Slashdot Mirror
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."
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
It's the few folks using it to screw over the rest of humanity. How to "outsmart" these few should be the question.
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.
Can we stop referring to Machine Learning as AI?
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.
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.