Hawking: AI could end human race

Otherwise, you can quit your trolling.

This is why analysis exists. Anything that is computed ultimately results in a symbolic expression that is comprehensible to a human. If we find ourselves making illogical leaps because computers compute so much that we find the programs incomprehensible, I think that warrants the creation of new mental techniques to simplify, partition, and chunk the programs we create into human readable modules.

For every calculation tool that exists to do something or make a decision on something, there exists the potential or the development of a tool (or the design of a process) to balance it out. Computers may be powerful and alter our thinking on a fundamental level, where we see the entire world discretely, atomically, and logically (worst case) and believe everything the magic computer tells us to do, but this is no different than anything else we have ever done. Some people push the envelope, other people don't.

I could say that the way black holes are presented and illustrated in western culture has done more damage to the human psyche by creating an all powerful, inescapable mental abstraction for which to compose poetic analogies of the human psyche against, but I won't. Because people can choose to be idiots and fall into their own stupidity, or they can laugh at themselves quietly and continue to try to do whatever it is humans think they are trying to do. We flip a coin every time we think, act, explain, breathe, exist, create, and we pretend we know what the act of flipping that coin does. No one can know everything. Not stephen hawking, not skynet, not me, not my cat. My cat will always outsmart me.

the proponents of any given tier of AI approaches always claims that consciousness will arise out of just doing more of what they're doing now. I doubt it.

Of course, an AI that wipes us out before figuring out how to repair itself would be kind of dumb.

BTW a recent episode of Elementary was based on this topic and was, by the standards of network TV, stunningly accurate on all the issues.

At the moment we have complex systems, such as international stock markets, which are dependant on rules pre-defined by developers and system designers. The more complex these systems are, the greater the potential for "dumb logic" to misdiagnose something and then start performing a series of events that would be, in the best case scenario, highly disruptive.

I guess a bit like how OCR is designed to detect patterns and determine what characters are the closest match. If you have some nonsense scribblings, OCR will still try to recognise those random shames as letters where as a human would spot that the markings are not intended to be letters and words. So if AI allows a machine to double check it's running parameters and spot what would have been processed regardless by dumb logic as incorrect (eg spot the random scribblings are not intended to be characters) then I'm all for artificial intelligence.