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Yoshua Bengio, a Grand Master of Modern AI, is Worried About Its Future (technologyreview.com)
Yoshua Bengio is a grand master of modern artificial intelligence. Alongside Geoff Hinton and Yan LeCun, Bengio is famous for championing a technique known as deep learning that in recent years has gone from an academic curiosity to one of the most powerful technologies on the planet. Here's an excerpt from an interview he gave to MIT Technology Review: MIT TR: What do you make of the idea that there's an AI race between different countries?
Bengio: I don't like it. I don't think it's the right way to do it. We could collectively participate in a race, but as a scientist and somebody who wants to think about the common good, I think we're better off thinking about how to both build smarter machines and make sure AI is used for the well-being of as many people as possible.
MIT TR: Are you worried about just a few AI companies, in the West and perhaps China, dominating the field of AI?
Bengio: Yes, it's another reason why we need to have more democracy in AI research. It's that AI research by itself will tend to lead to concentrations of power, money, and researchers. The best students want to go to the best companies. They have much more money, they have much more data. And this is not healthy. Even in a democracy, it's dangerous to have too much power concentrated in a few hands.
MIT TR:There has been a lot of controversy over military uses of AI. Where do you stand on that?
Bengio: I stand very firmly against.
MIT TR: Even non-lethal uses of AI?
Bengio: Well, I don't want to prevent that. I think we need to make it immoral to have killer robots. We need to change the culture, and that includes changing laws and treaties. That can go a long way. Of course, you'll never completely prevent it, and people say, "Some rogue country will develop these things." My answer is that one, we want to make them feel guilty for doing it, and two, there's nothing to stop us from building defensive technology. There's a big difference between defensive weapons that will kill off drones, and offensive weapons that are targeting humans. Both can use AI.
MIT TR: Shouldn't AI experts work with the military to ensure this happens?
Bengio: If they had the right moral values, fine. But I don't completely trust military organizations, because they tend to put duty before morality. I wish it was different.
Bengio: I don't like it. I don't think it's the right way to do it. We could collectively participate in a race, but as a scientist and somebody who wants to think about the common good, I think we're better off thinking about how to both build smarter machines and make sure AI is used for the well-being of as many people as possible.
MIT TR: Are you worried about just a few AI companies, in the West and perhaps China, dominating the field of AI?
Bengio: Yes, it's another reason why we need to have more democracy in AI research. It's that AI research by itself will tend to lead to concentrations of power, money, and researchers. The best students want to go to the best companies. They have much more money, they have much more data. And this is not healthy. Even in a democracy, it's dangerous to have too much power concentrated in a few hands.
MIT TR:There has been a lot of controversy over military uses of AI. Where do you stand on that?
Bengio: I stand very firmly against.
MIT TR: Even non-lethal uses of AI?
Bengio: Well, I don't want to prevent that. I think we need to make it immoral to have killer robots. We need to change the culture, and that includes changing laws and treaties. That can go a long way. Of course, you'll never completely prevent it, and people say, "Some rogue country will develop these things." My answer is that one, we want to make them feel guilty for doing it, and two, there's nothing to stop us from building defensive technology. There's a big difference between defensive weapons that will kill off drones, and offensive weapons that are targeting humans. Both can use AI.
MIT TR: Shouldn't AI experts work with the military to ensure this happens?
Bengio: If they had the right moral values, fine. But I don't completely trust military organizations, because they tend to put duty before morality. I wish it was different.
"Some rogue country will develop these things." My answer is that one, we want to make them feel guilty for doing it..."
When dealing with an adversary - NEVER project your own morality on them. It's not a given that their values are the same as yours! Proceed on what you know to be truthful, not what you want it to be.
Life is not for the lazy.
no one is treating speculative fiction as fact. speculative fiction is there to get people to think about the future and possible outcomes. Asimov wrote the three laws because he speculated that computers could turn against us at one point. This is something worth considering as one develops new technologies in computation as it is one of the many possibilities. Some speculative fiction looks furthur out than others but alot of it becomes relative as we grow as a species. 1984 is a good example of the speculation regarding technoligical advancement being used for totalitarian control.
The other side to the coin is to look at our past and how technology was adopted and how the leaders in those fields felt as their creations were used on Nagasaki.
so while you think that they have an axe to grind, their stories taken in general are potential futures that can be used for people to construct moral decisions today when you combine them with the facts of the past. Or we could just not think all together like you seem to want to do.
In the end, If this person really cared about the outcome of what he was doing then he would be actively working in the field to bring about the change that he desires rather than doing interviews and feeling morose for his part in all of this. He can be part of the solution, it is his choice.
The country that sidesteps the problem wins.
Weapons are expensive to produce. Wars are expensive to fight. As Sun Tzu notes, the best strategy is not to fight.
If you don't produce killer AI but put your resources into out-evolving humans and AIs as individual constructs, you can't be beaten by either and can walk right over those degraded and exhausted by fighting.
That's who wins.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Your logic is not supported by the facts.
For example, the columbine school shooting that happened in Colorado many years ago, it was a particularly famous one because, in part, of what the police learned from it. When they showed up they surrounded the building as the shooters kept shooting inside it. Once they moved in....the instant the shooters saw a cop with a gun, they shot themselves.
Since then, when a school shooting occurred, the cops ran in immediately, without bothering to try to surround the building to catch the criminals as the escaped. And in each case, the result was the same, the shooters offed themselves the instant they saw someone capable of resisting.
Do you know why these same shooters didn't shoot up police stations instead? Because of the presence of armed respondents in police stations. Why do they like to shoot up schools? Partially because of the horror of murdering children, but also because those kids don't have any guns to shoot back with.
No, I am not saying we should arm schoolchildren. I am pointing out facts that disprove your theory that having weapons doesn't deter.
Your reasoning that nobody would fight wars, if both sides were armed, is similarly flawed. People fight wars when they have a reason to fight, and the expectation that they can win. The mere presence of guns on the other side isn't enough to deter, because the people choosing to fight believe that they have MORE guns (and it further helps that the leaders do not themselves do the fighting, but that is a different topic). So, people will pick fights with people they think are weaker or maybe even equivalent. But they don't pick fights when they know darn good and well that the other side will whoop their ass.
This is why the plethora of small countries that hate America aren't attacking us right now. This was the motivation behind operation "shock and awe," to educate the enemy as to what our capacities actually are, to break their spirits.
You are simply looking at the world through a distortion field. You believe that violence is always and only the result of insanity, with no tactical reasoning behind it. You believe that simply taking everyone's guns away would prevent people who are insane from doing very much harm. But it is simply not true. Violence is sometimes the result of insanity, and often the result of a coldly calculated risk-vs-reward assessment. Violence has been a common theme throughout all cultures and all epochs of human history. It is not something we can just disregard and easily solve by eliminating weapons.
And with violence as a concrete threat, we need concrete means of responding to it and (ideally) discouraging it. Violence on an international scale is best discouraged by having the best weapons, so nobody picks on you.