The Myth of AI – Jaron Lanier

You're so clever. Alien, el oh el.

I said that it would take a book to explain. You are parodying an extremely shortened summary of a complicated subject.

The difference between AI and "alien" is no one is trying to make alien. There aren't research labs and billions of dollars in funding. There is no incentive at all. And the problem is far more difficult. AI is just algorithms.

Second, aliens arent actually that powerful. Superintelligent AI would be godlike in power to us. I'd much rather have aliens.

We could, maybe, for various degrees of help and with various dangers depending on how much help (look up Oracle AI), and I would easily wager using relevant tools (not just "AI tech") would make the positive outcome more likely than not using them, but there are still many ways it can go wrong, and while past and present weak-AI technology might be useful in creating a sentient machine I'm doubtful much would be that helpful in solving the Friendliness (or benevolence) problem directly.

For instance the other comment brings up the uncertainty around giving an Oracle AI the task of finding what benevolence means to humans, to then plug into the final AI hoping it will be Friendly. You don't know how to precisely define 'benevolent' so let the Oracle AI do it (or help you do it), though you think you can at least program the Oracle AI to do a good job in finding answers to vague, complex, fragile problems. (Why? Past success in AI tech?) Is what the Oracle AI outputs actually good? How do you know? What did the Oracle AI have to do to reach its answer, or gain a last bit of certainty in it? (e.g. Did it reason it needed more data and so built or hastened the arrival of brain-scanning technology, started scanning brains from volunteers, the very recently deceased, cryonics patients, or just without its creators knowledge through black market deals, and at some point did it simulate trillions of human minds under all sorts of gruesome scenarios to test responses? Do you even morally care about sentience on silicon? Would you care more if you were an upload?) You've got a lot of problems just building an Oracle AI (or anything powerful enough that can help you solve the hardest problems). Even supposing the output it gives is good and the costs (practical and ethical) were acceptable, will a seed AI allowed to recursively self-improve be guaranteed to preserve this Friendliness property in all subsequent improvements?

With the idea of using "AI tech", you've basically drawn a line in the outcome space that on one side says something like "let's just program the thing" and the other says "hold on, let's just program the thing but also use all these other relevant computer tools we've developed over the decades to help program the thing". It's the start of an approach, but does it really prune all that much? What do these relevant tools actually buy you in safety, if a safety-guarantee-tool is not among them? Another line which may be what you were heading towards, could be on one side say something like "we might not be able to solve all the necessary problems with our current intelligence, so let's also spend time looking for ways to augment human intelligence -- brain-computer interfaces, brain emulations, tweaks to our genetic code, that sort of thing" and the other side "no, we're capable, let's try our best right now". Using ems based on friendly-ish human minds that become better than human could very well be a better approach to solving the superintelligent problems correctly and efficiently than doing so on raw human levels, on the other hand it could turn very bad if one of those ems instead just solves the problem of recursively improving themselves and their goal and value system is insufficiently friendly. Or many other failure modes. (Though an interesting "most likely scenario" given certain assumptions and only looking at a span of 2 years which by itself doesn't look too terrible is Robin Hanson's Age of Em idea.) Just like approaches involving molecular nanotech to help us, there's reasons why it could be seen to help the best outcome along, but it also opens the door to a lot of other risks that aren't necessarily there if you took the other side, so again how much is really pruned?

What I take as your general idea of "maybe we need and should employ additional help and knowledge that we've yet to gain to even really start" isn't bad, though, much better than "Benevolence is easy, a King and his subjects all know he is a great ruler when everyone is smiling frequently", it's just lacking in detail to constitute a plan. Throwing in the positive feedback loop idea (which might even manifest as impressive accelerating returns, who knows) to me seems only relevant to figuring out time scales, I don't think it says anything about the fraction of good vs. bad outcomes apart from whether short or long time scales matter.

All speculation about the future will sound like science fiction. Someone in 1800 making accurate predictions about 1900 would have sounded crazy. Someone predicting the atomic bomb in 1900 would have sounded crazy. Or airplanes, or television, or the internet, etc. Just because something sounds absurd doesn't mean it's not possible.

We live in a world where the only intelligences are humans. The idea of superintelligent minds seems absurd to us, because it isn't something we've ever encountered in reality before. But there is absolutely no law of nature that says it's impossible, or even difficult. If you look at history, it'd actually be really surprising if it was. Human minds were just the very first intelligence coughed up by evolution. We are far from the limits of what is possible.

And there is a difference between genetic engineering and AI research. Biology is incredibly complicated. Like millions of complicated, interconnected, moving parts. It really is impossible to make Alien, or really anything beyond modifications to existing biology.

Algorithms are a whole nother ball game. Our current AI algorithms are actually reasonably intelligent at many tasks, even smarter than humans at some things. And they are extremely simple. Could be described in a line or two of equations, or a few paragraphs of text. Not because they are primitive, but because simple algorithms work. And they have been improving every single year for a long time, and will likely improve well into the future.

But you don't have to take my word for it. If you survey AI researchers and experts, they almost unanimously agree that AI will be invented in our lifetime. If you survey biologists, I highly doubt they would make similar claims about Alien.

>because machine learning is not even within sight from true AI

Well I don't agree at all, and neither do many experts. It may not be very intelligent currently, but it's certainly getting there.

>How can we research the safety of something we know nothing about?

Even if AI uses totally unknown algorithms, that doesn't mean we can't do anything about it. The question of how to control AI is relatively agnostic to how the AI actually works. We don't need to know the details of a machine learning algorithm to talk about reinforcement learning. We don't need to know the exact AI algorithm to talk about how certain utility functions would lead to certain behaviors.

> And after you explain that, explain how having something vaguely in common with religion automatically means it's wrong.

No one is saying it's wrong, only that the discussion isn't scientific.

It is not only unscientific and quasi-religious; there are strong psychological forces at play, that muddy the waters further. There are so many potentially catastrophic threats that the addition of "intelligence" to any of them seems totally superfluous. Numbers are so much more dangerous than intelligence: the Nazis are more dangerous than Einstein; a billion zombies obliterate humanity; a trillion superbugs are not much more dangerous if they are intelligent or even super-intelligent; we intelligent humans are very successful for a mammal, but we're far from being the most successful (by any measure) species on Earth.

This fixation on intelligence seems very much like a power fantasy of intelligent people who really want to believe that super-intelligence implies super-power. Maybe it does, but there are things more powerful -- and more dangerous -- than intelligence. This power fantasy also helps cast a strong sense of irrational bias over the discussion. This power fantasy is palpable and easily observed when you read internet forums discussing the dangers of AI. This strong psychological bias tends to distract us from less-intelligent, though possibly more dangerous, threats. It is perhaps ironic, yet very predictable, that the people currently discussing the subject with the greatest fervor are the least qualified to do so objectively. It is not much different from poor Christians discussing how the meek are the ones who shall inherit the earth. It is no coincidence that people believe that in the future, power will be in the hands of forces resembling them; those of us who have studied the history of religions can therefore easily identify the same phenomenon in the AI-scare.