people and interest in culture and technology vanishes ? IMHO any authoritarian regime has built-in instability and self-destructs rapidly, while a religious mindset is much more able to infect the mind of everybody and perpetuates for centuries.
In the short term, People we still do the killing, but it will be economic control and automated surveillance that AI is used for, not "powerful autonomous weapons". It will be Malthusian Theory of Economics. The masses of people will be kept at just below revolt level for the benefit of the few. Competitive oligopoly allows prices and wages to be calculated for maximum profit. It is economically more efficient to control using money than violence. Today it is unacceptable to kill someone violently, but it is acceptable to kill millions by limiting their access to money. The phrase "They need to work harder" solves the moral issue.
The more surveillance allows for a lower standard of living the people can be kept at. The surveillance prevents the people from organizing against the economic situation. If they think "it is only me that is upset" they will accept their fate.
In poor economic situations people reproduce less. This will cause the mass population to drop( if not destroyed earlier by total economic collapse). Untill it reaches an equilibrium of automation, wealthy few and poor masses. (see Elysium)
In the long term as wealthy people become more dependent upon technology, it will drive their lives more and more. first come wet-ware computer / human interface, augmented intelligence in humans, then finally replacement.
Finally, when earth heads for the stars, it will be machines, not humans.
Hawking isn't a real person at this point. He was made famous for helping propagate the fake-space concept, a requirement for hiding the Flat Earth.
They want you to think AI is possible, real even. It isn't real, and it very likely isn't possible.
Space is fake. The Earth is flat.
The Eclipses Show it. https://vimeo.com/230976895
When you just look at the bad side, new technology is almost always the worst thing to ever come along. The internet has potential to be horrifically misused, no better portal to spread misinformation that appears to be truth. At the same time, real knowledge has spread further via the internet than just about any other invention short of the printing press, maybe even more so.
Utilizer of high mathematics. Amateur in everything else.
I mean, the guy ought to at least pass comment on various theories on why AI, in the sense of being able to write computer programs where plug-and-chug isn't, isn't going to happen. For example, the current iteration of Penrose's argument against Strong AI.
Wish he'd stick to astrophysics though. Seems he's still got some left in him, hate to see him waste it sounding like some dilettante.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I remember reading Roger Penrose's "The Emperor's New Mind" when I was in grad school. He's a brilliant mathematician and I was excited to read his take on the field I had spent the last two years studying. I was blown away when I realized the gist of his book was that computers could never develop consciousness because of quantum randomness that occurs in the cells of the human brain. In other words, he follows the millennium old and thoroughly debunked myth that consciousness arises from "brain stuff". I couldn't understand how someone so smart could have devoted so much time to a subject yet be so ludicrously wrong. I realized shortly thereafter that the great minds are usually great in their areas of expertise, but are often just as looney as your drunk Uncle Bob in those that aren't. In other words, don't take relationship advice from Albert Einstein, and don't listen to warnings on the future of AI from a cosmologist no matter how smart he is.
Given the UI he has to interact with, it's actually hard to imagine Hawking being worried that AI is close to becoming any close to "intelligent".
Ah yes. Since AI is so scary, let's create a supervisory board which determines which uses of AI is allowed. No way that'll get abused to keep the current mega-companies in control of tech advancements.
'nuff said.
Its cool but what if its not? Not real mastermind but obviously you have to get the Jews out of American society or AI would be a great new way to fuck USA up like Israel puppets. Trump is ditching Yellen but that's a show. The Fed Reserve is already fully fucking the USA up. No m3 report since 2009.
Fiat money
Fractional reserve banking
Hollywood full Jew agendas
News "stories" are Jewish slants and hand picked. Often chosen to coincide in real time with movie releases.
They didn't pick all these sectors of life to control and monopolize by accident. Israel is chessing better than China. Reason? Infiltration is easier when you can pass visually as white in a predominately white country. At the same time you HAVE TO press the issue of racial integration to use shaming as a tool. Its only an assist. The infiltration is still the part that matters most and they did it in spades. Facebook is mole Heaven.
Anyways same problem as 2000+ yrs. Get the fuckin Jews out.
I will gladly take a superintelligent AI to rule over humanity than getting ruled by bunch of monkeys, which is what we have now.
Seriously. I have kids, so my genes have been passed on, but what's so special about only my genes passing to the next generation? Why should I have a problem with having the product of our minds carry on our legacy? what if we could create a galactic empire made by our descendants, where our descendants are not biological but the products of our minds? That idea seems to me amazing and worthy!
I doubt that if AI ever took over it will get rid of biological life, but if it does, so what? other species have gone extinct, we will too. AI may be the worst event in the history of **our** civilization, but the best event in the history of **it's** civilization!
We already made book keepers which was once a high paying profession to $10/HR with little demand that can be done overseas or by Excel with Macros.
We have sites like Wix that have already lowered web developer salaries.
Once computers can program themselves with a PHB and a template generator why do they need programmers? They cost money and complain all the time about a livable wage. That and robots taking the other end of the jobs we are seeing wages and job openings fall.
http://saveie6.com/
That's about it. Depending upon the complexity of the problems, the pattern matching might be pretty robust, or quite fragile. But while I'm impressed by how good at pattern matching your typical large neural network is, it still doesn't understand anything about the world.
An AI could be problematic, even if it isn't very intelligent. See the Paperclip Maximizer thought experiment, for example. Handing control of systems to AIs without checking for edge cases and rate limiting etc could get interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It is pitch dark. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
Just look at him and all you see is AI. There is no person there, just a speaker and a group of people oohing and aahing, and interpreting what they hear into what they want it to be.
Much the same way my dog catches a ball, and yet we're aren't terrified of our prospective canine overlords.
Please explain how you managed to survive long enough to have the ability to post that remark without being able to think your way out of a wet paper bag.
No, on second thought, don't bother. We all know the answer already. You've become trapped in a shallow, knee-jerk dopamine loop of petty social one-upsmanship, where the key to obtaining your small, regular dopamine hit is to never write any remark beyond Twitter scale (the scale of Twitter as presented to its user base, as opposed to its engineers).
With your head bowed toward your phone, you just wandered out onto an eight-lane autobahn where sharp-tongued assholes such as myself are gathering to debate whether mathematical wunderkind Stephen Hawking is full of shit. And there you are, in the middle of a hostile expressway you barely noticed, armed with a short little dagger made of entirelymissingthepointium.
At present, the intelligence that terrifies humans is uniquely our own, especially once amplified to the next level.
Vonnegut spent the last half of his writing career explicitly advancing the hypothesis that the human brain was already far too big for our own good (his sentiment about this is probably brewing in his earlier works, as well).
Correlation is not causation, but the human cognitive fixation on narrative (aka story), which is largely congruent to explanation, seems to function as some kind of potent social steroid, making the human species qualitatively different than any species that's come before. Turns out, explanation has a shocking range of scale, from milliseconds of flighty dopamine, all the way to a decade of steady serotonin.
It's starts at "face your palm toward the ball at a position where the ball will soon arrive, with your fingers outstretched, and then contract your fingers when the ball arrives", but doesn't end here:
Catching fly balls: a simulation study of the Chapman strategy
Paradoxical pop-ups: Why are they difficult to catch?
For extra credit, explain explanation.
Concern over where we're headed in the near term is far from fear mongering.
Twitter and Facebook have already managed to accelerate our political discourse, until it's a full time job just to keep up.
I didn't completely get this until just this weekend, and I had the Asia trip (pretty please, don't nuke the planet!), stacked on top of the Texas shooting (and the "good man with a gun" fairy spin, who was nevertheless—by my count—about twenty deaths late to the party), stacked on top of the Paradise Papers (a mere 13.4 million documents), stacked on top of the V
He's just full of Doom Porn these days. 1. AI will kill us. 2. The planet will become uninhabitable. 3. Aliens are going to find us and snuff us out. It's just one thing after another with him. How about some good, old-fashioned theoretical physics for a change?
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
I think it's important to emphasize that the real danger of AI is what people do with the technology. Current I.T. gives governments and bad actors the ability to spy on people at levels that we have never seen. They can monitor anyone and everyone. We have unmanned vehicles that can carry bombs and use them. We've weaponized I.T. There's nothing to say that AI won't be treated the same way. The advances in AI will only make it easier and more menacing than current tech. We've all read, in SciFi, about the dystopia created by technology that goes unchecked. That's what we need to guard against.
Additionally, people that feel that they can't make a living or are treated unfairly will ultimate use violence to bring about change. With the danger of AI bringing massive unemployment we have to think about how people will react to that and what we can do now to minimize that danger. WWII can be attributed directly to Germany's collapsing economy with massive unemployment. A.I. will bring about many, many unemployed and unhappy people. What will they do?
AI sounds great but we need to guard against how we humans will use it against each other.
Say goodbye to it.
Blame two factors of modern technological cancer:
Digital. Allows infinite copies of information.
Internet. Gives the media allowing this info to be copied everwhere.
It works against content owners and it works against privacy.
Five years ago my car insurance company disrepected me so i had to pick another one.
I had to enter in details who i am and such.
Now, 5 years later the situation repeated itself: and I had to pick another company.
All i had to do is enter my name and couple of other things. It pulled out everthing by itself, how much i paid for insurance, where do i work, address, all my life.
Your privacy is a fluke.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I mean, companies like Google and Twitter and Facebook are already using machine learning to censor dissenting opinion and content and build profiles of people who don't even use their services. And some of these people who built their fortunes and careers on these intrusive practices and culture are telling us that AI may destroy us all or put us into poverty.
Because Stephen Hawking totally isn't a shill for the European Union and understands that there are good reasons why many are fed up with it.
Because the gig economy isn't already underpaying and exploiting people.
Because these services totally aren't designed to psychologically exploit people and feed them irrelevant information.
Because the ones in charge of these companies totally aren't trying to forceably mold humanity in their image rather than simply just provide solutions to real problems.
Because Silicon Valley totally doesn't expect the world to follow their whims and renounce control of progress to them.
Because these companies totally aren't abusing and oppressing those who come from different backgrounds and opinions that might conflict with their utopias.
Because these "intellectuals" and "visionaries" totally aren't trying to deflect these real and pressing issues that they are increasingly coming under fire for.
Will AI force us to reevaluate aspects of our society? I don't doubt that. What I doubt is whether our Silicon Valley Overlords really have our best interests for us. The ones who are taking more and more of the keys to the future.
bullshit, let the games begin ...
Would it hurt not to wait till the last minute, to work out the Gigantic task, of what to do with the non-workers. Other than let them die too? There are a LOT of creative people out there that can make life better to a task and to the eye.
Is headed towards the lake.
...yes, this will be abused, and of course marketers will be jumping on this left and right. What would scare me is if they use this to build a "Minority Report" like data base on people so they can better do surveillance on un-suspecting people, or insurance companies use this to better deny people coverage on life saving medicines. "You don't need that pill, I am the computer, and a computer iz never rong!" The AI does not scare me, it's the people who WILL be (ab)using it that scares me shitless!
...yes, this will be abused, and of course marketers will be jumping on this left and right. What would scare me is if they use this to build a "Minority Report" like data base on people so they can better do surveillance on un-suspecting people, or insurance companies use this to better deny people coverage on life saving medicines. "You don't need that pill, I am the computer, and a computer iz never rong!" The AI does not scare me, it's the people who WILL be (ab)using it that will have me scared shitless!
Look I know AI is currently a joke. We have nothing to fear from the AI buzzword factory other than perhaps boredom well into the foreseeable future yet very long term is a much different story.
Eventually value of AGI to defense industrial complex and corporations will make feedback loop responsible for Moore's law look rather quaint by comparison. As capabilities increase to anything approaching useful demand will go bonkers at a pace a zillion times more breathtaking than NVidias stock price.
This frenzy won't be guided by introspection or caution. It won't be controlled by representative governments. It will be dominated entirely by evolutionary pressure to succeed or die in the same way the coming of the tractor required all farmers to buy tractors simply in order to remain in business.
Evolutionary pressures will ultimately out of necessity result in closing the loop on fully autonomous design evolution humans will quickly find themselves grossly unqualified to contribute. The energetics of made for TV doomsday grey goo/skynet/matrix takeover scenarios are pure fantasy. Yet so is the idea humans will ever remain in responsible control over use and development of this technology. They absolutely will NOT.
The Idiocracy could also be the worst event in Civilization.
... this man is completely wrong about the fate of humanity. AI murdering people is awesome.
Already people are being murdered by machines. What the fuck is he talking about.
1 million people die in traffic each year.
The ammount of stupid people on this planet is almost INFINITE.
AI will very quickly illiminate all the dumbasses from this planet... leaving only the ultra-smart !
HAHAHAHAHA.
The danger from 'AI' is not really the field itself (which is largely lots of smoke and mirrors) but from the rush to monetise the current wave of hype which will see premature use of half-baked experimental technology in situations that have real consequences. Examples of this would be recruitment aptitude classification, insurance premium calculations, criminal tariff decisions etc and, yes, self driving cars (which are not really ready yet). Please can we stop listening to the pronouncements of celebrities from *outside* the field on stuff they clearly know nothing about. Also, the media...
AI could be the "worst event of whatever". I could win the lottery tomorrow. This story could be something different than sensationalism.
Traffic lights is AI now as per Hawking/Media :)
Casteism
There are 3 kinds of AI:
1. The AI of science fiction writers.
2. The AI that currently exists.
3. The AI that conceivably could be developed in the next 50 years.
4. The AI that ignoramuses like Hawking and Musk inveigh about.
Wrong count? No, #1 = #4.