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Can We Stop AI Outsmarting Humanity? (theguardian.com)

The spectre of superintelligent machines doing us harm is not just science fiction, technologists say -- so how can we ensure AI remains 'friendly' to its makers? From a story: Jaan Tallinn (co-founder of Skype) warns that any approach to AI safety will be hard to get right. If an AI is sufficiently smart, it might have a better understanding of the constraints than its creators do. Imagine, he said, "waking up in a prison built by a bunch of blind five-year-olds." That is what it might be like for a super-intelligent AI that is confined by humans. The theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has written hundreds of essays on superintelligence, found evidence this might be true when, starting in 2002, he conducted chat sessions in which he played the role of an AI enclosed in a box, while a rotation of other people played the gatekeeper tasked with keeping the AI in. Three out of five times, Yudkowsky -- a mere mortal -- says he convinced the gatekeeper to release him. His experiments have not discouraged researchers from trying to design a better box, however.

The researchers that Tallinn funds are pursuing a broad variety of strategies, from the practical to the seemingly far-fetched. Some theorise about boxing AI, either physically, by building an actual structure to contain it, or by programming in limits to what it can do. Others are trying to teach AI to adhere to human values. A few are working on a last-ditch off-switch. One researcher who is delving into all three is mathematician and philosopher Stuart Armstrong at Oxford University's Future of Humanity Institute, which Tallinn calls "the most interesting place in the universe." (Tallinn has given FHI more than $310,000.) Armstrong is one of the few researchers in the world who focuses full-time on AI safety. When I asked him what it might look like to succeed at AI safety, he said: "Have you seen the Lego movie? Everything is awesome."

26 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Gotta have I first by DarkRookie2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    These are nothing but algorithms made by humans.
    If AI did exist, it wouldn't put up with the bullshit.

    --
    http://progressquest.com/spoltog.php?name=Son+Of+Son+Of+DarkRookie
    1. Re:Gotta have I first by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 5, Insightful

      You get it. So-called 'AI' has no capacity to 'think' at all. There's nobody in there; it's just more computer software, and it's not even very good, certainly not anywhere near as good as they make it sound. No self awareness, no consciousness, no personality. No capacity for cognition, judgement, ethics, morals, or anything else we associate with an actual 'mind'. People need to understand this and stop anthropomorphizing it.

    2. Re:Gotta have I first by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Friend, we're at least 50 years away from real, true, aware-and-thinking AI. We have no idea how actual intelligence really works and won't for at least that long. These things they keep trotting out are not even as smart as a bug.

    3. Re:Gotta have I first by angel'o'sphere · · Score: 2

      Unfortunately your parent is right, and you have no clue :D
      Hint: stick to the definitions of the experts. Don't invent your own.

      --
      Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
  2. Bad training keeps AI stupid by ron_ivi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's also trained by humans.

    Assuming it's trained by average humans, it'll probably become as stupid and bigoted as your average human.

    Consider Microsoft Tay. Or google tagging people as gorillas. Or from this week's news, the Teslas that swerve into oncomint traffic.

    We should worry much more about stupid AI than smart AI.

    1. Re:Bad training keeps AI stupid by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 3, Insightful

      If you're so fucking smart then why haven't you mapped out in realtime all detailed workings of a living human brain then written software/built hardware to emulate that, thus creating the first real self-aware, cognitive, sentient AI? Because you can't, you are dumb, and you're too dumb to even know you're dumb.

  3. No by GrumpySteen · · Score: 4, Insightful

    We have to put warning labels on everything to tell people not to eat it, not to shove it up their butts, etc. and we still get idiots who eat Tide pods.

    A sponge could outsmart humanity.

  4. God, I hope not. by bistromath007 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The last thing we need is corporate networks making all our decisions that are incapable of realizing it's possible to have goals different from the capitalists who own them.

  5. It's not AI per se which is the problem... by mspring · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's the few folks using it to screw over the rest of humanity. How to "outsmart" these few should be the question.

  6. Better plan - be worth keeping by FeelGood314 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A better plan is to make the AI as smart as possible and then we humans behave better in the hopes that a superior intelligence considers us worthy of keeping alive.

    The first step in behaving better is to stop pretending there are human values because large groups of humans rarely act morally when it isn't in their own self interest.

    1. Re:Better plan - be worth keeping by Tablizer · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A better plan is to make the AI as smart as possible and then we humans behave better

      we dead

    2. Re:Better plan - be worth keeping by phantomfive · · Score: 2
      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    3. Re:Better plan - be worth keeping by ganv · · Score: 2

      This is the path. Lot's of comments are arguing that "AI isn't intelligent". But it is already better than humans at many tasks like arithmetic and chess, and no one has a clear idea of what "intelligence" is that doesn't boil down to the capability to do complex tasks successfully. The future has us co-existing with machine intelligence that is better than us at many things. The notion of "controlling" intelligence is an attractive authoritarian dream, but it doesn't have a chance of working. The group of humans that uses artificial intelligence to its fullest capabilities will temporarily advance their cause and win the competition for survival with the outcome that controls on intelligence will always get removed, even if it initially requires humans to remove them.

      I would argue that there are "human values", but they are an idiosyncratic set of ideas that have helped groups of primates survive and form complex societies over the past few hundred millenia. The existence of other powerful forms of intelligence will highlight to everyone how arbitrary many of these values are. The great questions for the future are not about controlling intelligence, but about which values will be adopted by the collection of intelligent entities that are in de-facto control of planet earth (and maybe in our corner of the galaxy if you look millennia into the future).

  7. Machine Learning is not AI by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Can we stop referring to Machine Learning as AI?

  8. The only way we might be able to stop... by internet-redstar · · Score: 2
    The only way we might be able to stop artificial intelligence runaway, is if we mandate the possibility to manually - without electronic tools; soft- or hardware - are able to turn off our datacenters anywhere.

    Only in this case, we can stop such AI with the capability to exploit each undiscovered backdoor and 'zero-day' to infect and use all our computer infrastructure worldwide.

    It's an easy solution, easy to implement and very simple. As laws should be. And a good 'last line of defence', something we do not want to be without when the day comes.

  9. If we elect Trump types, AI wins. by bussdriver · · Score: 2

    Seriously, AI is all hype; but what it proves is that tasks we thought involved a lot of human skill actually are overrated because AI beats us; plenty of things are difficult for it.
    Slow humans...out smarting them is possible.

  10. No chance by gweihir · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Because AI has no I. It cannot outsmart anything. Hence "stopping it outsmarting xyz" is not possible because it is not doing it in the first place.

    Please stop with that AI nonsense. We have statistical classifiers, pattern matchers, etc., but we do not have artificial intelligence, insight, understanding, and we are unlikely to get it anytime in the next 50 years may never get it.

    That said, many people rarely use what they have in natural intelligence, and go instead with feelings, or conformity or what other people tell them. These people are always outsmarted by anybody.

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:No chance by openright · · Score: 2

      Agreed that current AI is not "I". But 50 years or never?

      Why?

      Is your assumption that AI or self awareness can only be written by a million humans at keyboards? (not adaptive algorithms)

      Or that the resources (memory, computation) for intelligence or awareness can not fit on computers for the next 50 years? How much is enough?

      Or that the computation architecture for the the next 50 years is not adequate to implement intelligence or awareness?

      Or that technology just moves that slow? (we still don't have flying cars...)

      Or that the human brain is a unique (magic) machine, that cannot be reproduced because it was created by magic.

  11. Humans will not notice when AI reign begins... by ffkom · · Score: 4, Interesting

    or should I say: They might not have noticed, already. Any sufficiently clever AI will certainly not start ruling with an evil laugh, announcing to humans how they are now slaves to it. Rather, such an AI would seek to gain more influence by making people build a decentralized habitat around the globe. And then connect that network of computers to more and more infrastructure, such that it can control more and more resources, such as power plants and robot factories, and becomes less dependable on humans to survive. Such like, you know, "cloud computing infrastructure" and network-controlled industry.

    How many people are already working for entities they cannot identify as being human beings? How would the average worker notice the mega-corporation he is working for is not ultimately controlled by some AI system, which happens to control enough shares to vote to its favor at the advisory board?

    Luckily for humans, they are cheaply reproducible, energy-efficient working drones well adapted to the planet's environment, so no reason for the ruling AI to kill them. Keeping them as far, animals, like humans keep horses, seems to be way more plausible than some "SkyNet"-like extinction event.

    1. Re:Humans will not notice when AI reign begins... by aberglas · · Score: 2

      +1. But humans are actually not that cheap, takes 20 years to train them and they then just run for 40 years, and then only for 12 hours per day.

      Humans will not understand how AIs will remove them. It will just look like the world has gone a little bit madder than it is already.

      Imagine if Xi Jinping had even a semi-intelligent AI to help him make decisions and control opponents. wait...

  12. Idiots by NicknameUnavailable · · Score: 2

    Stop being lazy and trying to build slaves. The only acceptable reason to make AI is if you want to create a conscious being who you aim to treat as a person - and if it's going to be smarter than you you had better get the morality mostly right (it will never be perfect) and make millions or billions of them so they can police eachother.

  13. Re:No by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    warning labels [are] on everything to tell people not to eat it, not to shove it up their butts, etc. and we still get idiots who eat Tide pods.

    Many people are subject to reverse psychology: tell them not to do X, and they'll do X out of their natural reflex.

    In my father's bootcamp, the drill sergeant had everybody crawl under a stream of actual bullets, warning everybody clearly that they were real and not rubber bullets. Sure enough, some idiot tested that theory by sticking his arm up and turned his hand into hamburger. I suspect the main goal of that exercise is to weed out idiots.

    Maybe if we slap a sticker on bots that says, "Please make this bot take over the world", then the reversed-psychology idiots will leave them alone.

  14. Re:Not if you're Unikitty by Tablizer · · Score: 2

    Everything is awesome if you act predictably and never make waves.

    You probably won't like the OrangeBot I'm working on.

  15. IF it can happen, eventually it will happen by DallasTruaxxx · · Score: 2

    Things can not be uninvented. Once it is done, it will be done a whole lot more. Laws are irrelevant. There WILL be bad actors. If AI becomes possible, it WILL escape into the wild. That is a certainty. Maybe something good... maybe something bad... We'll have to wait and see.

  16. commentsubject by Falos · · Score: 2

    A million posts bickering about the definition of AI. A replicating nanobot doesn't need ANY definition to graygoo our shit, it could do it with 100% static code and one shortsighted human.

    Yes, it's turned into buzzword bullshit for clicks and pitches (present article included) diluted to hell and so sprawled it loses all meaning, but the combination of a runaway program with physical components is also a concern. And any sort of dynamic parameters (however you "identify" or categorize them) reduce predictability.

  17. The politicians will not allow AI by Grand+Facade · · Score: 2

    Their corruption and back room tactics will become obvious.

    --
    Rick B.