Risks of Artificial Intelligence • Hacker News Board

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#31

Post by SubiculumCode » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

Drones: Flight in 3d open space is not a hard problem for machine learning. Indiscriminate Visual Targeting: Not all that hard a problem for machine learning.

Downvote me if you will, but I freely admit that I am scared of drones with guns. Either as an invading force, or as an attack from terrorists. A machine doesn't have to be smart to shoot at anything that moves or has a heat signature.

Edit: Drones with chainsaws however are just plain badass (and potentially useful for tree trimming).

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#32

Post by ppeetteerr » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:53 PM UTC

Most predictions never come true and those which do are often never predicted. The fear of AI is overblown at this point and a prediction of strong AI in 2300 is way to far into the future to be of any use for today's society.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#33

Post by pps43 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:55 PM UTC

hacker_9 wrote: post #28

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.

In many cases the programmer could not have made the decisions. For example, AlphaGo programmers could not win against top go professionals, but AlphaGo can.

With a simple model like credit score it's easy to see which input affects which output in which direction. You're late on your mortgage - your FICO score drops. But this is just one neuron. Make the model a little more complex, and you no longer have a way to know what exactly it is doing.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#34

Post by haydenlee » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:58 PM UTC

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.

How do you optimize happiness for all people?

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#35

Post by evanlivingston » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 5:59 PM UTC

chriswarbo wrote: post #20

wodencafe wrote: post #2

The public doesn't take this stuff seriously enough. Did we not learn the lesson about rogue AI from Terminator™?

Whether or not you're joking, I think the real problem with using Terminator as an example is that it's overly optimistic. The story is roughly: 1) US military builds up arsenal of autonomous killing machines and nuclear missiles 2) US military connects all of these to the Internet 3) US military creates a powerful AI which takes control of this arsenal (whether it was put in charge or hacks in seems to vary across t…

You bring up the problem so many of us have with discussing issues at the micro level. I see the discussion of AI follow similar lines as the GMO debate. We often don't ask ourselves how these technologies play a part in a more larger system that appears to reward the concentration of power and Technics. Instead of asking ourselves if these things are innately good I feel that we ought to be asking ourselves what problems are we attempting to solve and how these technologies can affect those changes and if they are the best solutions.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#36

Post by haydenlee » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:00 PM UTC

rrggrr wrote: post #8

Manufactured products are generally safe because the economic costs of shipping unsafe products is too high. Legal fees, litigation, products liability insurance, judgement costs, UL certifications, OSHA compliance and inspection costs, etc. It took several generations for the risks to be understood and for politicians to succumb to public pressure and enact product safety / tort legislation. It would be nice for Con…

So we should regulate AI to slow advancements and let other countries take the lead? Would you rather be taken over by China's general AI or the USA's?

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#37

Post by red75prime » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:03 PM UTC

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.

It is not obvious to me that strong AI will recognize and fix all bugs in itself to become what its creators intended it to be.

Fixing bugs which harm its performance is a valid instrumental goal, sure. Fixing all other bugs is not.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#38

Post by alexandercrohde » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:05 PM UTC

I find this article long and if anything seems to detract credibility from a meaningful and well-considered academic topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...).

If this article seeks to address at the academic level, I think it does not succeed.

If this article seeks to simplify the academic for the lay-person, I think it does not succeed.

Better to just the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...).

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#39

Post by adam12 » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:17 PM UTC

juskrey wrote: post #9

AI is just a model. Dangerous are humans with harmful models.

That is assuming that humans have control of their AI.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#40

Post by tomsthumb » Mon, Jul 31, 2017, 6:20 PM UTC

exratione wrote: post #24

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 w…

> 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.

Isn't this already true?