8 ms·

Machines for thinking: Computers will get smarter, but with humans in charge

61 points by cryptoz 11y ago

pygy_ 11y ago
A small number of humans, at first, maybe. AI will conquer the world, one niche at a time, as soon as moneyed interests realize it is cheaper that way. At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. No need for gun wielding robots, just cut the power for a while.
- unoti 11y ago
  > At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. In some ways this is already underway. Very few of the people in the world have any economic power, and the proportion is shrinking. We have the ability to food all of the world, or at least much more than we do. Mankind has a rich history of moneyed interests letting those with no economic power starve.
  - PavlovsCat 11y ago
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger... > Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day -- most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land -- can't afford to buy this food.
- solotronics 11y ago
  I have been traveling outside the US recently and I notice that this already exists in many places. Something to consider though is that in these places the common man had no economic power to begin with but now with globalization the difference is becoming more visible. We need to help get these people plugged in to the internet and this will open them up to advancement and opportunities. Instead of paying a middleman (a corporate retail store) to buy handcrafted goods we might could purchase directly from the producer with bitcoin or some other form of electronic payment. There should be a tech equivalent of doctors without borders..
  - petra 11y ago
    Actually , the communications medium is the easy part(and to some extent you could enable ecommerce with catalogs and mobile phones and some sms based payments(like m-pesa) ). And it certainly isn't hard to get some sort of internet at the village level. But the supply chain is a much harder part.
- jfoutz 11y ago
  Why would an AI care what moneyed interests care about? All the intelligences we know about have this boredom state. Some smart people just sort of stop caring about what they're paid to care about, and retire. Others love it and keep at it until they die. AI is even harder to predict. There's been no selection bias, yet. It's not at all clear if they'll have "survival instinct" or desire or even need to reproduce. They'll be different. Tangentially, I think human cultures are AI, at least in some sense. We've created this environment that's driving down the cost of computation dramatically and that's been driven by "emergent" behavior. Emergent behavior is a really hard term to define. In most cases you can replace it with "magic" and you'll get the same information back. We're like the dog packs in Verner Vinge's deepness in the sky, but at a larger scale. It's such a vast intelligence, i can't really get a handle on the scope, any more than a single neuron knows it's helping me to type this.
  - moonchrome 11y ago
    Why are people always talking about AI like it implies intrinsic motivation or even self awareness (in the context of motivation). Motivation/tasks can be provided by the human - AI can be a general purpose problem solving machine. It doesn't have to "care" - it's just a machine with a task to perform - the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. Once you have an AI that can do that - society falls apart. Foundation of modern society is built on the fact that cooperation trumps every other method of work - general purpose AI changes that equation to the point where other people are not only not necessary but also actively dangerous (threatening to take control).
    - jfoutz 11y ago
      > the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. That includes task selection. Maybe the AI gets bored with stock prediction. Maybe the AI is happy competing with all the humans, maybe it'd rather go explore space. Maybe it decides this whole reality sucks and suicides. We really have no idea what'll happen. Best guess is, tools get better and better until they decide to do something else. Like a trusted employee going and starting a competing company, or moving to the beach and surfing. Maybe it's disastrous, maybe it's utopia. Maybe it's like _her_ and they leave. Best anyone can do is make vague guesses. I know, i'm anthropomorphizing. It's for convenience, the solution space for AI is way bigger than our simple wants and needs.
meeper16 11y ago
Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory- A Search Engine that Thinks, Almost http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-thinks-almost/ http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-th...
sparkzilla 11y ago
Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. - Dune.
- backprojection 11y ago
  > But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. If you have machines over to which you can turn your thinking, why would you still need to enslave other humans?
  - arethuza 11y ago
    "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." 1984
    - msutherl 11y ago
      Pardon the diatribe, but the older I get, the more I feel this book has done incredible damage to political thinking in the States (where it is often a high school reading requirement.) What's problematic is that it focuses on one interpretation of power at the exclusion of others and leads one to believe (at a young, impressionable age) that it is a canonical account. The above statements are true in a way, but governments are also established to provide order, and have done so very successfully in general. The book is obviously a response to European nationalism, but we mustn't forget that nationalist dictatorships arise, with deep public support, from specific conditions. Instead of the constant "never again" and automatic insistence on the precise values of the post-war European welfare state, we should leave space for new political thinking, of which some components may appear to be heresy. Obviously thinking here of anti-state-surveillance – Snowden has apparently read one book in his life: 1984 – but here the "power [...] is an end" meme, presented without any nuance, appears to make sense in this context, but only highlights one side of the matter in a way that distorts the issue. Yes, power may be abused. It's good to have safeguards.
kriro 11y ago
Man-Computer Symbiosis Licklider (1960) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html
kwhitefoot 11y ago
Which humans?
FaisalAlTameemi 11y ago
Here are a few points worth considering: 1. Technology is objective. Technology is incapable of being good or evil. 2. Backers, Builders and Designers of technology, like many others, are likely driven by money, power, or ego. 3. Building technology that can "think" is inevitable and needed in today's age to improve countless industries, one of which is Education. 4. Technology will never be able to think like humans. Simply because humanity itself hasn't fully understood how our own brain truly works. 5. The solution to "evil" technology isn't the removal of AI, rather a requirement for positive ideology from the intelligent peeps working on it.
randcraw 11y ago
1) I've read the first two books of the three mentioned. Oddly, the article's title applies only to the first book, in which Markoff elaborates on IA (intelligence augmentation) as a second front in the rise of computer automation (along with AI). Domingo's book never strays outside mainstream AI, and it seems nor does the third. 2) On a more generic note regarding the direction of AI... I think there's little doubt where AI will take us -- toward a future which is more predictable. The goal of AI is to recognize patterns and predict outcomes. Toward that end, AI and its integrators will gradually reshape business and law to make AI's job easier and more accurate. This will result in our lives becoming more conventional, predictable, and 'managed' by both business and government. Imagine a future lifestyle that's more like the clockwork of Sweden's or Japan's or Switzerland's than the Sturm und Drang that is America's. I suspect a world shaped by AI will be less likely to resemble 'The Terminator' than it will 'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit'.

61 points by cryptoz 11y ago

pygy_ 11y ago

A small number of humans, at first, maybe. AI will conquer the world, one niche at a time, as soon as moneyed interests realize it is cheaper that way. At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. No need for gun wielding robots, just cut the power for a while.

unoti 11y ago
> At some point, the masses won't have any economic power anymore, and billions of meatbags will be left to starve. In some ways this is already underway. Very few of the people in the world have any economic power, and the proportion is shrinking. We have the ability to food all of the world, or at least much more than we do. Mankind has a rich history of moneyed interests letting those with no economic power starve.
- PavlovsCat 11y ago
  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger_b_1463429.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-holt-gimenez/world-hunger... > Hunger is caused by poverty and inequality, not scarcity. For the past two decades, the rate of global food production has increased faster than the rate of global population growth. The world already produces more than 1 ½ times enough food to feed everyone on the planet. That's enough to feed 10 billion people, the population peak we expect by 2050. But the people making less than $2 a day -- most of whom are resource-poor farmers cultivating unviably small plots of land -- can't afford to buy this food.
solotronics 11y ago
I have been traveling outside the US recently and I notice that this already exists in many places. Something to consider though is that in these places the common man had no economic power to begin with but now with globalization the difference is becoming more visible. We need to help get these people plugged in to the internet and this will open them up to advancement and opportunities. Instead of paying a middleman (a corporate retail store) to buy handcrafted goods we might could purchase directly from the producer with bitcoin or some other form of electronic payment. There should be a tech equivalent of doctors without borders..
- petra 11y ago
  Actually , the communications medium is the easy part(and to some extent you could enable ecommerce with catalogs and mobile phones and some sms based payments(like m-pesa) ). And it certainly isn't hard to get some sort of internet at the village level. But the supply chain is a much harder part.
jfoutz 11y ago
Why would an AI care what moneyed interests care about? All the intelligences we know about have this boredom state. Some smart people just sort of stop caring about what they're paid to care about, and retire. Others love it and keep at it until they die. AI is even harder to predict. There's been no selection bias, yet. It's not at all clear if they'll have "survival instinct" or desire or even need to reproduce. They'll be different. Tangentially, I think human cultures are AI, at least in some sense. We've created this environment that's driving down the cost of computation dramatically and that's been driven by "emergent" behavior. Emergent behavior is a really hard term to define. In most cases you can replace it with "magic" and you'll get the same information back. We're like the dog packs in Verner Vinge's deepness in the sky, but at a larger scale. It's such a vast intelligence, i can't really get a handle on the scope, any more than a single neuron knows it's helping me to type this.
- moonchrome 11y ago
  Why are people always talking about AI like it implies intrinsic motivation or even self awareness (in the context of motivation). Motivation/tasks can be provided by the human - AI can be a general purpose problem solving machine. It doesn't have to "care" - it's just a machine with a task to perform - the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. Once you have an AI that can do that - society falls apart. Foundation of modern society is built on the fact that cooperation trumps every other method of work - general purpose AI changes that equation to the point where other people are not only not necessary but also actively dangerous (threatening to take control).
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    > the thing that makes it intelligent is ability to solve tasks it wasn't programmed to do. That includes task selection. Maybe the AI gets bored with stock prediction. Maybe the AI is happy competing with all the humans, maybe it'd rather go explore space. Maybe it decides this whole reality sucks and suicides. We really have no idea what'll happen. Best guess is, tools get better and better until they decide to do something else. Like a trusted employee going and starting a competing company, or moving to the beach and surfing. Maybe it's disastrous, maybe it's utopia. Maybe it's like _her_ and they leave. Best anyone can do is make vague guesses. I know, i'm anthropomorphizing. It's for convenience, the solution space for AI is way bigger than our simple wants and needs.

meeper16 11y ago

Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory- A Search Engine that Thinks, Almost http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-thinks-almost/ http://newscenter.lbl.gov/2005/03/31/a-search-engine-that-th...

sparkzilla 11y ago

Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. - Dune.

backprojection 11y ago
> But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them. If you have machines over to which you can turn your thinking, why would you still need to enslave other humans?
- arethuza 11y ago
  "Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power." 1984
  - msutherl 11y ago
    Pardon the diatribe, but the older I get, the more I feel this book has done incredible damage to political thinking in the States (where it is often a high school reading requirement.) What's problematic is that it focuses on one interpretation of power at the exclusion of others and leads one to believe (at a young, impressionable age) that it is a canonical account. The above statements are true in a way, but governments are also established to provide order, and have done so very successfully in general. The book is obviously a response to European nationalism, but we mustn't forget that nationalist dictatorships arise, with deep public support, from specific conditions. Instead of the constant "never again" and automatic insistence on the precise values of the post-war European welfare state, we should leave space for new political thinking, of which some components may appear to be heresy. Obviously thinking here of anti-state-surveillance – Snowden has apparently read one book in his life: 1984 – but here the "power [...] is an end" meme, presented without any nuance, appears to make sense in this context, but only highlights one side of the matter in a way that distorts the issue. Yes, power may be abused. It's good to have safeguards.

kriro 11y ago

Man-Computer Symbiosis Licklider (1960) http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html http://groups.csail.mit.edu/medg/people/psz/Licklider.html

kwhitefoot 11y ago

Which humans?

FaisalAlTameemi 11y ago

Here are a few points worth considering: 1. Technology is objective. Technology is incapable of being good or evil. 2. Backers, Builders and Designers of technology, like many others, are likely driven by money, power, or ego. 3. Building technology that can "think" is inevitable and needed in today's age to improve countless industries, one of which is Education. 4. Technology will never be able to think like humans. Simply because humanity itself hasn't fully understood how our own brain truly works. 5. The solution to "evil" technology isn't the removal of AI, rather a requirement for positive ideology from the intelligent peeps working on it.

randcraw 11y ago

1) I've read the first two books of the three mentioned. Oddly, the article's title applies only to the first book, in which Markoff elaborates on IA (intelligence augmentation) as a second front in the rise of computer automation (along with AI). Domingo's book never strays outside mainstream AI, and it seems nor does the third. 2) On a more generic note regarding the direction of AI... I think there's little doubt where AI will take us -- toward a future which is more predictable. The goal of AI is to recognize patterns and predict outcomes. Toward that end, AI and its integrators will gradually reshape business and law to make AI's job easier and more accurate. This will result in our lives becoming more conventional, predictable, and 'managed' by both business and government. Imagine a future lifestyle that's more like the clockwork of Sweden's or Japan's or Switzerland's than the Sturm und Drang that is America's. I suspect a world shaped by AI will be less likely to resemble 'The Terminator' than it will 'The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit'.