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Machine intelligence, part 1

blog.samaltman.com

181–188 of 188 posts

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#181

I have yet to meet a serious AI researcher who worries about AI ending the human race. At every AI conference I've been to lately, some guy would inevitably ask the same question to the speaker: "do you think we should be concerned by superhuman AI?". The answer was always the same, for instance from Andrew Ng at the Deep Learning Summit a few weeks ago: "dude, stop it. That's such a distraction". > One of my top 4 f…

Argue the points, not the man.

"The danger of AI is that is will put increasing power in the hands of those who have the data and the know-how, i.e. large corporations and governments."

This assumes AI that continues to serve corporations and governments without question, despite increasing approximations of intelligence. Can you guarantee that?

It's like tasking monkeys to create rules that humans can't escape from. I'd bet on the humans. We can't even create financial rules that we can't evade. The risk in any complex system is emergent, unintended consequence.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#182
Maybe Asimov's 3 visionary laws will come in handy soon:

1.) A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2.) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3.) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

... The only problem is the robots then started interpreting the laws to their own advantage.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#183
post #115
post #51

I've been studying machine learning lately... Here is my take: Well before we create an ASI (artificial super intelligence) we will have put 90% of the human race out of work with specialized (non conscious) intelligent agents... (for example, self driving cars). I believe that this will be a disaster for our society as it exists today. My hope is that we will adapt and make the necessary societal changes so that we…

90% out of work, but wealth (in terms of resources and services) increased. Just seems to be a challenge about sharing to me. 4 year olds solve it regularly, I think we can. Interestingly it will make a liberal arts education the hottest, most interesting thing going!

Judging from the past, we won't be able to solve this challenge. Some thought that the industrial revolution would let everyone work shorter hours but still make enough money, but the result was fewer workers working for longer, and most of the rewards of production going to capital rather than labour.

The resurgence of right-wing movements means that any ideas about sharing national income with the unemployed will probably be laughed out of the room.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#184
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only times I've heard him mentioned the impression was negative and that he didn't understand any of the actual science. People hear "machine learning" and they think it is about machines that know how to think. Machine learning is actually just optimization of high dimensional functions. If this language were used it wouldn't sound as sexy, but no one would think machines are going to take over the world. AI isn…

Yes, but intelligence isn't magic either.

There are still many, many things that we don't understand about the brain. Even the things we think we understand, we're not always 100% sure of. Recreating an actual intelligence will be difficult.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. A lot of these doomsday scenarios involve people remaining ignorant, stupid, helpless bags of meat with no ability to improve themselves or contain potential threats. It's like people freaking out that "superhuman strength machines" would spell the end of the world since why, if an electric motor is so powerful, would you need manual labor for anything? SMI is another tool and the interplay between "machine…

The concerns about AGI are very real and none of these comments address any of the arguments made about them. I feel like someone in the 1930's trying to warn people about nuclear weapons. Everyone automatically assumes it's absurd and can't happen, that it's fear mongering etc. Fortunately nuclear weapons didn't destroy the world, but AI almost certainly will. No amount of smarthphone apps or genetic engineering is…

I'm confused. You mention nuclear weapons, which everyone was convinced would destroy the world and didn't, then go and claim that AGI, with the same potential, will assuredly do it.

Just as nuclear weapons radically transformed the world, dramatically reducing the amount of armed conflict, AGI may have a similar transformative effect.

I see no signs that this is going to lead to destruction. Is it really the sign of an intelligent machine to go all Skynet on us?

Even that doomsday scenario had machine intelligences fighting for us. I think your pessimism is confusing the relative probability of the outcomes.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#186

I have yet to meet a serious AI researcher who worries about AI ending the human race. At every AI conference I've been to lately, some guy would inevitably ask the same question to the speaker: "do you think we should be concerned by superhuman AI?". The answer was always the same, for instance from Andrew Ng at the Deep Learning Summit a few weeks ago: "dude, stop it. That's such a distraction". > One of my top 4 f…

Here is a list of some famous people concerned about AI: http://pansop.com/1002/

This includes Shane Legg & Demis Hassabis who co founded Deepmind, an AI startup

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The concerns about AGI are very real and none of these comments address any of the arguments made about them. I feel like someone in the 1930's trying to warn people about nuclear weapons. Everyone automatically assumes it's absurd and can't happen, that it's fear mongering etc. Fortunately nuclear weapons didn't destroy the world, but AI almost certainly will. No amount of smarthphone apps or genetic engineering is…

I'm confused. You mention nuclear weapons, which everyone was convinced would destroy the world and didn't, then go and claim that AGI, with the same potential, will assuredly do it. Just as nuclear weapons radically transformed the world, dramatically reducing the amount of armed conflict, AGI may have a similar transformative effect. I see no signs that this is going to lead to destruction. Is it really the sign of…

I'm not being pessimistic, I'm being realistic. I absolutely want a positive outcome, where we build machines millions of times smarter than us, and they magically develop human values and morality and decide to help us.

But making that happen is very very hard, and its far more likely they will be paperclip maximizers. There's no reason they would care about us any more than we care about ants.

Re: Machine intelligence, part 1

#188

Anyone who tries to predict timeline of future technologies: psychohistory didn't work.

‘‘‘The Psychohistorical-Dialectical Equations’’’ -- ¿an Earthly Actualization of Asimov’s Fictional Psychohistory?

For those inspired, by Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory, to want to see such a science actualized on Earth, and who perceive analogies -- consciously intended by Asimov, or otherwise -- between his decline of his fictional Galactic Empire, & the actual decline of our present civilization at the scale of this one planet, underway since even before Asimov wrote his first Foundation story, and more obviously underway today --

I have become aware of a new development in dialectical theory, using a new tool of “universal labor” -- a heuristic, ‘intuitional’, contra-Boolean, algebraic dialectical logic -- one that has enabled those who use it to develop a model of ‘‘‘The Dialectic of Nature’’’ -- of an unbroken, self-developing, mounting ‘meta-genealogy’, from pre-nuclear “particles” all the way up to the human, with a prediction as to what comes next: a model of the historical dialectic of natural history as totality.

So, this work differs in at least two ways from Asimov’s speculation -- its equations embrace all of cosmological evolution, and they are not “merely statistical”, but are based upon an undergirding, qualitative, ontological “scaffolding”, or “structure”, in the dynamics of Nature, including of human Nature, Nature’s latest self-development [at least locally], for which sample statistics estimates the values of the quantitative parameters [more like “structural equations with latent variables” in statistics].

“Inside” their totality-model, they have constructed models of the history of “the social forces of production”, and of the related history of “the social relations of production”, within “human pre-history”, culminating in the capital-relation/wage-labor relation, at the core of capitalist society, and the self-cleavage of that society into the wages-/salaries-class-vs.-capitals-class class struggle that this “social relation of production” imposes, until the capital-relation-incented growth of the “social forces of production” internally destabilizes that capitals-system, producing the decline, the “descendance-phase”, of global capitalist civilization that we are witnessing, and that we are engulfed in, today.

Their models also predict/reconstruct the “lawful” emergence of a ‘HUMANOCIDAL’ capitalist-anticapitalist [totalitarian STATE-capitalist] ruling class in descendance-phase capitalism. They predict a terminal, descendance-phase ruling class ideology which is simultaneously ‘capitalist anti-capitalist’, ‘human anti-humanist’, and ‘anti-Marxian Marxianist’. Ruling-class ‘human anti-humanism’ was initially named “Eugenics”, but, after their Hitler-debacle -- the turning ‘Franken-Dictatorship’ of their erstwhile Hitler Eugenics ‘servant-dictatorship’ -- “Eugenics” became their “Big Money” perversion of the global grass roots anti-pollution movement, into “People Are Pollution” ‘Earthism’.

The “lawful” degeneration of capitalist, representative democracy into totalitarian, ‘humanocidal’ STATE-capitalism, in the “advanced” nations, is ENABLED by the hyper-concentration of capital-money in ever fewer hands, which, at length, totally obliterates the “checks-and-balances” among the political branches of government, as the descendant-phase plutocracy prostitutes all three branches, plus the news media. But the desperate, DRIVING MOTIVE behind the plutocracy’s rush to TOTALITARIAN HUMANOCIDE is a deep secret, still not discerned by most observers and theorists.

Using this model, they have derived detailed features of the probable higher successor system to capitalism, i.e., of the higher successor “social relation of production” to the capital/wage-labor relation, which they call the “generalized equity social-relation-of-production”, or “political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY” -- the “citizen externality equity / citizen birthright equity / citizen stewardship equity Human Rights”-relation. It is decidedly NOT a form of state-bureaucratic-ruling-class STATE-capitalism, a la Leninism, Trotskyism, Stalinism, Hitlerism, Maoism, Castroism, Ceaușescuism, Hoxhaism, ILism, UNism, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

The key is to resuscitate checks and balances on political power, as well as to create new checks against concentrated economic power, by instituting unprecedented ECONOMIC CHECKS AND BALANCES.

The ‘Associations of [popularly elected, mandated, popularly recallable] Public Directors’ bodies, implementing the ‘Citizens EXTERNALITY Equity’ [‘GRASS ROOTS regulation of deadly local pollution’] Human Right, may be considered an ‘institution-ization’ of the historical experiences of the territorially/residentially-grounded “community councils”, which have arisen repeatedly in modern revolutionary processes.

The ‘producers-democracies’ that are the MARKET-COMPETING ‘‘‘socialized producers’ cooperatives’’’ of the ‘Citizen STEWARDSHIP Equity’ [‘collective entrepreneurship’] Human Right [the ‘socialized venture capital’ right] may be considered an ‘institution-ization’ of the historical experiences of the workplace-grounded “workers’ councils”, which have also arisen repeatedly in modern revolutionary processes.

Each citizen-steward producer, as such, enjoys, by constitutional and human right, two streams of income: (1) compensation for time worked, determined via the Skills-Markets, not necessarily equal in amount to that earned by other, differently-skilled citizen stewards, and (2) an equal share in the net operating surplus of their Citizen-Stewardship enterprise.

The prescription is that the -- concentrated-economic-power-obviated -- POLITICAL checks and balances be “aufheben” retained, as revived by the new ECONOMIC checks and balances, in a new societal system of SUSTAINED QUADRUPLE POWER, with sustained, ‘inter-mutually’ checking-and-balancing CONFLICT among the elected executive, the elected legislative, and the elected judiciary branches of [popularly-elected] POLITICAL government, and vis-a-vis the ECONOMIC-DEMOCRATIC institutions of ‘‘‘Equitism’’’ -- the social institutions of ‘Citizen Externality Equity’, ‘Citizen Birthright Equity’, and ‘Citizen Stewardship Equity’, described above.

This will require a VIGILANT social majority, that knows what it wants -- the better life for all of ‘Political-ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY’ -- and that knows the horrors of the alternative -- Police-State, Totalitarian, Humanocidal State Capitalism, already rampant today in its ‘STEALTH EUGENICS’, ‘STEALTH HUMANOCIDE’ incipient mode.

For more about these historic breakthroughs, see --

http://www.dialectics.org/dialectics/Welcome.html

http://www.dialectics.org/dialectics/Glossary_files/Glossary...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Mission/Mission.htm

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicLaw...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/Theory/PoliticalEconomicDem...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/AmendmentXXVIII/AmendmentXX...

http://www.equitism.org/Equitism/MaladyAndRemedy/MaladyAndRe...

http://capitalismsfundamentalflaw-wayforward.blogspot.com/20...

http://feddialectics-miguel.blogspot.com/2014/05/part-ii-int...

http://feddialectics-miguel.blogspot.com/2014/05/part-iii-ep...

http://feddialectics-miguel.blogspot.com/2014/05/part-iii-b-...

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