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The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

economist.com

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Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#21

Post by jarek-foksa »

return0 wrote: post #8

Now 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.

If we managed to create an AI that gets out of control, we would pose an existential threat to it due to our ability to create another even more powerful and uncontrollable AI.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#22

Post by bwood »

return0 wrote: post #14
bwood wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i dont understand how that thing will develop intention. We perceive ourselves having it, but its really an accident that we do; if we didnt we wouldnt be here to observe it. Why would an artificial machine, no matter how smart , want to do anything?

If the AI doesn't have its own intention (perhaps having intention is a prerequisite for being truly intelligent), it's conceivable that we would program it with an intention or goal, such "find the most efficient way to produce as many paperclips as possible". If you assigned such a task to a human, it's fairly obvious that the task is subject to other things which are important to humans (for example, don't enslave or kill people to build paperclips, don't replace strip-mine all our farmland to find more paperclip material, etc.). But since an AI doesn't necessarily share, understand, or agree with all the implicit values we have, it's myopic view of the world could cause it to destroy us as a mere side-effect of trying to achieve it's singular goal.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#23

Post by DanAndersen »

jjaredsimpson wrote: post #19
loup-vaillant wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The machine does not hate you, nor does it loves you. But you are made of atoms, that it could use for something else. --- If you create an AI with a genuine utility function. And that AI manage to be gazillion smarter than you are (think the difference between us and chimps, only much greater). Then it is likely the AI will (i) convince you to unleash it upon the internet, (ii) become even more powerful and totally…

>If the goal is to keep humans safe and happy, it might imprison everyone in playgrounds, and drug or lobotomise any unhappy people, or restraint any suicidal people. Or, if you specified "happiness" with pictures of smiling people, it might resort to facial reconstruction, or it might just tile the solar system with molecular smileys, because that maximises the "make people smile" goal much better than actually maki…

Would you be able to provide links to the arguments that refute it? Simply asserting that someone has disproved X isn't very helpful to the rest of us.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#24

Post by return0 »

coldtea wrote: post #10
return0 wrote: post #8

Now 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…

> Fifth, as advanced AI, it could develop actual feelings, including sadism, greed, etc.

I get that some AIs will have simulated reward signals, but letting them go haywire would just be bad design. We have nuclear heads, but we do not design them to explode at random. Now, our own reward mechanisms arise from the grander plan to keep organic life alive. Theirs have no underlying motive, and i don't think it goes the other way around, i.e you can't create a grander plan starting from the rewards. One would need a mathematical proof for the latter.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#25

Post by DanAndersen »

giltleaf wrote: post #17

>"Crucially, this capacity is narrow and specific. Today’s AI produces the semblance of intelligence through brute number-crunching force, without any great interest in approximating how minds equip humans with autonomy, interests and desires." I'm not sure why we would want AI to have autonomy, interest, and desire? It's almost like solving a problem that doesn't exist.

Phrasing it this way leads to the implication of autonomy, interest, and desire being like these modular things, sort of Aristotelian "Things" that are bestowed upon minds, like Star Trek's Data putting in "the Emotion Chip."

If you build a drone navigation system that can reroute based on weather conditions rather than being a manually human-guided remote control bot, you've given it some degree of "Autonomy." Give it a goal (to get to a destination with minimal fuel costs) and now it has some limited "Desire." Give its camera face processing algorithms to deliver an item to a specific person? Now there's "Interest."

These aren't going to be characteristics that we plug into a program in a Frankenstein-like manner, but just actions and behaviors, rooted in practical code, that will from the outside resemble things we call autonomy etc. when talking about each other.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#26

Post by justinpaulson »

Posted this on HN a couple days ago but I don't think anyone saw it: http://justinpaulson.com/posts/0bb97847af7e2123f6173361

tl;dr: Robots and AI will not be built as separate entities, but will instead be incorporated into our own bodies. They will not be the superhumans, we will be.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#27

Post by [deleted] »

DanAndersen wrote: post #20
return0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont understand how that thing will develop intention. We perceive ourselves having it, but its really an accident that we do; if we didnt we wouldnt be here to observe it. Why would an artificial machine, no matter how smart , want to do anything?

Don't think of "wanting" as a soul-like action of a little person in the machine. "Wanting" is a shorthand for anything that is the result of a goal system and autonomy. In the simplest sense, giving a drone a map of its surroundings and giving it a location as the goal for its path-finding optimization algorithms, the drone now "wants" to go to that location.

[deleted]

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#28

Post by return0 »

justinpaulson wrote: post #26

Posted this on HN a couple days ago but I don't think anyone saw it: http://justinpaulson.com/posts/0bb97847af7e2123f6173361 tl;dr: Robots and AI will not be built as separate entities, but will instead be incorporated into our own bodies. They will not be the superhumans, we will be.

also the other way around, we can build robots and implant an organic, lab-grown brain in them. it may be energetically cheaper.

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#29

Post by SCHiM »

return0 wrote: post #14
bwood wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

i dont understand how that thing will develop intention. We perceive ourselves having it, but its really an accident that we do; if we didnt we wouldnt be here to observe it. Why would an artificial machine, no matter how smart , want to do anything?

It 'wants' what we programmed it to want.

It's not that the machine decided that it wanted to build paperclips. It's what we've told it to do.

The _means_ to build paperclips however is where the 'intelligence' comes into play. We've programmed the drive to build paperclicps, but we've left it to the AI to figure out how to do this. The article that you've read assumes that planning and subgoals are necessary for the AI to achieve its goal. Eg. That it needs to understand that in order to make paperclips it needs materials, and the further insight that to acquire more materials it needs to remove the other consumers of materials (us).

Re: The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the perils

#30

Post by return0 »

bwood wrote: post #22
return0 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dont understand how that thing will develop intention. We perceive ourselves having it, but its really an accident that we do; if we didnt we wouldnt be here to observe it. Why would an artificial machine, no matter how smart , want to do anything?

If the AI doesn't have its own intention (perhaps having intention is a prerequisite for being truly intelligent), it's conceivable that we would program it with an intention or goal, such "find the most efficient way to produce as many paperclips as possible". If you assigned such a task to a human, it's fairly obvious that the task is subject to other things which are important to humans (for example, don't enslave…

yeah but that's bad design or terrorism, there is always another person to blame here. I think we are talking here about machines that take the blame themselves.
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