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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.
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.
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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.
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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.
Alternately, we might be less than 10 years away. We don't really know how far off we are or what the dangers are because we don't know what a strong general AI will really look like.
Talking about the dangers of string AI now is a bit like talking about super-weapons in 1920. Sure they saw how science + warfare could increase destructiveness, but there's no more reason they should have anticipated Nukes in 20-30 years in 1920 than 1820.
I stole this Sig
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.