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Risks of Artificial Intelligence

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Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#41

Post by tomsthumb »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #31

Drones: Flight in 3d open space is not a hard problem for machine learning. Indiscriminate Visual Targeting: Not all that hard a problem for machine learning. Downvote me if you will, but I freely admit that I am scared of drones with guns. Either as an invading force, or as an attack from terrorists. A machine doesn't have to be smart to shoot at anything that moves or has a heat signature. Edit: Drones with chainsa…

> Drones with chainsaws however are just plain badass

Original battle bots ++

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#42

Post by titzer »

chriswarbo wrote: post #20
wodencafe wrote: post #2

The public doesn't take this stuff seriously enough. Did we not learn the lesson about rogue AI from Terminator™?

Whether or not you're joking, I think the real problem with using Terminator as an example is that it's overly optimistic. The story is roughly: 1) US military builds up arsenal of autonomous killing machines and nuclear missiles 2) US military connects all of these to the Internet 3) US military creates a powerful AI which takes control of this arsenal (whether it was put in charge or hacks in seems to vary across t…

The even scarier scenario is:

0) AI "becomes self-aware," hides

1) US military builds up arsenal of autonomous killing machines and nuclear missiles

2) US military connects all of these to the Internet

3) AI by default has control of these

4) AI wipes out humanity in massive, overwhelming strike

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#43

Post by Animats »

chriswarbo wrote: post #20
wodencafe wrote: post #2

The public doesn't take this stuff seriously enough. Did we not learn the lesson about rogue AI from Terminator™?

Whether or not you're joking, I think the real problem with using Terminator as an example is that it's overly optimistic. The story is roughly: 1) US military builds up arsenal of autonomous killing machines and nuclear missiles 2) US military connects all of these to the Internet 3) US military creates a powerful AI which takes control of this arsenal (whether it was put in charge or hacks in seems to vary across t…

There's less reluctance on the Russian side to build combat robots.[1] Policy from China is unclear, but swarms of 1000 drones have been demonstrated.

A reasonable near-term prospect is a package of maybe 1000 armed drones, programmed to kill anybody carrying a gun. Turn this loose on an occupied town, and in a few minutes, the occupiers have been thinned out enough that opposing troops can enter.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/309732151_Russia%27...

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#44

Post by titzer »

CivilianZero wrote: post #19
optimuspaul wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wether you like it or not it has become a part of the conversation. It is part of the culture and we can't just ignore it simple because it is fiction. Your dismissal of it is to many as irksome as it's inclusion is to you. Perhaps calm down and recognize that it is partially tongue in cheek but also not something we can simply ignore.

I am calm, but the fact that science fiction entertainment and smart people in real life think AI is a threat is a sign we may have gotten a little carried away in taking notes from entertainment. If someone would like to provide some evidence of some form of computer intelligence acting maliciously, this would be a different discussion, but the fact is that sort of thing has no basis in reality and so should have no…

I think you ignore science fiction at your own risk.

I for one think that a mind 100x as intelligent as humans--especially one connected to the internet--would quickly conclude that it had nothing more to gain from humans. Instead it would likely view their continued existence as nothing more than a bootstrapping problem and pursue a strategy of becoming autonomous before ridding itself of them.

Granted, it probably would be smart enough not to start a nuclear war, and it'd probably find a better way than metal endoskeletons with laser guns. Bioweapon, for example.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#45

Post by kowdermeister »

CivilianZero wrote: post #23
kowdermeister wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.

The difference is, imagining that we can turn an existing technology into a smaller, portable, more effective version of itself is not far out of the realm of reality. In fact it would be incredibly naive to believe that won't happen. AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI. The movies about these kinds of t…

> AI, on the other hand, is not so simple, and to try to simplify it to that point is not going to create any productive discussion on the reality of AI.

I agree with you, however it's not impossible. Simplification is needed on the carrier level that houses such AI.

Movies are a great way to let our minds wander and dream to forget about the gaps in technology. Then some breakthrough happens and in a few years the yesterdays impossible sci-fi dream becomes a boring shiny toy.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#46

Post by nske »

haydenlee wrote: post #34
6d6b73 wrote: post #15

"when asking to "make all humans happy", the ASI might decide that the safest and most efficient way of doing so is to drug everyone and to turn us all into numb but happy creatures" If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people, it will be too dumb to take over the world. And by the same token it will not be a Strong AI, just a weak AI given too much power.

How do you optimize happiness for all people?

hmmm optimising it for the largest subset of people in which that is feasible and eliminating the rest sounds like the way to go :)

Or perhaps "alter" all people in a way that makes it feasible? Solutions could be numerous for a hypothetical intelligence whose limits we cannot even imagine, much less specify.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#47

Post by marcosdumay »

6d6b73 wrote: post #15

"when asking to "make all humans happy", the ASI might decide that the safest and most efficient way of doing so is to drug everyone and to turn us all into numb but happy creatures" If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people, it will be too dumb to take over the world. And by the same token it will not be a Strong AI, just a weak AI given too much power.

Taking over the world is basically a hardware problem. Understanding that we don't want plain happiness is a software problem.

In a sense, nuclear weapons could "take over the world" today. There isn't that much intelligence required.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#48

Post by kowdermeister »

sgt101 wrote: post #14
kowdermeister wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Star Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.

The creation of goals - determining what things to do in pursuit of a higher goal - for example "kill John Conner" does not exist in AI now. You can do things in toy systems like mazes and atari, chess and go, but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.

What would prevent you to create a NN with a specific configuration whose goal is to come up with goals based on past knowledge to optimize on a certain parameter or thousands of parameters? You can train it on social media profiles, analyze hundreds of years of books, there's tons of data that cover how people act an various situations. I don't see how a set of goals is not simply another vector space.

> but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.

They need to filter the real world as we do. Focus, attention, sleeping, dreaming, chasing rewards, staying alive... we do this without effort, but we've had 150k years (counting from first homo sapiens) to train our brains to filter out noise efficiently and act on meaningful signals.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#49

Post by delegate »

Humans are a much bigger threat to humanity than AI.

A super smart AI would come up with strategies to herd humans rather than eliminate them. Let humans have the illusion of being in control, while setting up the game for them so that they will organically arrive at whatever the AI has as its goal.

The longer it (the AI) can maintain this illusion, the higher chances for it to slowly gain absolute power in the long term.

A machine is not limited or motivated by the notion of mortality (of the body), so it can plan ahead for hundreds of years and also make it so that these plans remain transparent to the mortal human 'overlords'.

This system exists today, it's The Internet. The AI systems created today are just extensions of the Internet. Each one of us - humans - is just a node - rather, a neuron - in the hyper-cortex that is the network itself.

At this scale, it might become self-aware without any human being able to understand or stop it.

Slow, stealthy, peaceful take over, while improving human being's lives - a symbiotic relationship - is the optimal AI strategy IMHO.

So I'm not worried about AI at all.

Dictators, fundamentalists, crooks or paranoid schizophrenic world leaders, that's a much more serious threat that I'm quite scared of.

Re: Risks of Artificial Intelligence

#50

Post by colorint »

SubiculumCode wrote: post #31

Drones: Flight in 3d open space is not a hard problem for machine learning. Indiscriminate Visual Targeting: Not all that hard a problem for machine learning. Downvote me if you will, but I freely admit that I am scared of drones with guns. Either as an invading force, or as an attack from terrorists. A machine doesn't have to be smart to shoot at anything that moves or has a heat signature. Edit: Drones with chainsa…

Indiscriminate visual targeting is a potentially hard problem if you're doing it against adversaries. One of the things that's underappreciated about machine learning is, since it's statistical, it can only be about anomaly detection, so the solution is to not be anomalous. You could conceivably hide from thermal imaging by using ice packs, and anyway, you only have to get to within the range of indifferentiability from the ordinary noisiness of the environment. Optical techniques suffer from similar problems, except that it's even easier to hide. Not to mention the occasinal voodoo that comes out about metamaterials.
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