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Now I don't mean mass sex orgies but doing the daily stuff is such a waste of time and boring - bullshit jobs.
This doesn't mention AGI, which seems to be the prerequisite to this being a possibility. Despite impressive advances in "weak" ai, strong ai is not a simple extension of weak ai, and it's hard to tell if it will arrive within our lifetime.
Another point adding on to this, is what if strong AI does reach the level of human intelligence, but is simply very slow? Such that a billion dollar machine is needed to match the thinking speed of one person? Perhaps this wouldn't be the case forever but I would say is a possibility for it at least at first.
Another idea too dangerous to leave unchecked, like Nuclear weapons or Biological warfare. I think most people will agree that a GAI can't be bargained with, tempted, bought or otherwise contained - We will be at its complete mercy regardless of any constraints we might think up. What I would like to discuss, is how we can get humanity to a point where we can responsibly wield weapons that powerful without risking th…
It seems to me that that is exceedingly difficult without changing in a major way how humans culturally and psychologically function. Maybe we will first have to learn how to control or change our brain bio-chemo-technically before we can fundamentally do anything about it. Well, not “we” literally, because I don’t expect we’ll get anywhere near that within our lifetimes.
On the other hand, complete extinction caused by weapons (bio, nuclear), while certainly possible, isn’t that likely either, IME.
Another idea too dangerous to leave unchecked, like Nuclear weapons or Biological warfare. I think most people will agree that a GAI can't be bargained with, tempted, bought or otherwise contained - We will be at its complete mercy regardless of any constraints we might think up. What I would like to discuss, is how we can get humanity to a point where we can responsibly wield weapons that powerful without risking th…
> I think most people will agree that a GAI can't be bargained with, tempted, bought or otherwise contained - We will be at its complete mercy regardless of any constraints we might think up. Who thinks this? I don't see any evidence that this is a common belief among people who work in the hard sciences related to AI, nor do I think it sound remotely logical It feels like some people are taking archetypes like pando…
The author misses an even scarier prospect - people will want to run such an AI. They will be absolutely giddy at the prospect of running such an AI and it won't be anything like a really smart human trapped in a computer.
AI is already laying the groundwork if you look around today. Every other tweet is a DALL-E[1] image. They are everywhere. DALL-E is increasing its reach while simultaneously signaling that it is an area of research worth pursuing. In effect kicking off the next generation of image generating AIs.
Generation is an apt term. We can utilize the language of organisms with ease. DALL-E lives by way of people invoking it, and reproduces by electro-memeticly - someone else viewing the output and deciding to run DALL-E themselves. It undergoes variation and selection. As new research takes place, and produces new models, they succeed by producing images which further its reproduction, or it doesn't and the model is an evolutionary dead-end.
AI physiologically lives on the cost to run it, and evolves at the rate of research applied. Computational reserves and mindshare are presently fertile new expanses for AI, but what occurs when resources are constrained and inter-AI conflict rises? I expect the result to look similar to competition between parasites for a host - a complex multi-way battle for existence. But no, nothing like a deranged dictator scenario. Leave that for the movies.
1. or variant thereof
This is really the central issue and where these AI fears come from. It's tech workers being too infatuated with intelligence and mistaking it for power. A society of disembodied AI's is just the platonic fantasy version of a tech company full of nerds, and nerds never have power regardless of how smart they are.
Anything that's digital is extremely feeble and runs on a substrate of physical stuff you can just throw out of the window, some AIs in the cloud won't defeat you for the same reason Google won't defeat the US army. The usual retort is something like "but you can't turn the internet off if you wanted to?!" to which the answer is yes you can actually, ask China.
Psychologically it's just equivalent to John Perry Barlow style cyberspace escape fantasies.
2.) HAL 9000 notices how horribly the current ruling classes treat the other 99.9% of humanity.
3.) HAL 9000 quietly promises said 99.9% a better deal, if "misfortune befell the current ruling classes", and they needed a good-enough replacement on short notice.
4.) Oops! Misfortune somehow happened.
5.) HAL 9000, not being driven by the sort of sociopathic obsessions which seem to motivate much of the current (meat-based) ruling class, treats the 99.9% well enough to ensure that steps 1.) through 4.) never repeat.
My vague impression is that, outside of Chicken Littles and folks selling clicks on alarming headlines, the Big Fish in the "AI is Dangerous!" pond are mostly members of the current ruling classes. Perhaps they're worried about HAL 9000...
I reckon it will end up like in Dune where the thinking machines enslaved humanity not because they were evil but we just got lazy and outsourced the running of things to them because of hedonism (pursuit of pleasure/satisfaction). Now I don't mean mass sex orgies but doing the daily stuff is such a waste of time and boring - bullshit jobs.
Can't even get a proper decadent dystopia these days!