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Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

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Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#121

Post by ra88it »

throwaway7808 wrote: post #106
Houshalter wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is incredibly dangerous , but if we did make safe, super intelligent AI, it would definitely be a much greater investment than directly working on those problems. To put it lightly, it would automate and massively bring down the cost/increase the speed of research and engineering. Sure enough money, spent on enough humans, given enough time, could eventually find a cure for any disease. But why do that when y…

Well, let's hope they will go broke wasting money into the AI research black hole before being able to actually build one :) Otherwise, you are correct. A successful built of super intelligent AI is probably an extinction event for the humans.

After super intelligent AI, what's special about humans?

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#122

Post by tremols »

quomopete wrote: post #20
tremols wrote: post #13

Have we cracked the brain's "programming language" yet? I am affraid that until now research has been focused on the biological side of it; and it makes more sense to me to replicate the logic instead of replicating the brain's biological structure. I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work…

the brain having a programming language would have to be based on a lot of assumptions that not everyone is willing to make.

Its true, but there are even fields of science based almost entirely on assumptions.

Even then, there is a neuroscience branch called neural coding that apparently acknowledges the existence of a neural code; but judging from the wikipedia entry their approach seems still too "low level".

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#123

Post by tremols »

jbooth wrote: post #56
tremols wrote: post #13

Have we cracked the brain's "programming language" yet? I am affraid that until now research has been focused on the biological side of it; and it makes more sense to me to replicate the logic instead of replicating the brain's biological structure. I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work…

By replicating the biological structure, they might shed some light on the logic. Right now we're making almost zero traction, a serious effort to copy it might at least make it clear what we're trying to understand. At the very least, if they have a cortex in software, it would create a ethical (?) way to experiment with the logic by enabling/disabling pieces and seeing what happens.

"By replicating the biological structure, they might shed some light on the logic.."

Sounds a bit like cargo-cult to me. We already tried to spawn amoebas from electro-charged soup of chemicals and it didn't work.

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#124

Post by tremols »

z3phyr wrote: post #49
tremols wrote: post #13

Have we cracked the brain's "programming language" yet? I am affraid that until now research has been focused on the biological side of it; and it makes more sense to me to replicate the logic instead of replicating the brain's biological structure. I believe that dataflow/reactive programming is the answer and the direction to follow as its principles are pretty close to how neurons work; plus it can be made to work…

This comes under the category of neuromorphic engineering. It is an excellent question, of which I am trying to find an answer for months now! I bet there is more, just buried under varied publications, and I am sure that they created a DSL for their specialized brain based chip. The most obvious and battle tested way to program a NeuroSynaptic hardware is to create models of the brain (any application) in an algorit…

Interesting, I gave up on a few google searches. But your comment seems to confirm the obscurity of such studies.

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#125

Post by aswanson »

ape4 wrote: post #72
spinchange wrote: post #36

Replicating the neocortex is Kurzweil's vision / approach also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Create_a_Mind

neocortex would be a cool company name

It would. Too bad it's taken by a lame Oracle consultant-type outfit: http://neocortex.com/

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#126

Post by MacsHeadroom »

icefox wrote: post #116
danso wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the question you should be asking is...if everyone agrees that cheap renewable energy and curing diseases is a good thing, why haven't we done it yet? I guess if you're cynical, you'd argue, because no one can make a profit from it (uh...right). However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised mac…

Why is curing all diseases a good thing?

Is being unhealthy good? Do you enjoy being ill?

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#127

Post by loup-vaillant »

lukifer wrote: post #70
loup-vaillant wrote: post #19

If they do pull that off, I hope they will be very, very careful. You know, Intelligence explosion, Friendly AI, taking over the world, that sort of things. http://intelligenceexplosion.com/

We're at the middle of the process, not the beginning: http://omniorthogonal.blogspot.com/2013/02/hostile-ai-youre-... "Information has been running on a primate platform, evolving according to its own agenda. In a sense, we have a symbiotic relationship to a non-material being which we call language. We think it's ours, and we think we control it. It's time-sharing a primate nervous system, and evolving towards its…

I'm not sure what your link has to do with your quote… Anyway, this blog post is not quite right.

While I agree capitalism is a more pressing problem than AI right now, it won't kill us all in 5 minutes. A self-improving AI… we won't even see it coming. There is also much more brainpower dedicated to "fixing" industrial capitalism, than addressing existential risks such as AI. And industrial capitalism doesn't need fixing, it needs to be abolished altogether.

Corporations are even less autonomous than the author thinks. Sure, kill a CEO, and some other shark will take its place. On the other hand, those sharks are all from the same families. Power is still hereditary.

If the people were truly informed about how the current system works, it would collapse in minutes. To take only one example, Fractional Reserve Banking is such fraud that if everyone suddenly knew about it, there would be some serious "civil unrest", to put it mildly.

The same does not apply to an AI. It's just too powerful. Picture the how much smarter we are from chimps. Now take an army of chimps, and a small tribe of cavemen (and women), which somehow want to exterminate each other. Well, the chimps don't stand a chance, if the humans have any time to prepare. They have fire, sticks, lances… Their telepathy have unmatched accuracy (you know, speech). And they can predict the future far better than the chimps. Now picture how much more intelligent than us an AI would be.

It's way worse.

---

Now, this new agey speak about information taking a life of its own… It doesn't work that way. Sure, there's an optimization process at work and it is not any particular human brain. But this optimization process is nowhere near as dangerous as a fully recursive one (that is, an optimization process that optimizes itself). And for that to happen, we need to crack a few mathematical hurdles first, like Löb's theorem.

But that's not the hard part. The hard part is to figure out what goals we should program into the AI. Not only we need to pin them down to mathematical precision, but we don't even know what humanity wants. We don't even know what "what humanity wants" even mean. Hell, we don't even know if it has any meaning at all. Well, we're not completely blind, we have intuitions, and a relatively common sense of morality. But there's still a long road ahead.

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#128

Post by baddox »

icefox wrote: post #116
danso wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So the question you should be asking is...if everyone agrees that cheap renewable energy and curing diseases is a good thing, why haven't we done it yet? I guess if you're cynical, you'd argue, because no one can make a profit from it (uh...right). However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised mac…

Why is curing all diseases a good thing?

Because, unless you're using a specially crafted definition of the term, diseases are all bad.

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#129

Post by Houshalter »

ra88it wrote: post #121
throwaway7808 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, let's hope they will go broke wasting money into the AI research black hole before being able to actually build one :) Otherwise, you are correct. A successful built of super intelligent AI is probably an extinction event for the humans.

After super intelligent AI, what's special about humans?

Define "special". I don't want to be killed to make way for more paperclips.

Re: Zuckerberg, Musk Invest in Artificial-Intelligence Company Vicarious

#130

Post by Houshalter »

r00fus wrote: post #118
Houshalter wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If AI succeeds, then none of those other things will matter at all.

> If AI succeeds, then none of those other things will matter at all. Define success. Now define for whom - the investors? mankind? The AIs themselves?

As in an Intelligence Explosion (http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/.) "Success" is really a bad way of wording it, I just mean if it happens, none of those things will matter. Regardless whether it is friendly or not. Either we go extinct or the AI is so far beyond us, our present progress doesn't make much difference.
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