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Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

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71–80 of 95 posts

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#71
I fear AI far less than I fear humans.

First, twenty thousand years or more of human history is about us trying to make other humans into machines: slavery, rape and forced prostitution, political coercion, war, overreaching prison systems and draconian punishments for minor crimes. We're not very nice to each other. Rather, we're controlling assholes as a species. Most of the ones who get power in organizations small and large are more focused on relative dominance than on absolute gain. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to the Bible to modern Stalinism, we see that effort by powerful people to turn the rest of humanity into a machine that will exert their own will.

Given 20,000 years of abusively turning humans into machines, tearing apart their families and banning their religions, attempting to boil them down into simple working devices, is it really likely that a control-freak species like us is going to let a machine try to assert itself as human? In peacetime, I think we'll be pretty good at preventing that from happening. We're good at mechanizing labor and, now that we have devices that outperform us at menial and dangerous work, that's becoming an asset rather than a flaw.

Sure, it's possible that we get outdone by AI, and in fact there's one context in which it's likely: war. Counted among the casualties of an all-out or existential war are all the rules that people once believed in, and all of our assumptions about what humans (who, normally, aren't so terrified and desperate or so power-hungry) will do. If a runaway AI destroys humanity, it will probably begin from humans warring against other humans, and in an all-out conflict where surrender is not seen as possible by either side.

This is not to downplay the risk. At best, I'd be saying that AI isn't dangerous in the way that guns aren't dangerous-- and, of course, we know that guns are extremely dangerous when used by humans to kill other humans. Luckily, this desire to kill another person doesn't seem to exist at the scale that would enable the existence of guns to be an existential threat.

So why might humans tend to kill other humans? Crime often results from scarcity. Well, technological unemployment is only accelerating. What happened to agricultural commodity prices in the 1920s, leading to widespread rural poverty and a global depression in the 1930s, is happening to almost all human labor today. It's terrifying because ill-managed prosperity begets scarcity and that begets fear and authoritarianism and war. While we're decades away from being able to build a species-killing AI (which, of course, would typically not be designed as such; it would probably be designed to kill some humans before running amok and doing fatal damage) I do think that if we are similar in character, by that time, to what we are now, it's a real threat. Power accrues, in most human organizations, not to those who deliver progress but to those who create scarcity. If this doesn't change, then wars will never end and that fact alone is an existential risk.

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#72
post #41
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mainly because I haven't seen any evidence. Special purpose AI is not evidence. That point is debatable, but most AI practitioners agree; it's only some technologists like Elon Musk et. al. that seem to be extrapolating. Sure, humans exist, and we can already make humans by combining DNA from a man and a woman :) That method does not lead to superhuman intelligence. What makes you think we could devise some other met…

>Computers and humans are completely different things. If you watch a child grow up, this is obvious. A child can do things that are impossible for a computer, while it can't speak, read, or write. A computer can do things that no human could ever do. They are qualitatively different. Do you think humans can do things that no computer will ever do? If yes, could you give an example? If not, doesn't that imply that hu…

>intelligence enhancing drugs

In terms of computers, this is like programming by injecting sequences of hex determined experimentally. "Clinical trials show that if you find the function three steps down from 'main' and inject 0xEAEAEAFF ten thousand times, there's a 30% chance the program will parse .PNG files faster!"

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#73
post #53

It becomes much easier to understand the AGI threat if you consider whole brain emulations -- human minds running at superhuman speed on silicon. Hollywood has made it obvious, if it wasn't already, the serious implications of that type of development. Whole brain emulations also make it clear that the issue has nothing at all to do with human values: a human superintelligence would be a catastrophic risk to humanity…

Whole Brain Emulation is far off, even putting in moore's law, because we still are far off from understanding the brain. Yes, optogenetics and the connectome are going to bring us a long way there, but at the end, we have to understand that the brain is far to plastic to really know at any time point what is going on. Experiments with macaque motor cortex (M1) provide a great example. When you cut off a finger or to…

The point is that the danger of AGI is much easier to understand through whole brain emulation, not that whole brain emulation is necessarily imminent. That said, the most pernicious risk in AGI is that it will happen "slowly, then all at once"; that it will always be a long way away until the day it isn't.

That said, it isn't obvious to what extent we need to understand the brain in order to transfer it to another substrate: much of engineering relies on a simplified understanding of the world.

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#74
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I thought about that when I was writing the reply. I don't really consider that a generalized use case. Is it more generalized? Yes. Computing itself, however, can be argued to be a specialized task. My computer today doesn't do "computing" it lets me read news stories, it lets me talk on skype, it lets me send mail, it lets me have philosophical discussions on hackernews. The personal computer is so clearly a g…

PLATO had graphical terminals with touch screens and software implementing forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games. They weren't just used by programmers by a long shot.

Ok, fine. PLATO was a super cool more generalist machine that happens to not be a personal computer. My use of personal computers was just an example that I thought would get a point across about the evolution of technology. The fact that PLATO existed and was very different than what came before it (as per all the cool stuff you listed) if anything strengthens the argument I was making. Generalist machines were a big step up from what came before, orders of magnitude better. A super-AI will also be unpredictably orders of magnitude better than what we've done so far.

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#75
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PLATO had graphical terminals with touch screens and software implementing forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games. They weren't just used by programmers by a long shot.

Ok, fine. PLATO was a super cool more generalist machine that happens to not be a personal computer. My use of personal computers was just an example that I thought would get a point across about the evolution of technology. The fact that PLATO existed and was very different than what came before it (as per all the cool stuff you listed) if anything strengthens the argument I was making. Generalist machines were a bi…

But my point is that the generalist computers weren't a sudden or unpredictable step, they were the result of slow and progressive improvement. If generalist computers are any example to go by, the fact that we don't have anything close to a primitive general AI indicates we're far, far away from developing anything close to a "super-AI".

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#76
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a reason to think that humans are near the upper limit of what's possible? If not, why can't we build something significantly smarter than us? A simple hypothesis: because we can't build what we can't understand, and we can't understand an intelligence smarter than us. (Most theories about the Singularity have machines building increasingly smarter machines, in a recursive fashion, but they could likewise be…

In certain domains, we've built things smarter than us. Chess comes to mind. Wouldn't your hypothesis imply that no computer could beat its maker at chess?

Well, that depends on whether we accept following a program that tells it exactly how to play chess is being "smart".

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#77
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to play Devil's Advocate, not because I believe this: We can, and do, create machines that are faster than humans, and it is reasonable to assume that eventually computers can be created that have capacity and connectivity larger than humans. But that doesn't prove that the result will be as intelligent as humans, let alone more intelligent, because intelligence is clearly more than just speed and capacity. Edit…

>Exactly what intelligence is, is still not known, and it is quite possible that we will need an algorithmic breakthrough to create something equivalent to human minds. Let's assume this is true. >And even if that happens, making that thing faster and bigger than human minds may turn out not to result in superintelligence -- that would just be another similar assumption as the first. So it might need yet another algo…

> So at the very least, it can think in one day what a human can think in a million days.

You are simply reiterating the original position that I was devils-advocating against.

It is not proven that a million days of work equals superintelligence, even though obviously it would be more effective than 1 day.

If some activity is exponential, like if it takes 10^x days to accomplish, then a human could solve problems of size 3 in about three years, and the million-fold faster computer would take only 10^(x-6), or about a minute.

And in three years it could solve problems of size 9. But a problem of size 1000 would take so many multiples of the lifetime of the universe that it would appear to be approximately as slow as a human, the difference is negligible.

This is not hypothetical; the best known complete (not approximate) solutions to things like the traveling salesman problem, or to fitting odd sized containers into a container ship, are in fact exponential like that as far as we currently know.

The topic is not limited to algorithmic complexity theory like that, it's just a proof of concept.

So the point is that superintelligence might turn out to be something that a million-fold improvement isn't enough to achieve.

We don't understand intelligence, so it's pretty obvious we don't have a handle on superintelligence.

Again, all this is a matter of optimisim or pessimism up until the subject is understood far, far better.

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with that is that having proof and getting overpowered by a superhuman AI might fall within a very short timeframe. To be brutally honest, I don't actually see this as being necessarily a bad thing --- it's not like humans are doing such a great job of running the world. If a hypothetical AI is so much better at it than we are that it can replace us, then don't we deserve to be replaced? Although I would…

The premise of human being replaced is all well and good, but it seems like you're assuming the superintelligence will do a better job. A paperclip maximizer may be able to deconstruct us on a molecular level, but that's not a thing for our light cone.

Superintelligence by definition does a better job. Think of it this way:

You're a human; how good are you at walking from point A to point B? You're actually quite good at it. You open up google maps (a human invention) and walk to point B. It only takes a small number of humans to maintain the infrastructure for you to find point B.

Now imagine you are an ant. How good are you at finding point B? You're absolutely crap at it. You need to organize an entire complex system of pheromones and ant-conga lines just to find point B (usually a food location). Most of your colony is devoted to this organizational task of just finding point B from point A.

That task that is all consuming for the ant and takes the full attention of the colony is peanuts to us humans, it's so freakin' easy.

By definition a super intelligence eclipses our conception of the universe. If you took the humans who had to try really hard at X, Y, or Z tasks, these X, Y, Z tasks would be peanuts to the AI, they would be so easy the AI doesn't even think about them. The same way ants try really hard and organize their entire colony to find point B and humans don't even think about finding point B.

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#79
post #2

> [combination of things necessary for an AI to become a threat to humanity] Sound reasonable to you? Me either The question isn't whether it "sounds reasonable". If there is even a 2% chance of that happening, we need to consider it. Anything that can end humanity is worth considering even if it is unlikely. > Even if this were the case, there is absolutely no reason to believe that, by virtue of running on a comput…

Sure we should consider it, and the people working on it are considering it. But that doesn't mean we are at a point where we should do something drastic like regulation that would slow down research (Sam Altman's idea).

Re: Stop Fearing Artificial Intelligence

#80
post #69
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Computers and humans are completely different things. If you watch a child grow up, this is obvious. A child can do things that are impossible for a computer, while it can't speak, read, or write. A computer can do things that no human could ever do. They are qualitatively different. Do you think humans can do things that no computer will ever do? If yes, could you give an example? If not, doesn't that imply that hu…

I think it's possible that human thought can't be simulated on a computer. It's far from obvious that it can, and this point needs justification. A lot of people are taking this for granted in their philosophical arguments. Computers can only run Turing complete programs. Human intelligence follows the physical laws of the universe (the mechanism being unknown). Those two substrates are different things; hence it's p…

>I think it's possible that human thought can't be simulated on a computer. It's far from obvious that it can, and this point needs justification.

Fair enough.

>Computers can only run Turing complete programs. Human intelligence follows the physical laws of the universe (the mechanism being unknown). Those two substrates are different things; hence it's possible that humans can do things computers can't. Or at least the burden of proof is on the person who posits that they are equivalent.

The Church–Turing thesis directly says that computers can do anything humans can, and it's pretty well accepted.

Physical laws, as far as we can tell, are Turing computable. I think once you accept the materialistic thesis you should agree that computers can in theory simulate humans, and I'm not really too interested in the opinion on this of anyone who rejects the materialistic thesis.

(Penrose has tried to argue that computation depends on QM, but I think he's been largely disproven.)

>We have the facility to use computers to achieve our goals, but AI algorithms don't use us to achieve their goals, to the extent that they have goals.

Why couldn't they? Why couldn't an AI convince someone to do what they want?

>For a concrete task: consider producing a movie that will win an Oscar. In theory this is possible: the Godfather has a very limited number of bits, all of which can fit on a single computer many times over. The bits could just be manufactured it out of thin air. >In practice I suspect a computer would need physical agency in the world to create such a movie. It would need the ability to negotiate with Hollywood producers to raise funding; to make creative decisions to direct people who operate cameras, microphones, lighting, etc.

Assuming it had access to an internet dump, it could download thousands of existing movies, determine what characteristics are likely to win Oscars, and generate voice and picture based on previous videos. Voice can definitely be generated using information already online, and video should be possible to patch together from existing movies and pictures.

>Computers don't yet have physical agency, and I suspect they won't for quite some time, for both technological and non-technological reasons.

See http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/04/07/no-physical-substrate-n....

About Roko's basilisk: Yudkowsky does not take the idea seriously. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/2cm2eg/rokos_ba... and https://www.reddit.com/r/xkcd/comments/2myg86/xkcd_1450_aibo....

>As I said, practically speaking, we should be focusing on the bazillions of problems that computing and the special AI that is already here present. In the 50 year time frame, the planet could be destroyed or the population could be decimated for many other reasons.

Do you say we shouldn't worry about climate change because it's in the future?

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