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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.
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.
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
Oppenheimer, Gates and company should have gotten the Nobel peace prize.
Longest period of relative peace in human history.
That said: Hawking has crossed the Shockley/Chomsky line. He is now talking out of his ass about things he knows nothing about.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
Whoops, didn't preview, and screwed up the close bold tag. Here is the fixed version:
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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...
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.
So you're saying he's incapable of learning anything that's not related to theoretical physics and cosmology? Don't forget the amount of time he can dedicate to search and think about a problem. After all, he became Director of Research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology within the University of Cambridge by sitting on his ass all day long, literally.
#DeleteFacebook
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I thought there were millions of people killed in the Soviet Union, Southeast Asia, South America, weren't there several instances of genocide over the last 70 years?
Peace between super powers is not the same as peace.
Physicists all wish there will be a worse invention in human history than the nuclear weapons they created.
Hawking did not invent any nuclear weapons.
He just invented Black Holes, which just suck up stuff instead of exploding it and irradiating it.
I'm not sure which members of the "nuclear-weapon states" club have Black Holes in their arsenals.
In Poland, right before New Year's Eve, you can buy backyard ballistics at dubious street markets that would take out a German Leopard tank. But I haven't seen a Black Hole bomb offered.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
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.
So you're saying he's incapable of learning anything that's not related to theoretical physics and cosmology?
Yes, and by this joined Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson's club of "scientist" talking out of their asses.
Solving violence is easy... just round up every person commiting a violent act and shoot them twice in the chest, one in the head.
Nukes kept Stalin out of western Europe. It is that simple.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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...
The speed of light in a vaccum is a constant, death/reproduction are just a concepts.
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.
Yeah we'd be so much better off if we didn't know about atoms, wouldn't we? Go back and swing in the trees if that's what you want.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
He has zero credibility outside of theoretical physics and cosmology. So yes, we should ignore his utterly facile points that have been raised decades ago.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Aw, did Bill or Neil come down on the wrong side of something for you? Let me guess, seeing as this is Slashdot. Climate.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Whether it is conscious or not is completely irrelevant with respect to whether it's dangerous or not. It doesn't have to be self aware and it doesn't have to be malicious or power hungry to be a threat.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
He hasn't had much credibility even in physics for several decades. The last time he was able to stir any kind of passion was when he said information was permanently destroyed in black holes. Leonard Susskind, among others, showed him to be wrong, and there hasn't been much of anything since.
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
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.
Hawking doesn't present any real argument to support his point of view, he just makes wild hypotheses. So he obviously didn't think too much about it.
Shockley was a smart guy, he could learn about Eugenics.
Chomsky wasn't stupid, until he took up politics.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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.
I think he changed his name to defeat or inhibit well-known AI algorithms but has sacrificed his own intellect in the process. Have a little compassion.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
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.
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.
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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.
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/
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.
Since its all theoretical (there is no AI capable enough of doing what he is saying right now), I would think this is more like philosophy. If you didn't take philosophy in school, you might not see its value. On the contrary, having very smart people try and answer unanswerable questions is extremely valuable to lay a groundwork for debate. Some might say that exploring unanswerable questions is one of the deepest types of thinking.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
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.
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.
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!
I've got an unanswerable question right here for you:
#DeleteFacebook
he became Director (...) by sitting on his ass all day long, literally.
This is also a potential problem. By being stuck in a chair "all day long", unable to move even an arm, he probably tends to get a bit paranoid - and this could be an example of that.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
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
The first outcome: conscious sex toys.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
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...
Summary of Proost: 'Unanswerable questions are a waste of time. Go out and get drunk and laid.'
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I once read that the biggest advantage of philosophy was that it enables people to recognize bad arguments. I haven't come up with a bigger advantage yet.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Traffic lights is AI now as per Hawking/Media :)
Casteism