Artificial intelligence: Our final invention?

Some counter-points on this narrative, with which I&#x27;m very familiar.<p>1. Philosophers and AI theoreticians have a hard time defining what they mean by the term &quot;intelligence&quot;. Talking about systems millions of times more intelligent than a human is nonsense unless you can define what it is you&#x27;re talking about.<p>2. Whatever intelligence is it only makes any sense within the context of some environment. Environments impose a multitude of constraints. In the &quot;intelligence explosion&quot; scenario the environment is assumed to be constraint free, or something close to it.<p>3. Be wary of people trying to sell you ideas based on fear. It&#x27;s usually snake oil, concealing some other agenda - such as trying to obtain or maintain grant money for projects.<p>4. That many top AI people have &quot;bug out&quot; houses is simply false. An exaggeration, intended to add drama to the article.<p>5. Historically, the predictions of top AI researchers have not proven to be particularly accurate, although that does not mean that this will always be the case.

I was reading, waiting for the mention to IBM Watson... and here it comes! I&#x27;m so tired of reading how Watson is a step toward Artificial General Intelligence, self-aware machines, etc.<p>People must really understand that Watson is, like almost any successful AI (not AGI) product today, &quot;just&quot; a huge statistical pattern matching machine. Watson does not feel anything. Watson does not know what soccer is. Watson knows that a label &quot;Soccer&quot; has a distance of x to label Y and Z. Watson can answer Jeopardy questions, and now medical questions, but it&#x27;s structurally unable to learn the slightest new task. So please, let&#x27;s credit Watson for what Watson is good at, but stop using it to tell us AGI is coming.

We have already invented AI, and it is already running amok.<p>The AIs are of the &quot;hive mind&quot; kind and it is common to refer to it as &quot;A transnational corporation.&quot;<p>Known identities are &quot;IBM&quot;, &quot;Google&quot;, &quot;Unilever&quot;, &quot;Monsanto&quot; etc.<p>These AI&#x27;s are beholden to nobody, define and persue their own goals, by manipulating their environment to their advantage.<p>And they&#x27;re better at it than humans: They decide for themselves when, where and how much tax they want to pay, and they are not afraid to remind parliamentary inquiries about this fact.<p>For at least 10 years, it has been evident that these AI&#x27;s are politically far more astute and successful than humans, and the latest &quot;trade-agreement&quot; negotiations, what little we get to know about them, is clearly an unmitigated powergrab by these AIs.<p>The fact that the hive-minds are composed of humans does not in any way change this conclusion.<p>And now: Imagine how your life would be, if Google, the company, truly hated you, personally, and were out to get you.

&quot;Differential intellectual progress consists in prioritizing risk-reducing intellectual progress over risk-increasing intellectual progress. As applied to AI risks in particular, a plan of differential intellectual progress would recommend that our progress on the scientific, philosophical, and technological problems of AI safety outpace our progress on the problems of AI capability such that we develop safe superhuman AIs before we develop (arbitrary) superhuman AIs. Our first superhuman AI must be a safe superhuman AI, for we may not get a second chance.&quot;<p>- CEO of the Singularity Institute<p>I believe he also said that if you die now or soon, you don&#x27;t just lose a few decades off your life but possibly immortality.

What if &quot;runaway&quot; isn&#x27;t possible?<p>It might be possible for an AI to be roughly as &quot;intelligent&quot; (depending on how one measures this) as the smartest humans, but that intelligence is the result of many millions or even billions of years of accumulated evolutionary learning.<p>It might be -- for fundamental information and machine learning theory reasons -- fundamentally harder to go where there are no roads. Start looking into combinatorics and the problems of searching large spaces.<p>The observation that genius is often tied to madness may be indirect circumstantial evidence for this. When we try to push the boundaries of human intellect, we seen to run rapidly into weird problems.

Obligatory:<p><i>&quot;Welcome to the Desert of the Real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.”</i>[1]<p>Also:<p><a href="http://sysopmind.com/singularity/aibox" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sysopmind.com&#x2F;singularity&#x2F;aibox</a><p><a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/AI-box_experiment" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;rationalwiki.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;AI-box_experiment</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://www.philfilms.utm.edu/1/matrix.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.philfilms.utm.edu&#x2F;1&#x2F;matrix.htm</a>

People like to laugh, but if we can invent real AI, and there&#x27;s no reason to suspect that we cannot since nature did it blindly, then it&#x27;s just a matter of time until the end of the human race. We will likely either become them or be destroyed by them (or maybe some of us kept in zoos or as pets.) You cannot firewall or imprison a god, especially with humans being so divided, short sighted and manipulable. Simply put it&#x27;s still survival of the fittest, what happens when that&#x27;s no longer us is pretty inevitable. The only real question I see is how long will it take?<p>One happy thought is that the AI uses us as slaves to build a way off the planet to a place more habitable for an AI. Someplace nice with lots of raw material for chips and lots of energy. Maybe a super massive blackhole, maybe another solar system nearby.

Choice quote from the end: <i>But it was alarming how many people I talked to who are highly placed people in AI who have retreats that are sort of ‘bug out’ houses” to which they could flee if it all hits the fan.</i><p>Does HN agree or disagree a significant number of those &quot;bug out&quot; people truly exist?

Here is lengthy debate by some of best minds in the field: <a href="http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_Debate" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;wiki.lesswrong.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Hanson-Yudkowsky_AI-Foom_...</a><p>TL:DR - whether AI can become significantly smarter than Humans really fast depends on intelligence return on computational investment.

&quot;I’m talking about the risks posed by “runaway” artificial intelligence (AI). What happens when we share the planet with self-aware, self-improving machines that evolve beyond our ability to control or understand? Are we creating machines that are destined to destroy us?&quot;<p>The reason no one is worrying about this is because &quot;AI&quot; is still a) just a bunch of math (and still surprisingly stupid) b) nowhere near sentient.<p>My Kinect can barely follow my hand or consistently recognize what I&#x27;m saying with any accuracy. I&#x27;m really not concerned with it plotting my demise.

I usually like Matt Miller but this is just silly. Why be more afraid of AI then Nuclear War or a Man Made Super Virus getting into the wild? Every new technology needs to be used responsibly and were very far away from Terminator at this point. He should be embracing AI to reduce health care costs and improve city planning and control interest rates and make a more fair society and accomplish many of the goals he talks about every week on left right and center.

I don&#x27;t like these all or nothing articles. Once Singularity is achieved, AI won&#x27;t instantly take over the world. It is also restricted by computational processioning power and will take some time to evolve as well.<p>Philosophically speaking, why would AI want to destroy humanity, wouldn&#x27;t it be just as bad as humanity itself?

It&#x27;s simpler and more dangerous than most of us are ready to accept: we don&#x27;t need to have anything what we don&#x27;t already have to reach the point of the technology used against us, destroying the civilization we take now for granted. We are already peripherally aware of the problems but we are for different reasons in various levels of denial. We still have enough nuclear weapons to end the civilization we now know. A lot of people can&#x27;t imagine that global warming is real and dangerous. And of course, a lot of people can&#x27;t imagine what&#x27;s wrong to have so much data about them stored by third parties and ready for misuse.<p>There aren&#x27;t any big arguments that such trends won&#x27;t continue. It seems that the dynamics of groups supports living in denial.

I think there is an unfounded assumption that artificial intelligence implies self-awareness. I don&#x27;t think that is necessarily the case and all the scary scenarios rest on that assumption.<p>I can&#x27;t recall who (and couldn&#x27;t find it through Google) the quote by the AI researcher who said something like &quot;show me what the brain (or mind) is doing and I can build a machine to do it too&quot;. Well, we don&#x27;t know what the mind or brain is doing and until we identify the epistemological principles we are just groping in the dark. Self-awareness my just be an artifact or consequence of the biological implementation of the epistemological principles behind intelligence and that an AI does not necessarily need to be self-aware.

Artificial intelligence is a highfalutin way of saying cool computer tricks. Hiding behind the hyperbole you can find some pretty interesting and fun algorithms.<p>Having said that, I hope the singularity can translate &quot;the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak&quot;

Self-awareness is likely to be a product of quantum-based, or even more lower-level conciousness. However, intelligence, which makes it possible to acquire knowledge and reason, is relatively mmore easy to be built. There is a subtle yet important difference between Intelligence and self-awareness. Intelligence gives a living-being an ability to learn and act but self-awareness personalizes this learning for self and therefore actions are directed by a desire to benifit the self.<p>This opens up a possibility that once a general intelligence is built, without awareness, it can be miss-used for the benefit of its creator or who eventually controlls it.

I have seen no evidence that the field of meta-learning over AI &#x2F; problem-solving approaches even has much interest, let alone is showing enough progress that it could foreseeably start self-improving. The &quot;AI&quot; areas where great progress has been made recently are extremely technique- and domain-specific (e.g., image recognition via deep neural networks). Heck, I haven&#x27;t even seen a lot of progress in areas that seem relatively straightforward &amp; seem like absolutely necessary precursors to strong AI, like automated refactoring of codebases or just straight-up genetic algorithms.

Garry Kasparov wrote a fantastic article[0] a few years ago about computer chess, advanced chess and artificial intelligence. This quote in particular is worth considering: &quot;Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.&quot;<p>[0] <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/feb/11/the-chess-master-and-the-computer/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nybooks.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2010&#x2F;feb&#x2F;11&#x2F;the-che...</a>

I am a big fan of what Joe Lonsdale calls human-computer symbiosis. He says that humans are good at certain things and computers are good at other things. For example, computers are good at looking at huge amounts of data. Humans are good at finding intuitive patterns in data. Though in time computers will undoubtedly start to be better at these things, I do not think that in my lifetime (or Matt&#x27;s daughter&#x27;s) we will see computers that can do literally everything better than a human can.

Something that almost nobody talks about in the context of AI is rights. It seems to me that at some point in the reasonably near future we need to have a discussion about modifying our laws to include all sentient beings, or at least decide what rights other intelligences should have. Far better to do this <i>before</i> we develop AI than after, I think. Unless we want to relive something like slavery..

We&#x27;re had Frankenstein&#x27;s monster since the first time someone got burnt by their own fire.<p>fun fact: Bill Joy (vi, bsd, sun) has misgivings about AI.

AI doesn&#x27;t interest me. What interest me is the pre-cursor to AI. I have a suspicion that we will need to use computers to model the electronics and software necessary to stimulate the birth of AI. It&#x27;s those modeling&#x2F;creation systems that interest me the most as they seem the most relevant. Those systems have yet to be created.

Also see &quot;Apocalyptic AI&quot; by Robert M. Geraci<p><a href="http://thelawsofrobotics2013.iankerr.ca/files/2013/09/15-Apocalyptic-AI.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;thelawsofrobotics2013.iankerr.ca&#x2F;files&#x2F;2013&#x2F;09&#x2F;15-Apo...</a>

A friend of mine directed an indie film about the singularity which is <i>just</i> about to come out. Here&#x27;s the website for it:<p><a href="http://www.is-movie.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.is-movie.com&#x2F;</a>

We are also intelligent, and we have not been able to improve it a million times. How is AI different?

How to be save against powerful, hostile AI: Keep hand firmly on power switch.