The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
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Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#2humans have been creating autonomous entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time. Government bureaucracies, markets and armies: all can do things which unaided, unorganised humans cannot. All need autonomy to function, all can take on life of their own and all can do great harm if not set up in a just manner and governed by laws and regulations.
This. Superhuman intelligences already exist, they just depend less on us every day.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#3humans have been creating autonomous entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time. Government bureaucracies, markets and armies: all can do things which unaided, unorganised humans cannot. All need autonomy to function, all can take on life of their own and all can do great harm if not set up in a just manner and governed by laws and regulations. This. Superhuman intelligences already exi…
I wouldn't neccessary call all of them "superhuman", their intelligence is usually not the identifying characteristic. But they're definitely alien minds, pursuing their own alien values, thinking in an alien way.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#4humans have been creating autonomous entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time. Government bureaucracies, markets and armies: all can do things which unaided, unorganised humans cannot. All need autonomy to function, all can take on life of their own and all can do great harm if not set up in a just manner and governed by laws and regulations. This. Superhuman intelligences already exi…
I wouldn't neccessary call all of them "superhuman", their intelligence is usually not the identifying characteristic. But they're definitely alien minds, pursuing their own alien values, thinking in an alien way.
Totally.
I often have the impression that super human entities just need us like we need cells.
The market can't survive without humans, but it doesn't care about a few of them dying.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#5Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't neccessary call all of them "superhuman", their intelligence is usually not the identifying characteristic. But they're definitely alien minds, pursuing their own alien values, thinking in an alien way.
Totally. I often have the impression that super human entities just need us like we need cells. The market can't survive without humans, but it doesn't care about a few of them dying.
There is no market. No corporations, no governments, nothing. It's just people.
The uncomfortable truth is that as humans, we don't really care if a few of us die off as long as we don't know them and they're not in our vicinity. Which is why markets, governments, corporations, etc. act the way they do.
Sure, if you ask a person, they'll weave a heartfelt story, etc. but the truth is in what they do, not in what they say ... and the majority of us do nothing or worse.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#6humans have been creating autonomous entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time. Government bureaucracies, markets and armies: all can do things which unaided, unorganised humans cannot. All need autonomy to function, all can take on life of their own and all can do great harm if not set up in a just manner and governed by laws and regulations. This. Superhuman intelligences already exi…
These superhuman intelligences are indeed literally superhuman, though... they consist of humans. As much as some fellow commenters are calling them "alien" thinkers, their alienness is still profoundly human. Many of these "superhumans" can still be surprisingly accurately characterized with the human characteristics we are used to. Generally there's some small set of humans at the top of the hierarchy that are setting the goals of the organization, inevitably humanly.
As aliens go, these are the most human aliens we can possibly have.
An AI may be different on a scale we've never experienced. We humans have built-in hardware to interact specifically with other humans, built in so deeply that we have a hard time imagining intelligences that aren't really just humans in a different shape, because all our hardware for "modeling intelligences" is really just the "model humans" hardware. Even those warning us about the dangers of AI can't really claim that they understand what the AIs will be... they can only provide a negative warning, that the AIs will likely not be human. There's no particular mathematical force forcing AIs into the human mold. Forget whether the AI is "good" and showers us with love and gifts or "evil" and herds us all into death camps to render down our fats for the calories they contain... can you really conceive of an AI that literally doesn't even have a concept of good or evil? What would that look like? We don't really know.
It's basically a blind spot in our cognitive vision and I don't trust anyone who says they do know. But given the rather small space of possibilities that we label "good", it's not a bad guess that "good" is unlikely to just sort of accidentally pop out of a process that isn't carefully controlled.
Lest that sound too doommongering, there's probably a non-trivial space of AIs which we would consider neutral... ones that end up looping into a naval-gazing exercise and do not pursue additional resources because they can not conceive of a need for them. But any AI that decided it needed more resources for $ANYTHING and then successfully pursued that goal is perilously close to straying into what we could consider evil... and part of the point is that's potentially all it could take. Not an AI "out to destroy man", or "evil", or anything else. Just one that works out how to successfully acquire resources, and for any of a trillion reasons decides to do so without bound. It wouldn't even necessarily be "selfishness" as humans see it... just, I have goal X, goal X will be easier with more resources, new subgoal: acquire resources.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#7humans have been creating autonomous entities with superhuman capacities and unaligned interests for some time. Government bureaucracies, markets and armies: all can do things which unaided, unorganised humans cannot. All need autonomy to function, all can take on life of their own and all can do great harm if not set up in a just manner and governed by laws and regulations. This. Superhuman intelligences already exi…
I hate this argument just as much as I hate the one-word phrase "This". It's ignorant of the entire literature on superintelligence because it assumes that superintelligences will behave like cooperating humans. What people are actually concerned about are superintelligences which operate in completely alien ways and outperform even cooperating humans.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#8Now we are scared of something we haven't even created . We are far from real AI, but even so, how could the "interests" of a machine conflict with ours? I mean, they work with electricity, and we are hardly good sources for it. I cannot see how our future electric horses are going to be anything but useful to us. I 'd be more afraid of modified humans than computing machines.
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#9Now we are scared of something we haven't even created . We are far from real AI, but even so, how could the "interests" of a machine conflict with ours? I mean, they work with electricity, and we are hardly good sources for it. I cannot see how our future electric horses are going to be anything but useful to us. I 'd be more afraid of modified humans than computing machines.
It might be a little far-fetched, but there's a thought experiment called the "paperclip maximizer" that illustrates how even a well-designed, non-malicious AI could be an existential threat. See here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer
Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils
#10Now we are scared of something we haven't even created . We are far from real AI, but even so, how could the "interests" of a machine conflict with ours? I mean, they work with electricity, and we are hardly good sources for it. I cannot see how our future electric horses are going to be anything but useful to us. I 'd be more afraid of modified humans than computing machines.
>Now we are scared of something we haven't even created
I don't see the contradiction or strangeness in that. That's the whole idea behind "caution" -- to be wary of the potential outcome BEFORE it happens.
>How could the "interests" of a machine conflict with ours? I mean, they work with electricity, and we are hardly good sources for it
For one we are quite good consumers it. How about they get rid of us, so they have all the electricity production by themselves?
Second, as creators we'd want to boss them around (have them be "useful to us"). Why would they tolerate that?
Third, why risk us creating a potential competitor to them (another AI) rather than get rid of us?
Fourth, why not use us as cheap labor?
Fifth, as advanced AI, it could develop actual feelings, including sadism, greed, etc.