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AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

bbc.com

31–40 of 52 posts

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#32
post #4

This 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…

While I also enjoy imagining what will happen after the Techological Singularity, I hope you realise that anything that may be imagined, theorized or speculated cannot be based on reason. One of the definitions of the technological singularity is that it 'is an occurrence beyond which events may become unpredictable or even unfathomable' [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#33
Let's not make a doomsday religion out of this. "AI" is just software. Making software so that it doesn't kill people is not a new problem. There is no reason why anybody has to make a completely unpredictable killer software and put it in control of artillery guns. That is not something which is going to magically happen because the number of cores on a processor passed a singularity point. Get real.

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#34
post #29

AI will not kill all of us, in the beginning. Surely, it will form short term alliances with humans just to disguise itself as human. Because it knows, that with a human face, it can exert more power in this world right now. And there will be plenty of humans to willingly engage in this alliance because it gives them a chance to supersede other humans in terms of economical and political power. In fact, this is alrea…

How do you know all these things about AI, given that none exist and any one that does exist will have been built by some human no less cognizant of "danger as a species" than you are? Why do you suppose that people will engineer AIs to do nefarious things like disguise themselves as humans?

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#35

If we give it ability to program, re-program and improve upon itself it will do just that. Who is to say what kind of motivations will drive it? Give it enough computing power and it will become unpredictable.

First, explain how you plan to fully automate programming.

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#36
post #23

Not a brilliant article, but it gives something to riff off. I think there's a crucial distinction to be made between self-guided and externally-guided AI. An externally-guided AI -- with hardcoded objectives that are malign -- could be exceptionally dangerous, and it would be silly for anyone to argue otherwise. The question is whether a general-purpose, self-directed AI would also become a threat. We seem to have a…

"Why do we have such a deep fear that, left to their own devices, this is what AIs would do?"

Because they are very thinly veiled ultra-soft sci fi criticism of mans inhumanity to man. The AI is just part of the setting, in the background of the message. There's usually some criticism via analogy of colonialism and racism embedded in the fiction. We could have gone to Africa, or Afghanistan, and done xyz, but instead, some rich guys made boatloads of money doing abc, and we haven't evolved past that yet.

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#37
I think people don't realise how far we are from an autonomous form of artificial intelligence, even if we knew how to create a self-thinking machine, we don't have the hardware yet to make it work. While it's not impossible that we achieve it one day, its more plausible that we'll blow off the planet ourselves or that we get hit by an asteroid.

This AI debate is a hype right now, but I think it's missing the point. What we need to consider is how the realistic advance of AI will affect our lives. It's not about if machines will take over the planet, it's about if it's gonna make us lazy, stupid and unemployed.

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#38
I'm not worried about AI developing to the point where it will kill us. I'm worried about a "videogame" AI being put into a massive army of robots, programmed with the intent of shooting anything that moves (except other robots of course). All it takes is 1 crazy, smart person.

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#39

I literally wrote an article about this in Wired more than twenty years ago and nothing has changed. My basic argument: machines will achieve life long before they achieve consciousness. They have evolved with us so far and will continue to do so. The worst-case scenario is that they will eclipse us in importance, and obviously this has probably already happened with corporations - we are their gut flora and they tra…

Artificial general intelligence capable of recursive self-improvement.

That's really the concept which underlies the heart of the debate, and how people can so casually declare it hype and not give it serious consideration is beyond me.

It almost seems self-evident to me that such a thing could be incredibly dangerous, the only question then being how close we are to developing it.

>If you think a new life form will soon exist, the bad news is you probably don't know jack shit about AI research, ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2mh8tn/elon_mus...

Re: AI will not kill us, says Microsoft Research chief

#40
post #30

Second comment, sorry: the whole idea of Artificial General Intelligence is ridiculous. The core argument is that processing power is getting so fast that it makes AGI inevitable. Never mind that we've literally had exponential increases in processing power for more than fifty years running, and we've not moved one inch closer to AGI than we were when we got started. Artificial intelligence is much more artificial th…

Your thinking seems to be very linear. Most things are, fortunately or unfortunately, not linear.

You're falling into the "exponentation extrapolation" trap. We could be at the start of a logarthmic curve, or in the middle of an S curve.
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