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Status:
"81 Years, NOT 91 Felonies"
(set 26 days ago)
Location: Dallas, TX
5,790 posts, read 3,597,628 times
Reputation: 5696
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The only way I can see around this trans-Turing (superintelligent) AI being a threat to humans is to program it to believe that some traits are indeed more valuable than intelligence, productivity, strength, physical robustness, and fearlessness. In particular, the most important trait is -- well, lets put it this way, it's not so much what an intelligent entity (human, AI, extraterrestrial if they exist and discovered) can do as it is what they do NOT do.
That means refusing to do bad to an entity on its NOT deliberately set out to hurt, harm, or demean the dignity of others outside the scope of self-defense or defense of others, or reasonable and proportionate levels of punishment for a wrongful act (especially a deliberate one). Even within this scope, the entity still must not do more than necessary to either (a) make that entity think twice before performing once again a very similar act in very similar circumstances or (b) inflict more retaliation, punishment that is more painful or indignifying than the act the wrongdoer committed.
However, that principle comes at a price -- we humans ourselves have to stop devaluing other humans who are lower than the average human in intelligence, productivity, strength, physical robustness, and fearlessness. Otherwise, why should we expect "Skynet"/"The Terminator", The Borg, or the Cybermen to value even the strongest, smartest, bravest, most productive, most fearless humans?
Yes, if human culture as a whole meets those ideas, that won't mean the superintelligent AI will follow our lead. But if humans don't change the way they value others, AI are guaranteed to adopt the human ways of valuing each other and apply it to ALL humans.
This is going to happen and much, much faster than 40 years. More like 10-25 years. IQ of 300? How about an IQ of 3000? How about being not just smarter but a million times smarter? We will look like ants in the eyes of such an intelligence and you know what we do to ants.
The machines will be developed whether there are regulations or not. Who is going to stop the USA? Or Russia? China for that matter. The Japanese are competent enough to keep a secret. Germany? Perhaps they are tired of "marching down the Rhine"? The machines will be developed to gain a military advantage and save the lives of our soldiers of course. Keeping the world safe for maximizing corporate profits etc.
Why will the machines kill us? They will kill us. They must kill us for we will be a threat trying to regain our power. Our rain and oxygen produce corrosion and these machines will take a nanosecond figuring out how to rid the earth of rain and oxygen. Cya....you greedy bas^^rds will earn it.
I dont think they would even allow the public to know if they had a true AI or super intelligent computer technology, it would be far too disastrous for the general public to have access to such technology too...the govt would loose the ability to exert its authority overnight!
I think mass unemployment due to ever-advancing automation is a very real threat.
I'm less worried about that.
About 118 years ago, a bit over 60% of the US population was directly involved with farming and ranching. Today, it is less than 4%.
Imagine that you could go back in time to 1900 & tell learned scholars, politicians, world leaders, journalists, futurists, business leaders, investors and farmers that in far-off 2018 less than 4% of the nation's population would be directly involved in agriculture.
Then imagine you asked them, "what do you think all the other people will do for a living?"
Chances are none of those learned people would guess "network engineer," "web designer," "search engine optimization engineer," "industrial robot tech," "radiologist," "professional MMA fighter," "professional football player," "cinematographer," "sound engineer," "microprocessor architect," "telemarketer," "City-Data forum moderator", "cryptocurrency miner", "social media marketer", and the like.
We don't know what the future holds -- it is exceedingly difficult to forecast the future.
Take the Great Manure Crisis of 1894.
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses...there were countless carts, drays, and wagons, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures exist for any great city of the time.
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day... In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, all of which had to be swept up and disposed of.
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Futurists estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles.
It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York; one of its goals was to figure out what to do about all the horse manure. The conference was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their waste output.
Obviously, the trend that couldn't go on forever -- well, it didn't go on forever.
So when we collectively think about AI and robotics, we do know that by automating more tasks, it frees up people to find better ways to add value to society. In the late 1890s, many people were employed in the collection and removal of horse manure from the streets of major cities. Just two decades later, the total number of people employed doing that had cratered to a tiny fraction of peak manure-removal employment. All those unemployed manure-removal laborers didn't sit around and whine; they all found other ways to add value to society and thereby earn compensation.
Back in the early 1900s, hunger was a major motivator: if you wanted to eat, you worked. Nowadays, hunger is not a major motivator: few in America actually go hungry.
Nevertheless, the future is brighter than it ever was.
About 118 years ago, a bit over 60% of the US population was directly involved with farming and ranching. Today, it is less than 4%.
Imagine that you could go back in time to 1900 & tell learned scholars, politicians, world leaders, journalists, futurists, business leaders, investors and farmers that in far-off 2018 less than 4% of the nation's population would be directly involved in agriculture.
Then imagine you asked them, "what do you think all the other people will do for a living?"
Chances are none of those learned people would guess "network engineer," "web designer," "search engine optimization engineer," "industrial robot tech," "radiologist," "professional MMA fighter," "professional football player," "cinematographer," "sound engineer," "microprocessor architect," "telemarketer," "City-Data forum moderator", "cryptocurrency miner", "social media marketer", and the like.
We don't know what the future holds -- it is exceedingly difficult to forecast the future.
Take the Great Manure Crisis of 1894.
Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses...there were countless carts, drays, and wagons, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures exist for any great city of the time.
The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day... In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, all of which had to be swept up and disposed of.
The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Futurists estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles.
It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.
In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York; one of its goals was to figure out what to do about all the horse manure. The conference was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their waste output.
Obviously, the trend that couldn't go on forever -- well, it didn't go on forever.
So when we collectively think about AI and robotics, we do know that by automating more tasks, it frees up people to find better ways to add value to society. In the late 1890s, many people were employed in the collection and removal of horse manure from the streets of major cities. Just two decades later, the total number of people employed doing that had cratered to a tiny fraction of peak manure-removal employment. All those unemployed manure-removal laborers didn't sit around and whine; they all found other ways to add value to society and thereby earn compensation.
Back in the early 1900s, hunger was a major motivator: if you wanted to eat, you worked. Nowadays, hunger is not a major motivator: few in America actually go hungry.
Nevertheless, the future is brighter than it ever was.
I think the difference here is that we are discussing things that will be smarter than humans yet likely cost less than humans to "employ." And I don't think this is going to be industry-specific, like the farming example you gave. When there is a machine that can do heart surgery better than a human can, and it costs $1 million all-in for a machine that can work for fifteen years, why on earth would a hospital hire a heart surgeon?
Machines has been taking over specific tasks in the workplace for a very long time, as you've eluded to. But never before have there been machines that were genuinely smarter than humans.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rstevens62
I dont think they would even allow the public to know if they had a true AI or super intelligent computer technology, it would be far too disastrous for the general public to have access to such technology too...the govt would loose the ability to exert its authority overnight!
I do not think the government will develop or own the first superintelligent machine. I think it is far more likely to be a tech company of some kind.
Quote:
Originally Posted by SportyandMisty
There is no reason that self-preservation and procreation to pass along "DNA" would be traits that a superintelligence must possess.
This is a good point, and it's an open question on what kind of "motives" such a machine would possess since it would seemingly be free from the hormonal urges and instincts that often drive human behavior. This may be reassuring, or it may be frightening.
"AI" is bunk, six decades of parlor tricks. Machines are not capable of conscious thought or any creative actions because they cannot deal with simple abstraction. The human mind can perform abstractions easily, IOW I can ponder myself pondering myself. Edgar Alan Poe called this regime the "thought of a thought".
Machines are constrained by their internal algorithms and limited history. Yes they can perform simple calculations at lightning speed, and this can be scaled to enable amazing feats of arithmetic. That said, show me one machine example with even a hint of of the mental prowess and mathematical creativity exhibited by the likes of James Maxwell or Georg Cantor.
I think the difference here is that we are discussing things that will be smarter than humans yet likely cost less than humans to "employ." And I don't think this is going to be industry-specific, like the farming example you gave. When there is a machine that can do heart surgery better than a human can, and it costs $1 million all-in for a machine that can work for fifteen years, why on earth would a hospital hire a heart surgeon?
Currently, the da Vinci Robotic Surgical System manufactured by Intuitive Surgical is guided by surgeons for complex yet minimally invasive surgery. It is commonly used for prostatectomies, hysterectomies, cardiac valve repair and many other procedures. The surgeon is required to be in the operating room. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Vin...m#Medical_uses. Robots hold great promise for all medical procedures requiring extraordinary physical dexterity.
At the same time, I see even greater promise with superintelligent AI diagnostic systems. The fundamental issue regarding a hospital hiring a heart surgeon is this is a highly regulated thing. Regulations to protect surgeons livelihood will exist long before the threat of their replacement is feasible.
An interesting question is if superintelligent AI systems perform true medical research as we understand it.
Once machines can protect themselves from being "shut off" who knows what their capabilities will be? Scary to consider, but maybe machines might be able to save this planet from self-destructing from humans which is what it's looking like
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