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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.
I wish he had a library card and could check out a history book...
"build smarter machines and make sure AI is used for the well-being of as many people as possible"
"itself will tend to lead to concentrations of power, money, and researchers"
"we need to make it immoral to have killer robots"
sigh...
victims
"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.
Analysis: China's Communist Party Members Have Terrible Haircuts. Action Taken By AI: Inspired by Wintermute in William Gibson's Neuromancer, AI composes a mighty dub called "Tiananmen Square Boogie", generates a photorealistic-looking 3D video for it and posts it on Youtube. Disasterous Real World Consequence: The video proves so viral on Youtube that billions watch it over and over again. K-Pop crashes in popularity, and male K-Pop singers can no longer afford quality makeup, hair gel and earrings, making them very, very sad. South Korea gets very pissed with China's AI, and unleashes its own AI on China. The Korean AI hacks into Apple's manufacturing plants in China, and causes them to manufacture iPads and iPhones with a yellow Banana logo. iTunes can only play Kung-Fu movies on these devices. Siri also sounds like a transvestite with a bad cold now. Apple's stock price crashes on the Nasdaq. America gets pissed, unleashes its own AI on China AND South Korea. This in turn causes North Korea to become tittilated and take advantage of the situation by unleashing its Bang-Dong-Bong Viral Propaganda Generator AI on everybody else. Bang-Dong-Bong fills Youtube with super-viral communist anthems, causing half the world's youth to become Communism admiring messes. This in turn pisses off the Europeans, and they unleash their........
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
There's a lot of other things to worry about besides rogue AI: social-media induced mass riots, garage-built nukes, garage-built run-away killer germs, state-built run-away killer germs, mass computer virus outbreaks*, big solar flares knocking out most our gizmos, global economic depression, and combos of these exacerbating each other.
With all the things that can go wrong, I almost think we solved Fermi's Paradox.
* Systemd may just be the end of humans ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
The author is a grandmaster fluffer.
I don't think 'grandmaster' has meaning in Go...how many dan is that? What nations 'dan'?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Very good point. What is truthful is that some percent will see enemies with real or imagined weapons as threats to be neutralised, regardless of any real threat.
You cannot deter the insane or psychotic, don't bother, and as some fanatics want to bring about the end of the world, mutually assured destruction is more of a temptation than a threat.
That's an equation scientists have to consider. Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should. You can't uninvent a weapon.
I agree that guilting is useless, but threatening is worse than useless. Other options are needed.
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)
Two things.
1. Democracy, like all systems, must evolve. And that means it will eventually evolve into something not democracy.
2. AIs and humans each have strengths where the other is weak. Just as prokaryotes combined to form the nucleus and mitochondria of more powerful eukyarotes, and these combined with viruses and bacteria to eventually form human cells, AIs and humans can combine to form a composite organism more powerful than either alone. Systems naturally combine, rather than compete.
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)
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)
You do know America's protectionism allowed Hitler to rise to power, as did Europe's attitude after WW1.
If people hadn't been so bloody minded and so bloody stupid, Hitler would never have risen to power.
Lesson #1: If you're not so bloody stupid, then nobody else is likely to become moronic. If you don't create your enemies, you tend not to have any. And then you don't have to fight anyone.
And what did you achieve in Iraq? You single-handedly created Al Qaeda in Iraq, it hadn't existed before the Invasion. Indeed, the only terror cells that existed before then were the ones created and armed by Col. Oliver North.
And bombing them to bits created ISIS, which turned from a bunch of wannabes into a serious invasion force through Blackwater murdering Sunnis for fun.
Meanwhile, back at the ranch, the Iraq government ditched America and allied with Iran. What did anyone expect? Iraq had been looted and plundered by US forces, infrastructure was in ruins and nobody was held accountable.
People aren't loyal to killers and thugs., they are loyal to people who supply stuff they want. Nobody wanted Christian religious fanatics waging what they themselves called a holy war. Nobody held them in any higher regard than any other religious fanatics of any other religion.
The current war in Syria, the war in Iraq, the war with Germany, all caused by bloodymindedness and stupidity on a grand scale. They were all avoidable.
You cannot claim any achievement through winning a war you should never have allowed to arise.
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)
No, being armed simply means you're the one the gunman will shoot first to avoid being shot at. You cannot deter a gunman. That is why America has more than ten times as many as Britain, despite having only four times the population and five tines the guns.
It's also why you see more gunmen in America in places where people are more heavily armed.
It's why have a go heroes either get killed or kill innocent bystanders but rarely ever stop an attack.
If having weapons worked, nobody would fight wars. They'd turn up, count weapons, and the one with the least would go home. Doesn't happen.
Guns don't deter. That's why gun crime in countries that don't have this hero mindset have far lower gun crime, regardless of guns per capita. It is the wild west myth, the heroic gunslinger, that causes people to die.
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.