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Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

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Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#151

Post by TeMPOraL »

psbp wrote: post #44
fchollet wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that Google has now gone full Singularist. They jumped the shark when they hired Kurzweil.

I don't really understand the objective of those like Kurzweil. What do they see as the benefit of the singularity? Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it? It would be complete ego death.

> What do they see as the benefit of the singularity?

Living forever / getting rid of death, fixing world problems, countless amazing technological achievements, colonizing the galaxy. In probable order of happening.

> Wouldn't a drastically more advanced intelligence just dwarf and dissolve any lesser intelligence that tried to meld with it?

Not necessarily; that's an actual research field.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#152

Post by TeMPOraL »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #127

The question is, what is Google going to do with all these robotics and AI companies? And please no singularity/skynet/robot uprising BS, I'm expecting more from HN than youtube level comments.

Singularity is not BS, and I'm pretty sure they want to make it happen. It would be a shame if Google wanted all this AI talent to improve ad revenue or just for self-driving cars. I for one hope they are not that short-sighted. I think, hope, that with "all these robotics and AI companies", they literally want to build the future of mankind.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#154

Post by TeMPOraL »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #94
f_salmon wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also called "a self-fulfilling prophecy"; you make something happen by the simple statement "it will happen". It's also a smart move for your career: You can create your own job and attract lots of funding for your research, or sell your business for a lot.

It sounds like a piece of fearmongering nastiness until you think of it in terms of mathematics rather than psychology. A so-called "artificial intelligence" is just an extremely sophisticated active, online learning agent designed to maximize some utility function or (equivalently) minimize some loss function. There's no term in a loss function for "kill all humans", but neither is there one for "do what humans want…

Or as Eliezer nicely phrased it once in a paper[0],

> "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

[0] - http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/ai-risk

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#155

Post by TeMPOraL »

sanoli wrote: post #147
topynate wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a goal, I'm sure they're thinking about it. Unfriendly AI is part of pop-culture, after all. As a hard mathematical problem, not so much (I was following Ben Goertzel's OpenCog project for quite some time, and he seems to have this view, even though he's affiliated to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which has Friendliness as its principal concern). The trouble is that if Friendliness is the slightest…

Question from someone ignorant on the subject: if we can select and breed friendlier and friendlier animals (has been easily done with wild foxes and other wild animals, not to mention dogs), why would it be hard to creat AIs with friendliness and non-violence at its core?

Because we don't have a clue what are "human values" and what it means for an AI (or animal, or frankly, other humans) to be "friendly".

We can sweep this problem under the rug in case of pets; it's not as if they could start making weapons and organizing an army. With human-level intelligence, we already have a friendliness problem with fellow humans, and in case of potential superhuman minds we need to be damn sure that it doesn't do something stupid (in our opinion) like taking all the resources of our planet and using it to tile the solar system with paperclips.

As the saying goes, "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else."

See also http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#156

Post by bachback »

I've met one of the founders a while ago. pretty smart people, but it seems to me that the whole purpose of silicon valley is advertising. not a world I want to live in. google establishing an ethics committee for proper AI? give me a break, we know how well that works.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#157

Post by mej10 »

marvin wrote: post #142
Tenoke wrote: post #106

>The DeepMind-Google ethics board, which DeepMind pushed for.. Damn, if DeepMind had to 'push' for an ethics board then that is a fairly bad sign. I am getting more worried. [0] https://www.theinformation.com/Google-beat-Facebook-For-Deep...

At least someone pushed for it. It's reassuring to hear that the thought was on the radar at all.

This is my thought as well.

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#158

Post by alphydan »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #155
sanoli wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question from someone ignorant on the subject: if we can select and breed friendlier and friendlier animals (has been easily done with wild foxes and other wild animals, not to mention dogs), why would it be hard to creat AIs with friendliness and non-violence at its core?

Because we don't have a clue what are "human values" and what it means for an AI (or animal, or frankly, other humans) to be "friendly". We can sweep this problem under the rug in case of pets; it's not as if they could start making weapons and organizing an army. With human-level intelligence, we already have a friendliness problem with fellow humans, and in case of potential superhuman minds we need to be damn sure…

Perhaps to illustrate the concept with an example: is George W. Bush considered "Friendly". What about Obama? Would an AI who behaved like them (according to some Humans, trying to bring peace and security to a country) be considered "Friendly".

Re: Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind for $400M

#159

Post by jonknee »

I don't know anyone on the team, but Om Malik was not impressed and he's usually reliable:

https://twitter.com/om/status/427653907766972416

> A $400 million talent acquisition with little talent. That's how Google rolls now!

There's also word that it was more than $400m, perhaps as high as $500m. That's a lot for talent any way you slice it.

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