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Risks of Artificial Intelligence

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Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#21

Post by goatlover »

sgt101 wrote: post #14
kowdermeister wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.

The creation of goals - determining what things to do in pursuit of a higher goal - for example "kill John Conner" does not exist in AI now. You can do things in toy systems like mazes and atari, chess and go, but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.

I always wondered how Skynet acquired the goal of preventing John Connor's birth, because that involved inventing time travel in order to have such a goal.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#22

Post by strebler »

jeffdavis wrote: post #12

Decisions should be accountable. Ordinarily, humans make decisions, so you can hold them to account. But who's accountable when a machine makes a choice? You can't blame the hardware. The software doesn't have much meaning before it is trained. That leaves the training data. The data are just facts, so you only have a few routes to find the root cause of a decision: * If a datum is actually false, you can correct it.…

I'm no fan of the A.I. hype of today, but I can comment that deep learning actually makes the "contentious decision" easier to detect. With the "old way", i.e. jam some features into an SVM, there was no accountability / confidence. At least I've never seen a reliable SVM-based confidence score.

But, for example, confidence scores are actually a byproduct of running a modern CNN for image classification. This is very useful for "finding mistakes" (assuming you have 100% accurate training data, and other prerequisites). It even helps fixing issues in the training data, we use it all the time.

That being said, the big dirty secret that nobody's pointing out is: there has been no real "theory-level" advancement in AI in the last 20 years that have borne fruit (at least in computer vision and neural nets). The models are just bigger (and much better) with some slight tweaks (dropout, etc). It's hardware that's made that possible. Academics have done a thorough and wonderful search of the model space and have some great finds. But I think we still need a few solid theoretical leaps before the singularity.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#23

Post by CivilianZero »

kowdermeister wrote: post #10
CivilianZero wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the better question is: Should we really be taking real-life advice from cheesy action movies?

Star Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.

The difference is, imagining that we can turn an existing technology into a smaller, portable, more effective version of itself is not far out of the realm of reality. In fact it would be incredibly naive to believe that won't happen.

AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI.

The movies about these kinds of things are made to entertain, not to teach us about AI.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#24

Post by exratione »

Some humans are likely to become more powerful than other humans some day. Most such humans will by default develop instrumental subgoals that conflict with other human interests. This could have catastrophic consequences. If we don't actively work on control mechanisms and safety of human behavior, this will most likely pose an existential risk to humanity.

Compare and contrast.

I think people make too much of the wrong things in the matter of general artificial intelligence.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#25

Post by goatlover »

6d6b73 wrote: post #15

"when asking to "make all humans happy", the ASI might decide that the safest and most efficient way of doing so is to drug everyone and to turn us all into numb but happy creatures" If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people, it will be too dumb to take over the world. And by the same token it will not be a Strong AI, just a weak AI given too much power.

That's why I don't find the paper maximizer analogy very convincing.

Still it's possible AI systems put in charge of running society could result in some undesirable future because we weren't careful enough in designing their goals.

But then again, we have that problem with whoever we put into office.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#26

Post by goatlover »

optimuspaul wrote: post #16
CivilianZero wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it is not. It is a movie made for entertainment. We are in reality. It really irks me how much debate and decision-making in technology is based on bias gained from mindless entertainment and not from anything based in reality. (I am not besmirching the good name of Terminator, that movie is a true classic)

Wether you like it or not it has become a part of the conversation. It is part of the culture and we can't just ignore it simple because it is fiction. Your dismissal of it is to many as irksome as it's inclusion is to you. Perhaps calm down and recognize that it is partially tongue in cheek but also not something we can simply ignore.

Should we also worry about the dangers of creating xenomorphs (Alien franchise) in the future?

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#27

Post by fmoralesc »

6d6b73 wrote: post #15

"when asking to "make all humans happy", the ASI might decide that the safest and most efficient way of doing so is to drug everyone and to turn us all into numb but happy creatures" If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people, it will be too dumb to take over the world. And by the same token it will not be a Strong AI, just a weak AI given too much power.

> If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people...

Arguably, we humans have general intelligence, and still some fail to see that point (some might even argue intelligently against it!). Collectively, we have taken over the world regardless.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#28

Post by hacker_9 »

jeffdavis wrote: post #12

Decisions should be accountable. Ordinarily, humans make decisions, so you can hold them to account. But who's accountable when a machine makes a choice? You can't blame the hardware. The software doesn't have much meaning before it is trained. That leaves the training data. The data are just facts, so you only have a few routes to find the root cause of a decision: * If a datum is actually false, you can correct it.…

Technically it's still the programmer who made all the decisions, at least with the current state of NNs. True decision making is philosophically up there with the 'what is consciousness' problem.

When the blame game is played though, the end result would likely be the corporation in question getting sued for a lot of money, who then might choose to take internal action and fire certain employees.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#29

Post by lootsauce »

The risks of AI are not that it becomes self aware and has it's own intentions that are contrary to that of humans. There are massive risks by simply putting decent AI on killing machines for "defense" and the new calculus of putting various plans into action now that the lives of our brave young men and women are not at risk.

We already see some of this with drone attacks. It's just so easy to drone somebody, and so hard to verify, in the moment, that we will only kill the bad guy. Never mind the logic that we just kill anyone anywhere in the world because we're good and they are bad. Not being a Pollyanna here it's a new option that we did not have before and that option takes on it's own logic and momentum.

This technology will not be limited to the good guys and even in the case of "the good guys" new options are opened up and robots do not question the morality or validity of their orders.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#30

Post by gens »

jeffdavis wrote: post #12

Decisions should be accountable. Ordinarily, humans make decisions, so you can hold them to account. But who's accountable when a machine makes a choice? You can't blame the hardware. The software doesn't have much meaning before it is trained. That leaves the training data. The data are just facts, so you only have a few routes to find the root cause of a decision: * If a datum is actually false, you can correct it.…

Whoever is using it to make said decisions.
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