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Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

nautil.us

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Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#101

Post by notahacker »

oberstein wrote: post #34
drzaiusapelord wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I meant as a product. Why can't I buy a robot today that can handle "get me a coke" or "fill the dishwasher" or "mow the lawn."

That is a problem of robotic hardware, not AI. It's really easy to hook up a microcontroller to get mic input and query a voice recognition server (backed by some sort of AI software) and then do commands based on interpretation of the result (more AI software). The hard part is actually being able to do the commands. There's a reason the service industry hasn't been totally destroyed by robotics yet, and it's simply…

Isn't the fundamental problem with robotics not replicating the relatively simple mechanics involved in tasks like getting a Coke, but writing specific software drivers to perform each class of mundane manual tasks because AI isn't intelligent enough to figure out how to use its robotic limbs and computer vision itself.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#102

Post by saiya-jin »

Tenobrus wrote: post #57
SpaceManNabs wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you assuming ethics and intelligence disparate? Intelligent humans aren't necessarily void of empathy, morality, and emotion.

They seem to be orthogonal at least. Smart people are not necessarily ethical and vice versa. I'm unsure as to whether the parent thinks that any increase in intelligence would correspond with a decrease in morality, which I disagree with. But there is a pretty clear issue, being that if we manage to augment intelligence without first understanding ethics there's a not-insignifianct chance of creating a sociopath who…

something like Khan in Star trek?

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#103

Post by [deleted] »

yellowapple wrote: post #76
jameshart wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's great to hear of progress in the AI research sphere, if you are working in this field, and are truly close to creating true artificial intelligence, I have a little tip for you: You probably want to learn not to include maniacal laughter in your forum posts . Just, you know, when you do combine the concepts into theories into worldviews, and you come to post your "Show HN: Generative causal inference in tu…

Implying that "mad scientist creates an artificial intelligence" is anything but the right idea :)

[deleted]

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#104

Post by notahacker »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #60
jameshart wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm. I very strongly got the opposite impression. "Today, we need geniuses like von Neumann and Turing more than ever before. That’s because we may already be running into the genetic limits of intelligence.... AI research also pushes even very bright humans to their limits.... The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human min…

>The detailed inner workings of a complex machine intelligence (or of a biological brain) may turn out to be incomprehensible to our human minds—or at least the human minds of today". Did he really say that? I probably should avoid talking right now . Ahaha. Ahahahahaaaa. Oh boy. I mean, the mind isn't that hard to crack once you start conceiving of exactly what problems it was designed to solve, what functions it wa…

Various people have been speculating on what problems the human mind was designed to solve since the dawn of human self-awareness. We haven't even got anything close to consensus on fundamental stuff like the extent and direction of causal relationships between language structure and the way a mind operates.

Things have got a bit better with fancy math and brain scanners to actually test hypotheses about how these psychological theories correspond to brain function, but we're a long way even from detailed answers to most relatively simple and defined experimental questions like "what's the difference between the way person X's mind and person Y's mind approach narrowly-defined problem A"

We're probably not even close to knowing how many open problems we have to solve, never mind actually solving them.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#105

Post by tim333 »

>Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

They probably will but I doubt mucking about with our DNA will make much difference. If human intelligence increases it will be mostly through interacting with computer systems in some way. At the moment using google for example helps and in the future we may have sci-fi stuff like implants and uploading.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#106

Post by woodchuck64 »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #88
woodchuck64 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That you have little desire to manipulate people isn't really here or there; the fact is that a social brain has extensive hardwiring that is designed to manipulate other social beings in blatant and subtle ways, and that hardwiring has been shaped and fine-tuned by eons of evolution. The desire restricting the extent of manipulation against another's interest is going to be constrained by moral beliefs and instincts…

But theory-of-mind is a distinct cognitive module from intellectual intelligence. You can enhance one without enhancing the other.

Let me make sure I understand you since I didn't understand why you were "remarkably insulted". The system fine-tuned by evolution is the human mind. Sociopathy and psychopathy seem to be genetically based and may occur in anywhere from 1% to 10% of the population based on various ballpark estimates. IQ is in no way related to moral behavior, smart people can be sincerely kind people or sociopathic, people of low-IQ can be sincerely kind or sociopathic. A person of low-IQ who is a sociopath ends up in jail most likely, a person of high-IQ who is a sociopath damages society far more by cleverly staying out of jail and may often land themselves high positions as they manipulate people's social intuitions without remorse. I suspect (but can't prove) that sociopathy has no correlation with IQ whatsoever.

> But theory-of-mind is a distinct cognitive module from intellectual intelligence. You can enhance one without enhancing the other.

I agree. However, I think theory-of-mind is one part of the puzzle. Another is moral reasoning and how it shapes social interaction. This, too, needs to be carefully understood because we know that authority and purity concerns, for example, both allow people to effectively turn off empathy. Turning off theory-of-mind when it is inconvenient is a potentially frightening ability.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#107

Post by jodrellblank »

Retric wrote: post #24
cryoshon wrote: post #18

Pre-genetic-augmentation human intelligence doesn't have to be plain old meat, either-- there's a renaissance of cognitive enhancement occurring right now in the nootropic field, with many different chemical compounds under investigation along with a few less traditional approaches like Thync/tDCS or "brain exercises". As far as eugenic paring of the human gene line toward higher intelligence goes, I wouldn't think a…

I feel people vastly underestimate the difficulty with enhancement. Disease, insanity, obsession, boredom, depression, and on and on it goes. Even twins can have dramatically different physical and mental strengths. Personally, I suspect this has to do with sci-fi generally hand waving away such things.

Why does an artificial limb feel like a heavy attachment, when a real limb doesn't?

What's the cognitive enhancement version of that - a screen reminding you of things isn't "making you smarter", presumably a neural implant reminding you of things isn't making you smarter either. And reminding you... how, calling for your attention? That would be distracting, not helping.

Discussions about blindness come with comments like "it's not like vision with your normal eyes closed, it's like seeing with the eye in your elbow". What kind of cyborg enhancement is going to make you better at cooking and predicting flavours and textures? Better at imagining engine innards? Better at deciding if you want to go somewhere or not?

The difference between a chip on your desk or in your head doing it with you looking at the results, and you doing it, but enhanced is huge.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#108

Post by akvadrako »

landryraccoon wrote: post #100
akvadrako wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't require assuming that it initially understands itself to eventually understand itself. Just the fact that it can measure and experiment with many copies in accelerated timescales means it will evolve a lot more quickly. Imagine what you could do with a planet-wide human breeding and genetic modification program with millions of generations - that's actually feasible for an AI.

The devil's in the details. Lets suppose for the sake of argument that your AI actually only takes as much material and technology as a modern high end server to build, say $2000 worth of labor and materials. How does the AI suddenly have billions of dollars worth of materials (and initially only human labor) available to do this sort of manufacturing and research? And mustn't human beings be complicit in providing t…

Indeed, there are practical concerns. But I never said suddenly or easy. And since it could simply buy the server time from any hosting provider, I don't see why any human compliance is necessary. Maybe initially it would only have one copy to play with.

Even that would be a massive boon to experimentation and productivity. It's like cloning your mind and trying out some new brain subroutines with at least an iteration per day.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#109

Post by PeterisP »

landryraccoon wrote: post #100
akvadrako wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't require assuming that it initially understands itself to eventually understand itself. Just the fact that it can measure and experiment with many copies in accelerated timescales means it will evolve a lot more quickly. Imagine what you could do with a planet-wide human breeding and genetic modification program with millions of generations - that's actually feasible for an AI.

The devil's in the details. Lets suppose for the sake of argument that your AI actually only takes as much material and technology as a modern high end server to build, say $2000 worth of labor and materials. How does the AI suddenly have billions of dollars worth of materials (and initially only human labor) available to do this sort of manufacturing and research? And mustn't human beings be complicit in providing t…

We can base the capabilities of a human-level AI on the capabilities of actual humans. In particular, we know what can be done by a reasonably skilled software developer in the black hat domain; and it's a reasonable assumption that a human-level AI can be as proficient in malware development as a human expert, and can do it faster once it acquires access to more hardware.

For example, it can:

* Gain access to a percentage of global home user computing power - botnets can and have done this, and their main disadvantage is that this computing power is hard to re-sell and not worth much; but if an AI can use for it's needs, it's there for the taking;

* Gain access to significant amounts of money - not billions, but certainly in millions; some campaigns of spam fraud, ransomware, etc can certainly achieve this.

* Gain access to identities, both physical stolen identities and "proper" offshore companies; and integrate them into the modern digital systems - bank accounts, legal credentials, etc.

* Gain access to low level workers - the same people who sign to 'earn money at home!' and become mules for money laundering of various fraudsters, they will also be eager to do whatever things the AI needs to be done physically - practice shows that an anonymous online employer can get such things done, as long as some money (or illusion of it) can be transferred.

Yes, all of this can be done in a bunker, anonymously, without people knowing about it; if the AI has gained access to the internet. It would be consistent with our experience in tracking malware sources - we usually can't do that, most of successful prosecutions come from following the money trail to someone who got too greedy, lazy and sloppy.

And furthermore, there is the very simple scenario of arbitrage. If an AI can provide some service (as if it was done by a human online) which earns $1 but takes only $0.50 of Amazon cloud rental fees... then it can scale it up extremely quickly. Once a superhuman AI is out of the box, acquiring resources in a clandestine way is very much possible.

Re: Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve

#110

Post by eli_gottlieb »

woodchuck64 wrote: post #106
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But theory-of-mind is a distinct cognitive module from intellectual intelligence. You can enhance one without enhancing the other.

Let me make sure I understand you since I didn't understand why you were "remarkably insulted". The system fine-tuned by evolution is the human mind. Sociopathy and psychopathy seem to be genetically based and may occur in anywhere from 1% to 10% of the population based on various ballpark estimates. IQ is in no way related to moral behavior, smart people can be sincerely kind people or sociopathic, people of low-IQ…

I'm insulted because you appear to believe that increasing intellect necessarily decreases moral traits, that "smart -> malicious". Which is pretty damned insulting to those of us who are clever!
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