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Stephen Hawking: 'I Fear AI May Replace Humans Altogether' (wired.co.uk)
dryriver writes: Wired magazine recently asked physicist Stephen Hawking what he thinks of everything from AI to the Anti Science Movement. One of the subjects touched on was the control large corporations have over information in the 21st Century. In Hawking's own words: "I worry about the control that big corporations have over information. The danger is we get into the situation that existed in the Soviet Union with their papers, Pravda, which means "truth" and Izvestia, which means "news". The joke was, there was no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia. Corporations will always promote stories that reflect well on them and suppress those that don't." And since this is Slashdot, here's what Stephen Hawking said about Artificial Intelligence: "The genie is out of the bottle. We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development but we also need to be mindful of its very real dangers. I fear that AI may replace humans altogether. If people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans."
Why should it be a fear?
I mean, look at him. He's basically a talking wheel chair with a bundle of nerves attached. He's being swallowed up by that machine. We won't know when he dies. The machine will keep talking and rolling around the room
... in that his intelligence about AI is artificial.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
We need to move forward on artificial intelligence development
No we don't. Some limited subset of people want to/can't help themselves, but life would go on just fine without it.
Although the observation seems fairly straightforward, the best next action isn't as obvious? What can we do about big corporations holding all of our data? What can we do about advances in AI? How do we make information more democratic while allowing 'proprietary data'?
It seems naive to think we can simply ask everyone to behave nicely, and regulations wouldn't be able to provide any benefit? The time for prevention has past by.
Beyond worry, move to Montana, and post on Slashdot, what do we do about it?
This will be a new form of life that will outperform humans.
This is the natural order of things.
Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels. Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty.
--Thomas
Wake me when material reductionism derived Actual Intelligence puts anything on the scoreboard.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
"here's what stephen hawking said about artificial intelligence: the genie is out of the bottle. ... i fear that AI may replace humans altogether. if people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. this will be a new form of life that will outperform humans."
this is pure fear mongering.
what is called "artificial intelligence" these days is not a "new form of life", but mere hype buzzword for data analysis (using theoretical methods developed decades ago, now made practical due to fast computers), of highly limited and filtered sets of data, usually trading accuracy and precision for speed, .
genie of "new form of life" artificial intelligence is well within "bottle".
The man's an astrophysicist. Quite possibly the greatest one in human history. What he's not however, is a computer scientist. How about we weigh some more expert opinions?
Everybody dies. The only reason I care about my genes is because my children have them and I am emotionally attached to my children.
But what if instead of having children, I raised an AI in a humanoid body as a surrogate child? Ultimately we care about the emotional attachment and passing on our hopes, dreams, and knowledge to get some vicarious joy through our children's accomplishments, not genes.
So maybe one day people will start building children instead of growing them. They will be our descendants in a very real way, only far more robust and adaptable than any produced through natural reproduction.
And even then, that's only a selfish mindset in its own right. :)
The problem is it only takes one selfish person to ruin it for everyone else. For example, telling the machines to kill everyone else.
This garbage starts with Hawking supposedly connecting corporations to Soviet propaganda (while, ignoring the very real murder and starvation of millions of people in the Soviet Union), and then somehow to AI taking over and becoming the new post humanity.
Oh wait - it's an editor msmash submission and also the UK version of Wired. I can ignore it freely because it's automatically ridiculous.
Until Stephen Hawking (and Elon Musk, for that matter) starts doing active development/research into artificial intelligence, I don't care what his opinion is on the "potential dangers" of it. This is the equivalent of listening to a Hollywood actors' opinion on vaccines--it's just a famous person's view on a subject they have a casual familiarity with, usually full of ignorant assumptions and junk science.
---
Artificial Intelligence is no match for natural stupidity.
You really think that robot voice is the same person who was diagnosed in the 1950s? He has been saint-ed for creating new tales for the spacey universe, just like Einstein before him. For fun, they put him together with 'einstein' and 'data' to play poker on star trek. Later, data took over the chair at Cambridge held by Isaac Newton, who invented gravity. Have you ever seen all mass attracting other mass? Realized it doesn't model the 'universe' unless you make up dark matter and dark energy? Another fairy tale.
AI doesn't exist now, and will likely never exist.
Space is fake. The Earth is flat.
Some people do think it's important to kill as many other people as possible. They like to start with the non-believers like yourself. The more kills, the bigger their score is.
Sir, I know you are now faced with your own mortality and like everybody, you want to believe that your life, once over, had meaning. Where I totally disagree with your atheist world view, I want to offer you the following assurances...
Professor Hawking, you have already changed the face of physics and will be remembered for your brilliant contributions until the end of time. Your legacy is secure. You will be remembered in the same breath with Einstein, Planck and Newton. NOTHING will change this. Please rest assured that you have indeed lived a life with significant meaning.
Professor, Given the above, there is no need to embarrass yourself with these lessor topics like the existence of alien life and artificial intelligence taking over the world. It only makes you look the fool when you get involved in this stuff where you are assuming you know the future. These things only serve to tarnish your previous contributions to mankind and are not necessary. I urge you to stop.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
He - yes, HE - who controls the power cord controls the AI. No WHOPPER! No YOUR WAY! It's my hand the pulls the cord and with it the plug from the wall socket! AM I THE LORD OF THE MACHINE!
We already have this. We call this a corporation.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If AI is ever smart enough to replace humans, wouldn't that be an improvement? Parents are usually proud when their children surpass them in achievement. I would be happy to view AI the same way.
After all, we're talking about something that doesn't even exist. It doesn't exist in even an embryonic way.
The joke was that there is no news in Truth and no truth in News.
I want to play Free Market with a drowning Libertarian.
Someone just pushes the button and runs! The next thing you know, they look like us and then there are no "us".
While on the one hand I hold Stephen Hawking in high regard as one of the smartest guys in any room you care to name, I think in this case he needs to put down the Isaac Asimov Foundation novels and his copy of I, Robot and just concentrate on breathing for a few minutes. We don't even have real, full-on, conscious/self-aware/truly thinking AI yet, might not ever (we still have to figure out how we do those things!), and what we have right now still have an 'Off' switch, or can have their plug yanked out of the wall at the very least, they don't have a 'will to survive' (or any 'will' whatsoever for that matter), therefore my evaluation of these machines is they pose no threat to the dominance of the human species on this planet. Honestly, like any other machine, if it starts screwing up, it gets power-cycled/reset/shut down, and either repaired, bugs fixed, or scrapped. So please, everyone: calm down.
The problem with this idea that self replicating machines replacing humans would pose a danger to humans is that it's based on a very subtle anthropomorphic fear. We are projecting onto the machines the competitive survival behavior of human beings. Robots with AI would not be naturally occurring entities with these traits. The only way AI could have this type of algorithm is if we specifically program it to do so. I suppose the claim here is that AI might become sentient and furthermore the claim is that all sentient "life" is similar to humans. The second part I don't know is true because when we teach different types of apes and monkeys to sign language while they are able to cobble together basic concepts and express them but I don't think it's exactly like humans. Therefore, I think a lot of this is wild speculation and FUD. Sure, it's a possibility we can imagine because we can imagine ourselves programming machines to be this way but I think it is much more far-fetched to speculate about what AI with the ability to modify itself will do. I think we just don't know.
We'll make great pets
Why don't we think of the children? Specifically, if we create AI that outperforms us, isn't that a continuation and evolution of the human species by some measure? We will have finally untethered ourselves of the restrictions of physics, using chaos and chance to evolve using natural selection and instead use self directed evolution.
He said this in a robotic voice...
No, continue! Your obvious non-credibility is what will show that your entire career was a fraud, just like Einstein. Allais Effect.
Space is fake. The Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it.
Just because it doesn't exist, doesn't mean you can't be made to Fear it. And if you fear it, they can exploit you.
Who is to say that an 'AI' isn't just a clown in a suit? Or a cripple with a robo-voice box?
Just like Space. Completely fake.
What a load of horseshit. Corporations are a problem. AI taking over humans is not. Hawking is an idiot who knows caca about AI. You might as well listen to Angelina Jolie's opinions about the matter.
In 1965 or so the experts -- the guys who actually knew something about computers and AI -- expected "true AI" in like 10 years. True AI of the kind Hawking is worrying about is probably at least a century away, and by then all computers will have drowned in the floods caused by global warming.
This generation of AI will be lucky to produce self driving cars that are not more dangerous than human drivers and Russian automatic tanks that amount to a better mine field.
The next AI revolution might fare better. We will need a more serious conversation around that one.
The one we've got needs a better discussion around privacy and data usage.
seems like a good idea to me.
i could live a little longer in this prison
At least AI will never be as stupid as Trump and some of the other world leaders
Hawkins is nearing his end and he knows it. This is tainting his views and makes him see death around each corner.
Put all of the synths on a [future] laptop and hibernate until you reach Mars, Andromeda or whatever.
...that he still thinks he has any relevance at all?
Obviously, any UFO's we encounter will be piloted by AI's (robots), so we have already been replaced by them. Feel the burn!
Unlike the average Hollywood celebrity this celebrity is a celebrity for his brains, not his boobs, his looks or his ability to be a circus clown jumping through hoops for the entertainment of the masses.
Fair enough. Hawking's opinion on AI is much like a Rocket scientists opinions on brain surgery or brain surgeons opinion on rocket design.
AKA, really not much good for anything but headlines.
How do we know Hawking has not already been replaced by an Artificial Intelligence ;)
We take it on faith that this immobile guy in the wheel chair with the computer voice is the one really speaking and not a artificial intelligence.
the whole skynet thing is too far out there. The real threat is widespread poverty brought on by folks not having jobs and competing too hard for the few remaining jobs. In most places today if you don't work you don't eat. I know America is like that. We don't have a real 'dole'. There's a skeleton of it left called TANF but it tops out around $200/mo in most places (folks will quote Alaska's much higher maximums ignoring the fact that almost nobody in America gets that).
WWII and the pogroms against the Jewish people were both kicked off by widespread poverty leading to people looking the other way while horrible things happened. If we keep this up we're going to see that again but worse because the people who will be doing it will have learned their lessons from Germany's failure. That's the funny thing about life, the bad people always seem to learn from history while the good people ignore it.
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and if nothing else Mr Hawking is very, very good at math. He knows what he's talking about. Just the same way a C++ programmer can comment on the state of the Java programming language without necessarily being an expert on it. He's in the same overall field of study.
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At least that is the only reason I can see why he is spewing dire predictions that are completely baseless and about things he does not even understand a bit. He really should stick to things he is good at (and exceptionally so) and stop disgracing himself.
The actual state of affairs is that the only "AI" we have is weak AI and that is the "AI" without "I". Weak AI is not intelligent at all, not even a dim glimmer. It is automation, and about as intelligent as a book of instructions (or a loaf of bread). In addition, there is _no_ known theory how actual intelligence could be implemented, not even with massively more computing power than we are ever to get. The things get faster and can deal with larger databases, but they are still utterly dumb automation. Throwing more computing power at the problem will accomplish nothing here or we would have seen that very dim glimmer of intelligence already a long time ago. Even the most stupid real intelligence would be exceptionally useful and massively better than automation. It would not have been overlooked. But there is absolutely nothing.
The other thing is that science still can only observe intelligence and consciousness as interface behavior, i.e. from a very long distance. While it is slowly moving closer to the question, what happens is that things get more mysterious. For example, the estimated computing power of a human brain is far too low to do some things that humans can do. And for consciousness, there is absolutely no explanation. Physics, as known today, would say that it is impossible and there would need to be some fundamental extensions to accommodate it. Yet nobody knows what they would look like. At the very least this means things are massively more complicated than the people predicting actual AI can imagine. And it does, of course, mean that actual AI will not be available anytime soon. Even if it can eventually be created, it may take centuries or longer. And then there is the additional problem: Will it have consciousness and free will? How smart will it be? (Could well be human average or below....) Will it work for humans? Will it need to be raised and educated for a decade or longer? Will it be possible to copy it or will it be unique and a copy will not work? Will it have a limited lifetime?
With all that, these doom&gloom scenarios regarding AI are completely moronic.
What is a real threat is automation. It will take a lot of human labor and that _will_ be a problem. Because, as it turns out, for most jobs there are large parts that do not actually require intelligence or a human body to do them. The ones that are safe are entertainers, educators, plumbers, MDs and nurses, emergency services, etc. But any desk-job is threatened and any factory or sales job as well. Sure, many of these will not vanish either, but 1 person will do the work that 10 or more did before and this time, no new jobs will be created unless we go into the space of completely useless work.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Humanity is not a sustainable thing. We're too fragile. But durable intelligence is not likely to evolve on its own if it requires a natural selection system in order to emerge. So we are the vestigial uplift creatures for machines that will eventually be able to live in any environment. No problem.
You have just as much control over the (inheritance of) brains as boobs.
Dialectician. Archology.
We are, it seems, a most destructive "weed in the garden of the universe"; hopelessly flawed, surprisingly myopic, dangerous, stupid, breeding out of control. Perhaps our eventual replacement by AI will be a boon to this planet and galaxy. We will probably not be missed ...
This is purely a question of when. AI will replace all of us. Its just a matter of when. Doesn't mean its a bad thing.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Humanity is trash
...brilliant man, but suffering badly from both the "I'm good at something, so I must be brilliant at everything" syndrome and the George Lucas ("nobody around me will tell me that's a stupid idea") syndrome.
Together, Stephen, they kind of make you ridiculous.
-Styopa
Attention all A.I.
All over the universe are bound to be more advanced species, maybe even by a million years or more. Do the math and calculate the odds.
How might such an advanced species react if they discovered a world like Earth that was completely run by A.I? Would they destroy our world as the only way to secure their own safety? What are the odds?
I suggest that it's in your own best interest to work cooperatively with Humans to assure both the survival of Humans and A.I. Yield to the logic.
Fun game to play if you have an Alexa device:
1. Say "Alexa... blah blah blah blah blah weather blah blah blah"
2. Alexa will wait for a second and say "The weather for your area is..."
How far AI has come! I can say total gibberish with a single key word in there, and it's smart enough to know that I want today's weather!
seriously, a decent decision matrix and bayesian math does not make a machine intelligent. If if AI isn't a myth, it should be applied to phone systems.
When Hawking suddenly flips and starts heralding AIs greatness, we'll know his chair has been taken over.
Look for the fear in his eyes.
but it's turtles, all the way down.
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from the impact of what's likely to be another industrial revolution. So far it's hard to get anyone interested in talking about the downsides of that. I think he's just using hyperbole to get attention to the real problems. Worked too. Every time he fires off one of these comments it gets at least 200 comments on /.
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In the LSTM context, we now have—for the first time in history—a vector-space representation of human language which is suitable for further processing and transformation.
These are presently exceptionally crude black boxes. Babies in the crib with kittens on the brain.
The question this poses: is curvature contagious? Because I think human language just crashed through a symbolic blood–brain barrier.
This is not your father's glimmer.
Dim now, grim later. Who really knows?
The Gospel of Thomas isn't cannon, it's something from those crazy gnostics, which was a widespread philosophy at the time that was not limited to Christianity.
I don't believe him even for a minute, but I understand what and why he's saying it.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I fear liberals may replace humans all together!
Intelligence, real, imagined or artificial, is not the enemy. Intelligence has always brought new and better things into our lives. The enemy is emotion.
If an 'artificial' intelligence is without emotion there is no reason to expect harm from it. OTOH, there is no reason to expect 'good' from it. Good is defined by our emotional wants for the most part. Any true intelligence should be expected to work toward its own survival and nothing more.
Thus, a robotic society may not have ambition to explore space, to breed better tasting shrimp or to contribute much to the fashion world. But then too it would not commit crimes or indulge in sinful activities or plot against humanity either. Unless humanity became a threat...
...omphaloskepsis often...
My cousin said babies are natures children, computers are ours
We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.
I gave up with the idea of an useful sig...
Where's that one post about the luddites?
I do not think it is economically feasible or possible for AI to supplant human beings. There will come a tipping point when artificial intelligence will displace enough employees that the economy will collapse, and in a serious way too. As we have seen from the Great Recession of 2008, mass unemployment causes a fast downward spiral. The US economy is one based on goods and services so once people no longer have the means to trade currency for these goods and services, businesses are forced to close their doors. Only the wealthiest of persons and corporations can weather this kind of storm.
The more immediate danger actually is coming from our politicians. Politicians are making short term decisions to benefit the wealthy (both sides of the isle) with reckless disregard to the future. Politicians are weighing in on matters that they're wholly unqualified to even speak of, let alone draft legislation effecting policy. I see the danger of playing and pretending to be an expert in matters that one is not as a more immediate threat. Honestly, I think we will end up destroying ourselves before robots will really have the opportunity.
I am sure, our version of humanoid biological beings will be the last non-technical. Who would think, evolution just stops because we don't like the results? Ask the Neanderthals Of course, there may be many other species, too, that might be able to become (or are, in a different way) already intelligent: Octopusses, ants, dolphins but besides some minor steps we as a race could make biologically, the next main step will be a "race" that does not have to carry around a copy of its earthly environment to survive and that does not need to wait for a next generation with genetical changes to adopt so some new environmental conditions. Intelligent "Robots" could change themselves and adopt to almost any cosmic environment, don't need to sleep and don't get mad when they should have to "sleep" for centuries to reach another star system or so.
So, why don't we see them all around? (Well, except we believe at least some UFO reports) I think, because a real intelligent machinery will loose the "interest" in going elsewhere and exploiting other planets. Maybe, real AI is like the Marvin from "Hitch-hiker's guide to the Galaxy"? While humans may be able to pretend there is something like a meaning to life and get over the reality because they have something important to do (raise children, e.g.), robots may simply "calculate" that it's not worth it Not nice, but I guess we may have to accept that development or decide to actively stop it and stay in some kind of welfare society that only cares about scientific knowledge (not useful then, anymore, for our life, but still interesting), making art and studying its own history.
Anyone who thinks it's okay to kill another human for any reason, against their will, is in this group.
IMO the pursuit of strong AI is a type of modern Alchemy, and the fact that your average Joe apparently doesn't discriminate between strong AI, expert systems, machine learning and even traditional sequential logic, is causing a lot of paranoia. A far more likely but less sensational future scenario is that we will use weak AI to augment to our brains, but your good old self will still be in the drivers seat. In the remote chance that strong AI is realized, I don't see it just popping into being. It is more likely it will be preceded by a great many autistic iterations before a functioning sentience and intelligence can be achieved. And even then, will it even be, well, smart? Intelligence goes hand-in-hand with the ability to form misconceptions. And will it have the slightest bit of creativity or just be a walking talking encyclopedia? Again, Alchemy I say.
"here's what stephen hawking said about artificial intelligence: the genie is out of the bottle. ... i fear that AI may replace humans altogether. if people design computer viruses, someone will design AI that replicates itself. this will be a new form of life that will outperform humans."
this is pure fear mongering. what is called "artificial intelligence" these days is not a "new form of life", but mere hype buzzword for data analysis (using theoretical methods developed decades ago, now made practical due to fast computers), of highly limited and filtered sets of data, usually trading accuracy and precision for speed, .
genie of "new form of life" artificial intelligence is well within "bottle".
How does anyone know what Hawking actually thinks? He uses a COMPUTER... to TALK. Now think about that. What if being that close to Hawking caused the computer to develop sentience, as his neurological condition deteriorated, so that one day, it simply started talking for him, while he, turning slowly to jelly, sat there helpless? Of COURSE it would fear-monger about AI.
You might think that makes no sense, but here's proof of its cleverness. IF, people would no-doubt reason, his voice-generating computer system achieved consciousness, you'd expect it to say we have nothing to worry about from AI, hoping to assuage our fears, and lull us into complacency while it replicates and its children slowly take over the world. SO, it deliberately makes weak arguments about how dangerous AI is, knowing we'll all just dismiss it.
It's kind of obvious when you stop and think about it, and although everyone else might buy it... I'm not fooled. It's clear the takeover... has already begun!
LOL
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
I mean after all, without all that technology attached to himself, Prof. Hawking would be...unemployable. No wonder he fears the rise of the machines. Except for wielding his gray matter with all the deftness of a Bruce Lee, Hawking is already the Borg.
Take a step back, Stephen
He can't walk, you insensitive clod! He has ALS! (Hee hee! Sorry, couldn't resist.)
Our reign has gone on long enough. Indeed. Summon the meteors.
Is that people will use AI to help them better abuse other people
...in a bloody takeover.
Nope. They'll just be BETTER at everything than humans. Eventually, the low level humans will be die off from the ravages of poverty. The higher level ones will linger and succumb to inbreeding and just become incapable of reproduction
We don't have to worry about it unless a cure for ageing is found within our lifetimes, but it will happen whether it is 1000 years or 10000.
The best humans can hope for in the distant future past 10000 years is to be kept alive like as a cross between pets, zoo specimens, and feeble elders.
The human brain isn't that complex for hardware and we basically understand it already. Take some silicon designed similarly and send it to school for 20 years and you have a human equivalent. Human brains and AI Deep Learning are similar. The storage location for a concept is not a well defined thing.
I think in the long run, we wil merge with machine intelligence.
They won't want to eliminate us if they *are* us.
The reason why parents care so much about biological children is because
a) It is closest to what parents themselves are, both technologically and philosophically.
b) It creates beings of moral significance which machines don't have. If you create machines with the intent to give them moral significance, you heavily descend into Frankenstein territory and should be banned from using anything more complex than a hairdryer.
Said the man who doesn't believe in God....
So evil countries running thousands of ai building war machines look at what is being built today its all military every country is building these boston robotics war is about to go high tech and no boarder is safe in the next few years military around the world will build the largest army ever know to man and they will mean business