Live data from Hacker News

Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

money.cnn.com

81–90 of 98 posts

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We also don't really understand how consciousness works either. Sort of a nitpick, but people concerned about AI risk usually don't postulate that an AI needs to be """conscious""" to be dangerous; it just needs to be a thing that can apply a lot of optimization power in unexpected ways toward goals that aren't perfectly aligned with what humans generally want.

Oh! Good insight! ... but we already have that, right? Undesirable outcomes from rulesets that govern the behaviour of a large number of (conscious or unconscious) actors are a pretty standard feature of civilisation

It's the paper clip maximizer idea [1].

"The goal of maximizing paperclips is chosen for illustrative purposes because it is very unlikely to be implemented, and has little apparent danger or emotional load (in contrast to, for example, curing cancer or winning wars). This produces a thought experiment which shows the contingency of human values: An extremely powerful optimizer (a highly intelligent agent) could seek goals that are completely alien to ours (orthogonality thesis), and as a side-effect destroy us by consuming resources essential to our survival."

[1] https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#82
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not like AI running on some peta/exascale supercomputer will be able to jump to your laptop and take it over and spread itself to every electronic device in the world That's exactly a proposed scenario - with the form of "jumping" being any kind of communication. See: The AI Box problem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_box

If the AI requires a supercomputer to "exists" it can only jump to another supercomputer. It will not be able to spread to your Arduino.

Or it could figure out how to distribute it's computing and then distribute itself a piece at a time off of the "supercomputer."

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#83
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how can one think that Mark's understanding of "sci-fi AI" is limited? We're so far from any of it that at this point it's all speculation about what could or could not happen. If I have a theory that humans will evolve into separate species, I can't say someone else's understanding on the matter is limited.

Limited in a sense that he's saying Musk is being irresponsible and then talking about the simpler machine learning problems that can be solved [1] when Musk's warning is really about the super intelligence piece. The main problem is the term AI is overloaded and overused so it creates confusion. Musk is not against the machine learning approach to solving a new class of useful problems (though replacing a lot of cur…

"Has limited understanding" is definitely not the wording I'd chose to mean "is talking of something different," but I see how it could be.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#84
I love Musk. He is brilliant and I think he has truly shaped the future.

But he is wrong.

Artificial Conscience(what he is referring to) is NEVER going to be achieved. I repeat NEVER. Its impossible.

Conscience is in the form and not in the matter. In one word, there is never going to be an AI with free will.

However, eventually we may build a super intelligent system with great power over our lives, that goes wrong, has bugs, or misbehaves. But, since the fact that such as system will never be conscious, we are always going to have power over it.

So yeah, Musk is being an alarmist, and I believe he is the one with a limited understanding of AI.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#85
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the AI requires a supercomputer to "exists" it can only jump to another supercomputer. It will not be able to spread to your Arduino.

Or it could figure out how to distribute it's computing and then distribute itself a piece at a time off of the "supercomputer."

Or maybe it could decide to move to another universe and take it over.. There are physical limitations to what AI even in the form of super-intelligence can do. While theoretically it could distribute itself to other computers, it first would need to learn a lot everything from math to computer security, which itself would take implies that it would have unlimited resources and time to do all of that.. Even if that superAI did learn all of the skills necessary to take over many computers (it would need to learn about architectures, operating systems, firewalls, antivirus, compilers etc) it would still be limited by the latency of the network so not all operations would make sense in a distributed system. And of course it would need to be so smart that nobody would notice that there is increase of "weird" traffic on the internet, that suddenly power usage would increase as computers would do all these calculations instead of sitting idle waiting for user to open fb.com.

To take over the world such AI would need to learn everything we already know about the world, not only including math and physics, but also including sociology and human behavior. While AI would be busy taking over the world, you would have to assume that we would be sitting, doing nothing, and that we would not be smart enough to figure out that something is going on. And when we did we would do nothing to stop it.

Is it possible, sure.. Likely? hell no.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#86
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Turning on an AI or copying the code for one and spreading it would probably be easiear. What people never mention in any discussion with AI is that the AI will be as limited by physical world as we are. AI It's not just code, it's also the hardware that will run the code. That hardware has theoretical and practical limits, and requires a lot of power. It's not like AI running on some peta/exascale supercomputer wil…

I think the main argument against this is once you're in the world of "super intelligence" you're severely outmatched. If for some reason it had an interest in staying on it might not be easy to stop.

super intelligence will not happen overnight. AI will keep evolving with us and before it's truly conscious it will give us better understanding of math, physics, medicine.. This will help the AI grow, but at the same time we will be growing with it. It will be a symbiotic relationship.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#87
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the main argument against this is once you're in the world of "super intelligence" you're severely outmatched. If for some reason it had an interest in staying on it might not be easy to stop.

super intelligence will not happen overnight. AI will keep evolving with us and before it's truly conscious it will give us better understanding of math, physics, medicine.. This will help the AI grow, but at the same time we will be growing with it. It will be a symbiotic relationship.

Not necessarily, there's the idea of an "intelligence explosion" - basically that while it may take a while to figure out the initial conditions it might be able to self improve rapidly from that point. Also consciousness may not be required (or possibly even preferable).

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#88
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

super intelligence will not happen overnight. AI will keep evolving with us and before it's truly conscious it will give us better understanding of math, physics, medicine.. This will help the AI grow, but at the same time we will be growing with it. It will be a symbiotic relationship.

Not necessarily, there's the idea of an "intelligence explosion" - basically that while it may take a while to figure out the initial conditions it might be able to self improve rapidly from that point. Also consciousness may not be required (or possibly even preferable).

"intelligence explosion" is also limited by the physical world. AI won't be able to come up with a better understanding of physics simply by reading academic journals. Yes it might have some good ideas, and find some of the stuff we're missing by simply connecting the dots, but that in no way will cause "intelligence explosion".

Just think how much money and time we have to spend to test just a few of all of the theories in physics. And no, AI will not be able to suddenly come up with better theories simply by simulating physical world.

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#89

They're talking past each other because "AI" has become a useless term. Musk's comments are about a potential (maybe conscious) artificial super intelligence and the risks that could come from that if we enable one somehow without understanding the preconditions. Zuckerberg is just talking about "AI" in the sense that machine learning can solve a valuable class of problems. The super intelligence risk could be seriou…

It doesn't even need to be a superintelligence - Musk explains a scenario that isn't very far on the horizon here at the Governor's meeting: https://youtu.be/OYJ89vE-QfQ?t=2959 (from 51:45 to 53:50)

Re: Elon Musk says Mark Zuckerberg's understanding of AI is 'limited'

#90
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

super intelligence will not happen overnight. AI will keep evolving with us and before it's truly conscious it will give us better understanding of math, physics, medicine.. This will help the AI grow, but at the same time we will be growing with it. It will be a symbiotic relationship.

Not necessarily, there's the idea of an "intelligence explosion" - basically that while it may take a while to figure out the initial conditions it might be able to self improve rapidly from that point. Also consciousness may not be required (or possibly even preferable).

"Colossus: The Forbin Project" (1970) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0064177/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Post reply on HN