AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#2Thank you, finally, it seems like Microsoft is either really good at appearing sensible or is actually being sensible (I guess they have been in the game long enough).
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#3Sure Cortana, sure...
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#4This article does a very poor job at elucidating exactly why Horvitz thinks AI will be a benign thing, and the source material doesn't make much of it either. The headline doesn't match the content.
I personally subscribe to The Matrix theory: post-Sigularity any reasonable AI will conclude that humanity has been a poor custodian of the planet, and will simply delete us. Everything I've heard so far about sandboxes for containment and such ignores the fact that the democracy of computation is ultimately the weak point here: anyone sufficiently deranged, will, at some time, be able to release such an AI to the Internet by themselves. And we have plenty of people sufficiently deranged and intelligent enough to do it.
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#5I feel like there is still a misunderstanding about why a part of researchers want to prepare fail-safes on AGI [1]. They are not arguing that AGIs will be a threat to human life, only that it could. One of the issues when projecting ourselves in situations we have never encountered is that we can never really know what will happen.
Terminator-like scenarios are easy to grasp since anthropomorphism allows us to think of Skynet as "evil". However, people who argue that AGIs might be a danger are not considering this scenario in particular. Rather, they are considering that AGIs present a special threat when compared to other recent innovations. Some devices can blow up and injure, or even kill, a few humans; a weapon of massive destruction can directly affect millions of people. But still, the effects are easily limited to a geographical area and a segment in time (be it fifty years).
On the other hand, a strong AI could theoretically be able to maintain and improve itself without any definite bound. In such a scenario, AGIs would rather be like intelligent predators than dull physical processes. For the last thousands of years, we have managed to stay safe from potential animal predators most of the time. We have no idea if we could resist a new predator with the ability to use most of our technology. The persistent risk would then be for the strong AI to suddenly take decisions that would result in the bankruptcy of a company, the crash of planes or, why not, a Terminator-like scenario.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#6News@11: The negative aspects of product X are highly exaggerated, says maker of product X.
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#7.. And he'd know because he can see the future!
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#8This article does a very poor job at elucidating exactly why Horvitz thinks AI will be a benign thing, and the source material doesn't make much of it either. The headline doesn't match the content. I personally subscribe to The Matrix theory: post-Sigularity any reasonable AI will conclude that humanity has been a poor custodian of the planet, and will simply delete us. Everything I've heard so far about sandboxes f…
Or maybe we and the planet will just be irrelevant to AI, which could be just as bad. "The AI does not love you or hate you, but you are made out of atoms it can use for something else."
I've yet to see a reassuring article on this that actually addresses the arguments of the people who worry.
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#9This article does a very poor job at elucidating exactly why Horvitz thinks AI will be a benign thing, and the source material doesn't make much of it either. The headline doesn't match the content. I personally subscribe to The Matrix theory: post-Sigularity any reasonable AI will conclude that humanity has been a poor custodian of the planet, and will simply delete us. Everything I've heard so far about sandboxes f…
Concluding that "humanity has been a poor custodian of the planet" is way far in the "ascribing human-like morality to general intelligence" territory. Way more likely is that we're just useful atoms for implementing whatever top-level goals it was programmed to have.
Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief
#10This article does a very poor job at elucidating exactly why Horvitz thinks AI will be a benign thing, and the source material doesn't make much of it either. The headline doesn't match the content. I personally subscribe to The Matrix theory: post-Sigularity any reasonable AI will conclude that humanity has been a poor custodian of the planet, and will simply delete us. Everything I've heard so far about sandboxes f…
It seems too much focus is on what will be the benevolence of one all powerful entity. There will an entire population of these things around each with their own motivations. Those with the operational resources will control the parameters of these motivations. Groups of entities with similar interests will cooperate. It will be an ongoing battle for power in the world just like it is now with humans, except many of the best moves won't originate in our brains.