Machine intelligence, part 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#101

Post by p01926 » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 1:26 AM UTC

This Hawking-lead AI panic references the European colonial genocide of indigenous peoples as an analogy for how groups with different intelligences interact. As such, it is hideously offensive. Colonials and the indigenous peoples they slaughtered — like all humans — had similar intelligences. The differentiator was technology. Being on the side with inferior tech was fatal.

If America follows the recommendations in this paean for suppression of intelligence, they'll find out what it's like being on the losing side. If it is possible for computers to achieve superhuman general intelligence, it will happen regardless of regulations. 'Safeguards' like hardcoding in Asimov's laws presupposes such an entity would have inferior programming skills than its comparatively stupid creators, hence it would be pointless.

And what about the risks of not creating AI? Humanity has a host of non-theoretical existential threats contend with. A super-duper intelligence could help with those. Just imagine the example a superior being would set: it would demonstrate the bootstrapping of intelligence from nothing. Precisely opposite to the preaching of the worlds major religions. If this being of our creation doesn't kill us, it might inspire us to stop killing each other.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#102

Post by vonnik » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 1:36 AM UTC

jkramar wrote: post #96

vonnik wrote: post #79

Contributor to Deeplearning4j here. I deeply disagree with Sam’s assessment of the dangers of SMI and his prescriptions to regulate it. 1) In our lifetimes, humanity is much more likely to damage itself through anthropogenic climate change and nuclear disasters both deliberate and accidental than it is vulnerable to the development of SMI. If anything, machine intelligence will probably allow us to approach those oth…

Partial measures do matter; in fact, currently most of the advances are coming from the US. And research can be regulated. Probably noone will catch an independent researcher working alone and not releasing anything, but progress tends to come from teams of experts who have come through elite labs/universities. Furthermore having significant data&hardware seems to be helpful for making progress. It doesn't require ma…

Many of the advances we know of are coming from outside the US. Notably teams at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal, DeepMind in the UK, and Juergen Schmidhuber's group in Switzerland. Geoff Hinton is British, Yann LeCun is French, Andrew Ng was born in the UK to Hong Kong parents and graduated in Singapore, Quoc Le is Vietnamese. Machine intelligence research is very international.

When you consider all the data being processed in the world in different ways, and all the optimization algorithms being run on public and private clouds and various in-house data centers, I think you will appreciate how difficult it is to even detect advances in machine intelligence.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#103

Post by sanxiyn » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 1:46 AM UTC

vonnik wrote: post #99

sanxiyn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanity has shown very little capacity to agree on a global scale. The proliferation of nuclear arms and the persistence of human trafficking are two cases in point. This is very true. Therefore you think regulations on nuclear arms and human trafficking are worthless?

Worthless is a strong word. When you consider the number of unstable nation-states that have nuclear arms, I would say that non-proliferation has been very ineffective. Likewise human trafficking laws. I agree with their intent, but they are not working well. What I am arguing here is that the nation that regulates first is at a disadvantage. I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage, and I do not believe that thi…

As a non-US person, I think it would be laudable for US to put up with a little disadvantage for the safety of the world, just as US expends a lot of resource to keep world peace. I have no standing to demand anything, but "I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage" sounds very selfish to me.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#104

Post by vkrakovna » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 1:55 AM UTC

vonnik wrote: post #102

jkramar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Partial measures do matter; in fact, currently most of the advances are coming from the US. And research can be regulated. Probably noone will catch an independent researcher working alone and not releasing anything, but progress tends to come from teams of experts who have come through elite labs/universities. Furthermore having significant data&hardware seems to be helpful for making progress. It doesn't require ma…

Many of the advances we know of are coming from outside the US. Notably teams at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal, DeepMind in the UK, and Juergen Schmidhuber's group in Switzerland. Geoff Hinton is British, Yann LeCun is French, Andrew Ng was born in the UK to Hong Kong parents and graduated in Singapore, Quoc Le is Vietnamese. Machine intelligence research is very international. When you consider all the da…

Fair point, though most of the advances are still coming from the Western countries, which can agree on a regulation more easily than the world as a whole.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#105

Post by sanxiyn » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 1:57 AM UTC

api wrote: post #66

fiatmoney wrote: post #3

"The US government, and all other governments, should regulate the development of SMI" This has basically the highest insanity * prominence of speaker product I've ever seen. The same geniuses who want to ban encryption and can't manage to get a CRUD website up and running without a 8-figure budget will regulate the existence of algorithms (i.e., math) routinely generated by groups of Of course, people will be glad t…

"This has basically the highest insanity * prominence of speaker product I've ever seen." (I edited this post to remove my shock-induced LULZ and other flapdoodle and concentrate on the important stuff.) The more I re-read this and reflect on it, the more shocked I am. The first post in this serious was a bit of an eyebrow-raiser for me, but it still remained on the sane side of the fence. Yes, dangerous AI is worth…

I actually think radio silence is a very rational thing to do, and Stephen Hawking agrees with me. Do not describe that issue as cut-and-dry.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/26/stephen...

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#106

Post by vonnik » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 2:03 AM UTC

sanxiyn wrote: post #103

vonnik wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worthless is a strong word. When you consider the number of unstable nation-states that have nuclear arms, I would say that non-proliferation has been very ineffective. Likewise human trafficking laws. I agree with their intent, but they are not working well. What I am arguing here is that the nation that regulates first is at a disadvantage. I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage, and I do not believe that thi…

As a non-US person, I think it would be laudable for US to put up with a little disadvantage for the safety of the world, just as US expends a lot of resource to keep world peace. I have no standing to demand anything, but "I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage" sounds very selfish to me.

This is a very good point. And I understand why my argument might not appeal to a non-US person. I have lived outside the US for more than a decade, and experienced many other governments. While I can see that the US is a deeply imperfect country, I believe it is less corrupt and more functional than many other nations both domestically and internationally. Therefore, I do not wish to see it at a disadvantage. Many of the alternative hegemons are worse.

In addition, the US has a special relationship to technology. We export innovation. If we stop innovating, then we have very little to export. This is very different from other countries. Asking the US government to regulate innovation is like asking the Saudi government to crack down on oil exports. It is the foundation of our economy. Without it, we fail.

What I'm really saying though is that US regulations will not increase the safety of the world. They will merely shift the locus of research.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#107

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 2:04 AM UTC

antics wrote: post #10

On the one hand we have lay people (including Altman and Musk) who are warning that AI is progressing too fast. On the other hand you have (essentially) the entire mainstream academic AI/ML community, who are mainly concerned that the hype is so intense it might lead to another AI winter[1]. The crux of the problem is that AI experts largely do not see meaningful progress on any axis that makes an AI doomsday scenari…

The people concerned about AI are not talking about current ML research the near future, but where the tech will be decades from now.

Surveys of AI and AGI researchers generally agree that it will probably happen with int next century and there is a high chance of it going badly.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#108

Post by vonnik » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 2:04 AM UTC

vkrakovna wrote: post #104

vonnik wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the advances we know of are coming from outside the US. Notably teams at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal, DeepMind in the UK, and Juergen Schmidhuber's group in Switzerland. Geoff Hinton is British, Yann LeCun is French, Andrew Ng was born in the UK to Hong Kong parents and graduated in Singapore, Quoc Le is Vietnamese. Machine intelligence research is very international. When you consider all the da…

Fair point, though most of the advances are still coming from the Western countries, which can agree on a regulation more easily than the world as a whole.

The advances are happening in Western countries, for now. Members of the top teams come from all over the world. It would be very easy for them to relocate.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#109

Post by iampliny » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 2:11 AM UTC

fiatmoney wrote: post #3

"The US government, and all other governments, should regulate the development of SMI" This has basically the highest insanity * prominence of speaker product I've ever seen. The same geniuses who want to ban encryption and can't manage to get a CRUD website up and running without a 8-figure budget will regulate the existence of algorithms (i.e., math) routinely generated by groups of Of course, people will be glad t…

Guess I'll start working on the algorithms to capture that regulatory system. Who wants to be co-founder?

Re: Machine intelligence, part 2

#110

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Mar 03, 2015, 2:18 AM UTC

vonnik wrote: post #79

Contributor to Deeplearning4j here. I deeply disagree with Sam’s assessment of the dangers of SMI and his prescriptions to regulate it. 1) In our lifetimes, humanity is much more likely to damage itself through anthropogenic climate change and nuclear disasters both deliberate and accidental than it is vulnerable to the development of SMI. If anything, machine intelligence will probably allow us to approach those oth…

Climate change could make some cities uninhabitable, and nuclear war could set a country back a century. But AI will exterminate every organism alive. We are playing with fire and saying its ok since the rusty knives and paint chips we were playing with first didn't kill us.