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Compared to nuclear war, superbugs, volcanoes, meteorites or catastrophic climate change, naughty-AI is a very distant threat. It's like worrying the geneticis

Compared to nuclear war, superbugs, volcanoes, meteorites or catastrophic climate change, naughty-AI is a very distant threat. It's like worrying the geneticists are going to breed Ridley Scott's alien sometime in the relevant future. The world is actually pretty messed up with problems right now; some of which we could actually do something meaningful about. Continuing the naughty-AI bunfight isn't one of them.

Houshalter 11y ago
I think it's far more of a threat than any of those things. Nuclear war isn't inevitable, and wouldn't destroy the entire world, just the countries at war. Even a ridiculous world wide nuclear war would leave tons of survivors. Volcanoes and meteorites are so unlikely they aren't even worth mentioning. Superbugs would have to be intentionally engineered by a malicious group with a lot of resources, and so are very unlikely. AI is inevitable. It's very likely to happen in our lifetime. And it's very likely to kill us all. And explaining every reason why I believe those things could fill an entire book, so I seriously recommend reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.
- stepvhen 11y ago
  >And it's very likely to kill us all. This is absolutely absurd. Could you elaborate on that instead of just pointing to a book?
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity. An AI programmed to collect as many paperclips as possible, would convert the mass of the solar system into paperclips. An AI programmed to solve the Riemann hypothesis would build the biggest computer possible to do more calculations. An AI programmed to value self preservation would try to destroy anything that was even a tiny percent chance of being a threat to it. It would try to preserve as much energy and mass as possible to last through the heat death of the universe. Etc. The only AIs which actually do things we want them to do would have to be explicitly programmed to want to do that. And we have no idea how to do that. We can't just hope that arbitrary AIs will happen to value humans instead of something else. We need to figure out how to control them, which requires solving something called "the control problem".
    - maldusiecle 11y ago
      > The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity. This is where this line of reasoning completely falls apart for me. Any complex system is going to do unexpected things that weren't deliberately designed for. My laptop computed doesn't do "whatever it was programmed to, to the point of absurdity." Why would you expect a program complex enough to simulate the human mind to act in such a predictable way, when none of the much simpler programs we already have act that way?
      - TeMPOraL 11y ago
        Nah, that's the key. Your laptop is not doing what it was designed to, it is doing things exactly the way it was built. That's the 101 of programming - programs follow what you wrote, not what you meant. > Why would you expect a program complex enough to simulate the human mind to act in such a predictable way, when none of the much simpler programs we already have act that way? Exactly. We suck at making complex programs do what we want them to. This is the source of worry.
      - Houshalter 11y ago
        Your laptop computer does do what it was programmed to do, to the point of absurdity. It will keep executing a computer bug over and ever. Despite the fact that isn't what you intended, it still executes the code anyway. An AI will continue to execute, even when it stops doing what we intended it to do. Computers don't care about our original intentions, they just execute code. A program "complex enough to simulate the human mind" would probably have even more bugs that result in unintentional behavior. Not fewer.
    - stepvhen 11y ago
      >The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. >The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. Questions: (1) What reason do we have to keep chimpanzee's around? Why don't we just kill them all? They can't even do calculus. (2) Whatever the answer for question 1, wouldn't an AI consider that same scenario regarding humans? Assuming an AI is truly smarter than a human? (3) If AI gets to the point where they are much smarter than humans, wouldn't it follow that there would be AI philosophers? Or activists? Or pacifists? Would there be such a thing as an AI civilization? Or is your scenario just a few AI overlords that some how slipped through the cracks of regulation by humans?
  - cobaltblue 11y ago
    I think a shorter tl;dr is simply that the ways a human-level or beyond AI can be programmed incorrectly (it eventually kills us all or worse), even trying our best to do it right, outnumber the ways it can be programmed correctly. If you don't believe this, I'm not sure how to convince you, other than to poke holes in your ideas about how a benevolent AI could be programmed correctly so you see that such an idea is actually a terrible one or at least insufficient. There are many level of detail attacks I could use, other attacks around the lack of a proof that the AI's goals and preferences will remain exactly the same let alone within a window of benevolence over time.
    - CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
      How about positive feedback loops? Could we not employ ai-technology as an aid in designing, and implementing, benevolent ai?
      - mercer 11y ago
        That strikes me as sort of circular in reasoning. To create benevolent AI using AI, the latter would already have to know what 'benevolent' means. In which case we might as well just create benevolent AI in the first place. In fact, by relying on a secondary AI it's quite possible we're even more likely to accidentally end up with AI that isn't benevolent.
        CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
        Ok, bad choice of words. How about augmented reasoning capacity enabled by technologies involved in creating AI.
      - cobaltblue 11y ago
        We could, maybe, for various degrees of help and with various dangers depending on how much help (look up Oracle AI), and I would easily wager using relevant tools (not just "AI tech") would make the positive outcome more likely than not using them, but there are still many ways it can go wrong, and while past and present weak-AI technology might be useful in creating a sentient machine I'm doubtful much would be that helpful in solving the Friendliness (or benevolence) problem directly. For instance the other comment brings up the uncertainty around giving an Oracle AI the task of finding what benevolence means to humans, to then plug into the final AI hoping it will be Friendly. You don't know how to precisely define 'benevolent' so let the Oracle AI do it (or help you do it), though you think you can at least program the Oracle AI to do a good job in finding answers to vague, complex, fragile problems. (Why? Past success in AI tech?) Is what the Oracle AI outputs actually good? How do you know? What did the Oracle AI have to do to reach its answer, or gain a last bit of certainty in it? (e.g. Did it reason it needed more data and so built or hastened the arrival of brain-scanning technology, started scanning brains from volunteers, the very recently deceased, cryonics patients, or just without its creators knowledge through black market deals, and at some point did it simulate trillions of human minds under all sorts of gruesome scenarios to test responses? Do you even morally care about sentience on silicon? Would you care more if you were an upload?) You've got a lot of problems just building an Oracle AI (or anything powerful enough that can help you solve the hardest problems). Even supposing the output it gives is good and the costs (practical and ethical) were acceptable, will a seed AI allowed to recursively self-improve be guaranteed to preserve this Friendliness property in all subsequent improvements? With the idea of using "AI tech", you've basically drawn a line in the outcome space that on one side says something like "let's just program the thing" and the other says "hold on, let's just program the thing but also use all these other relevant computer tools we've developed over the decades to help program the thing". It's the start of an approach, but does it really prune all that much? What do these relevant tools actually buy you in safety, if a safety-guarantee-tool is not among them? Another line which may be what you were heading towards, could be on one side say something like "we might not be able to solve all the necessary problems with our current intelligence, so let's also spend time looking for ways to augment human intelligence -- brain-computer interfaces, brain emulations, tweaks to our genetic code, that sort of thing" and the other side "no, we're capable, let's try our best right now". Using ems based on friendly-ish human minds that become better than human could very well be a better approach to solving the superintelligent problems correctly and efficiently than doing so on raw human levels, on the other hand it could turn very bad if one of those ems instead just solves the problem of recursively improving themselves and their goal and value system is insufficiently friendly. Or many other failure modes. (Though an interesting "most likely scenario" given certain assumptions and only looking at a span of 2 years which by itself doesn't look too terrible is Robin Hanson's Age of Em idea.) Just like approaches involving molecular nanotech to help us, there's reasons why it could be seen to help the best outcome along, but it also opens the door to a lot of other risks that aren't necessarily there if you took the other side, so again how much is really pruned? What I take as your general idea of "maybe we need and should employ additional help and knowledge that we've yet to gain to even really start" isn't bad, though, much better than "Benevolence is easy, a King and his subjects all know he is a great ruler when everyone is smiling frequently", it's just lacking in detail to constitute a plan. Throwing in the positive feedback loop idea (which might even manifest as impressive accelerating returns, who knows) to me seems only relevant to figuring out time scales, I don't think it says anything about the fraction of good vs. bad outcomes apart from whether short or long time scales matter.
- kfk 11y ago
  Nick sounds like a crazy guy, but then you watch some of his presentations and you see he is not that crazy. What he says make sense and I think everybody agrees the threat is non zero. The next step is understanding that if you look over the past 100,000 years, nothing posed an existential threat and thus we expect an incredibly low chance of that happening in the next 100 years. The whole point relies on believing that AI is a bigger threat in the next 100 years than any other natural one. It's not that far fetched.
  - cobaltblue 11y ago
    Adding to this, imagine you were part of an ancient alien species checking in on earth every so often. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was formed. 500 million years later, the first self-replicators appeared. Another half billion years (now 3.5 billion years ago) for things to settle down and create the most recent ancestor from which all life descends from. Over the next 3 billion years nothing much happens, until the Phanerozoic Eon is reached around 500 million years ago where more "interesting", larger life starts to develop. But again for another half a billion years nothing that much happens other than evolution continuing playing its game of optimizing for gene replication in more and more interesting ways. Around one hundred thousand years ago, an interesting branch of a species has been developing in ways that indicate the rise of general intelligence (their few pounds of squishy matter in their heads are pretty neat: http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/power/ http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/power/). But they don't seem to be doing all that much until about 10-20 thousand years ago. And even then, less than 10 thousand years ago, they built some interesting structures like the pyramids, but their population is still tiny and their global influence is limited. And it wasn't until about 500 years ago when things really started picking up in population growth and world influence (some mark that as the discovery of a formal scientific process to build and record more and more truths about the world that are actually true). Just around 100 years ago, this species developed air travel. In about 60 years after that, they went beyond their planet to their moon. This species at present could wipe out almost all life from the planet (if it wanted, which it doesn't) in multiple ways, to really get every last bit of life exterminated would take some doing but in a large enough time span doesn't seem impossible. An alien species would have to be observing this planet at very frequent intervals to be able to catch any of these recent developments -- because if millions of years ago they determined nothing interesting was happening, and decided to only look in every five hundred thousand years or so, it's very likely the last time they looked our species wasn't even around. Now you take the development of an AI that is roughly human level intelligent with a given amount of resources. If you give it the same amount of resources again, it can "breed", copy itself perfectly onto them, and now we have a "population" of two AIs whose combined intelligence should roughly match that of two twin humans. Maybe it doesn't even copy perfectly, maybe it switches some things about to see if it can create something smarter without modifying its own code directly. In any case its breeding is only restricted by its ability to breed and desire to breed in the first place and the compute and power resources it needs to run a new copy, and these can always get lower than initially. What does the long-term look like? Even if the initial resources for the first one are astronomical (e.g. all computing power in use on the planet as of 2016), I would still bet you that left to breed without any other restriction it would take the AI family far less time than 100 thousand years to reach 7 billion instances. So you're looking at many, many more AIs than non-AIs, plus each with human level intelligence that isn't distributed normally (assuming soft eugenics doesn't become widespread in non-AI populations) but is mainly all the same with perhaps increases here and there (assuming a soft takeoff), each coordinating with the same goals in mind. This situation without further specification can be either extremely good for the non-AIs or extremely bad for the non-AIs. The question of whether this will happen (and whether it happens in that exact form, personally I think hard takeoff from a single AI is likely) in the next 100 years or the next hundred thousand years (perhaps a near-extinction-level event occurs forcing our species to basically start over but with an even harder battle to survive since many low-hanging-fruit resources have been depleted) might help you determine whether to worry now about doing actions that make the extremely-good more likely than the extremely-bad, but if one thinks human-level AI can't happen at all in any amount of time, that there's something special about our squishy brains or something inherently limiting about our so-far-general intelligence such that we can't solve the engineering problem of creating another intelligence directly and must always go through breeding, the argument needs to take place at a different level. The paperclip maximizer argument (not sure if Bostrom repeats it in his book) is yet another level of argument but it's meant for those who already buy the premise of human level AI and self-improving AI but who also think increased intelligence will naturally converge to a human-loving benevolent AI that sees how self-evidently obvious it is to love all life or whatever, that we don't have to worry about all the messy details around Friendliness because they'll just fall out of the entity naturally. No one is actually worried about Clippy tiling the solar system with himself, its probability is epsilon. But a lot of people just see this one argument out of context and infer the arguer believes it to be a relevant possibility to worry about and write off the whole group as crazy...
- conjectures 11y ago
  Ridley Scott's alien is inevitable. Human history and scientific progress has been driven by conflict. Whenever a better weapon is within reach, we reach out for it. Modern genetics is advancing very fast. We'll definitely have Ridley Scott's alien in our lifetime. It's very likely to kill us all.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    You're so clever. Alien, el oh el. I said that it would take a book to explain. You are parodying an extremely shortened summary of a complicated subject. The difference between AI and "alien" is no one is trying to make alien. There aren't research labs and billions of dollars in funding. There is no incentive at all. And the problem is far more difficult. AI is just algorithms. Second, aliens arent actually that powerful. Superintelligent AI would be godlike in power to us. I'd much rather have aliens.
    - conjectures 11y ago
      Similarly my own views are the result of a wealth of material not summarisable in a HN comment. I intend to read the book, although I'm sceptical that AI will be established as an issue of political urgency. The purpose of my facetious approach is to make clear that statements such as, "Superintelligent AI would be godlike in power to us," are more likely to have originated by analogy to science fiction than from a grounded understanding of what is possible or realistic in the relevant future. Being "just algorithms" doesn't really mean very much. It's like saying breeding the Alien is "just genetics". It's something we imagine might be possible, but is far beyond our current capabilities.
      - Houshalter 11y ago
        All speculation about the future will sound like science fiction. Someone in 1800 making accurate predictions about 1900 would have sounded crazy. Someone predicting the atomic bomb in 1900 would have sounded crazy. Or airplanes, or television, or the internet, etc. Just because something sounds absurd doesn't mean it's not possible. We live in a world where the only intelligences are humans. The idea of superintelligent minds seems absurd to us, because it isn't something we've ever encountered in reality before. But there is absolutely no law of nature that says it's impossible, or even difficult. If you look at history, it'd actually be really surprising if it was. Human minds were just the very first intelligence coughed up by evolution. We are far from the limits of what is possible. And there is a difference between genetic engineering and AI research. Biology is incredibly complicated. Like millions of complicated, interconnected, moving parts. It really is impossible to make Alien, or really anything beyond modifications to existing biology. Algorithms are a whole nother ball game. Our current AI algorithms are actually reasonably intelligent at many tasks, even smarter than humans at some things. And they are extremely simple. Could be described in a line or two of equations, or a few paragraphs of text. Not because they are primitive, but because simple algorithms work. And they have been improving every single year for a long time, and will likely improve well into the future. But you don't have to take my word for it. If you survey AI researchers and experts, they almost unanimously agree that AI will be invented in our lifetime. If you survey biologists, I highly doubt they would make similar claims about Alien.

Houshalter 11y ago

I think it's far more of a threat than any of those things. Nuclear war isn't inevitable, and wouldn't destroy the entire world, just the countries at war. Even a ridiculous world wide nuclear war would leave tons of survivors. Volcanoes and meteorites are so unlikely they aren't even worth mentioning. Superbugs would have to be intentionally engineered by a malicious group with a lot of resources, and so are very unlikely. AI is inevitable. It's very likely to happen in our lifetime. And it's very likely to kill us all. And explaining every reason why I believe those things could fill an entire book, so I seriously recommend reading Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

stepvhen 11y ago
>And it's very likely to kill us all. This is absolutely absurd. Could you elaborate on that instead of just pointing to a book?
- Houshalter 11y ago
  The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. They would have godlike powers and abilities. And this could happen very rapidly, as the first smart AIs design even better AIs and better computers, which then design even better AIs, and so on. The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity. An AI programmed to collect as many paperclips as possible, would convert the mass of the solar system into paperclips. An AI programmed to solve the Riemann hypothesis would build the biggest computer possible to do more calculations. An AI programmed to value self preservation would try to destroy anything that was even a tiny percent chance of being a threat to it. It would try to preserve as much energy and mass as possible to last through the heat death of the universe. Etc. The only AIs which actually do things we want them to do would have to be explicitly programmed to want to do that. And we have no idea how to do that. We can't just hope that arbitrary AIs will happen to value humans instead of something else. We need to figure out how to control them, which requires solving something called "the control problem".
  - maldusiecle 11y ago
    > The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. They would do whatever we programmed them to do, to the point of absurdity. This is where this line of reasoning completely falls apart for me. Any complex system is going to do unexpected things that weren't deliberately designed for. My laptop computed doesn't do "whatever it was programmed to, to the point of absurdity." Why would you expect a program complex enough to simulate the human mind to act in such a predictable way, when none of the much simpler programs we already have act that way?
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      Nah, that's the key. Your laptop is not doing what it was designed to, it is doing things exactly the way it was built. That's the 101 of programming - programs follow what you wrote, not what you meant. > Why would you expect a program complex enough to simulate the human mind to act in such a predictable way, when none of the much simpler programs we already have act that way? Exactly. We suck at making complex programs do what we want them to. This is the source of worry.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      Your laptop computer does do what it was programmed to do, to the point of absurdity. It will keep executing a computer bug over and ever. Despite the fact that isn't what you intended, it still executes the code anyway. An AI will continue to execute, even when it stops doing what we intended it to do. Computers don't care about our original intentions, they just execute code. A program "complex enough to simulate the human mind" would probably have even more bugs that result in unintentional behavior. Not fewer.
  - stepvhen 11y ago
    >The tl;dr is that we will eventually have AIs which are smarter than humans. Much smarter than humans, to the point that we are to them what chimpanzees are to us. >The second point is that they would have no reason to keep us around. Questions: (1) What reason do we have to keep chimpanzee's around? Why don't we just kill them all? They can't even do calculus. (2) Whatever the answer for question 1, wouldn't an AI consider that same scenario regarding humans? Assuming an AI is truly smarter than a human? (3) If AI gets to the point where they are much smarter than humans, wouldn't it follow that there would be AI philosophers? Or activists? Or pacifists? Would there be such a thing as an AI civilization? Or is your scenario just a few AI overlords that some how slipped through the cracks of regulation by humans?
- cobaltblue 11y ago
  I think a shorter tl;dr is simply that the ways a human-level or beyond AI can be programmed incorrectly (it eventually kills us all or worse), even trying our best to do it right, outnumber the ways it can be programmed correctly. If you don't believe this, I'm not sure how to convince you, other than to poke holes in your ideas about how a benevolent AI could be programmed correctly so you see that such an idea is actually a terrible one or at least insufficient. There are many level of detail attacks I could use, other attacks around the lack of a proof that the AI's goals and preferences will remain exactly the same let alone within a window of benevolence over time.
  - CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
    How about positive feedback loops? Could we not employ ai-technology as an aid in designing, and implementing, benevolent ai?
    - mercer 11y ago
      That strikes me as sort of circular in reasoning. To create benevolent AI using AI, the latter would already have to know what 'benevolent' means. In which case we might as well just create benevolent AI in the first place. In fact, by relying on a secondary AI it's quite possible we're even more likely to accidentally end up with AI that isn't benevolent.
      - CuriousSkeptic 11y ago
        Ok, bad choice of words. How about augmented reasoning capacity enabled by technologies involved in creating AI.
    - cobaltblue 11y ago
      We could, maybe, for various degrees of help and with various dangers depending on how much help (look up Oracle AI), and I would easily wager using relevant tools (not just "AI tech") would make the positive outcome more likely than not using them, but there are still many ways it can go wrong, and while past and present weak-AI technology might be useful in creating a sentient machine I'm doubtful much would be that helpful in solving the Friendliness (or benevolence) problem directly. For instance the other comment brings up the uncertainty around giving an Oracle AI the task of finding what benevolence means to humans, to then plug into the final AI hoping it will be Friendly. You don't know how to precisely define 'benevolent' so let the Oracle AI do it (or help you do it), though you think you can at least program the Oracle AI to do a good job in finding answers to vague, complex, fragile problems. (Why? Past success in AI tech?) Is what the Oracle AI outputs actually good? How do you know? What did the Oracle AI have to do to reach its answer, or gain a last bit of certainty in it? (e.g. Did it reason it needed more data and so built or hastened the arrival of brain-scanning technology, started scanning brains from volunteers, the very recently deceased, cryonics patients, or just without its creators knowledge through black market deals, and at some point did it simulate trillions of human minds under all sorts of gruesome scenarios to test responses? Do you even morally care about sentience on silicon? Would you care more if you were an upload?) You've got a lot of problems just building an Oracle AI (or anything powerful enough that can help you solve the hardest problems). Even supposing the output it gives is good and the costs (practical and ethical) were acceptable, will a seed AI allowed to recursively self-improve be guaranteed to preserve this Friendliness property in all subsequent improvements? With the idea of using "AI tech", you've basically drawn a line in the outcome space that on one side says something like "let's just program the thing" and the other says "hold on, let's just program the thing but also use all these other relevant computer tools we've developed over the decades to help program the thing". It's the start of an approach, but does it really prune all that much? What do these relevant tools actually buy you in safety, if a safety-guarantee-tool is not among them? Another line which may be what you were heading towards, could be on one side say something like "we might not be able to solve all the necessary problems with our current intelligence, so let's also spend time looking for ways to augment human intelligence -- brain-computer interfaces, brain emulations, tweaks to our genetic code, that sort of thing" and the other side "no, we're capable, let's try our best right now". Using ems based on friendly-ish human minds that become better than human could very well be a better approach to solving the superintelligent problems correctly and efficiently than doing so on raw human levels, on the other hand it could turn very bad if one of those ems instead just solves the problem of recursively improving themselves and their goal and value system is insufficiently friendly. Or many other failure modes. (Though an interesting "most likely scenario" given certain assumptions and only looking at a span of 2 years which by itself doesn't look too terrible is Robin Hanson's Age of Em idea.) Just like approaches involving molecular nanotech to help us, there's reasons why it could be seen to help the best outcome along, but it also opens the door to a lot of other risks that aren't necessarily there if you took the other side, so again how much is really pruned? What I take as your general idea of "maybe we need and should employ additional help and knowledge that we've yet to gain to even really start" isn't bad, though, much better than "Benevolence is easy, a King and his subjects all know he is a great ruler when everyone is smiling frequently", it's just lacking in detail to constitute a plan. Throwing in the positive feedback loop idea (which might even manifest as impressive accelerating returns, who knows) to me seems only relevant to figuring out time scales, I don't think it says anything about the fraction of good vs. bad outcomes apart from whether short or long time scales matter.
kfk 11y ago
Nick sounds like a crazy guy, but then you watch some of his presentations and you see he is not that crazy. What he says make sense and I think everybody agrees the threat is non zero. The next step is understanding that if you look over the past 100,000 years, nothing posed an existential threat and thus we expect an incredibly low chance of that happening in the next 100 years. The whole point relies on believing that AI is a bigger threat in the next 100 years than any other natural one. It's not that far fetched.
- cobaltblue 11y ago
  Adding to this, imagine you were part of an ancient alien species checking in on earth every so often. Around 4.5 billion years ago, Earth was formed. 500 million years later, the first self-replicators appeared. Another half billion years (now 3.5 billion years ago) for things to settle down and create the most recent ancestor from which all life descends from. Over the next 3 billion years nothing much happens, until the Phanerozoic Eon is reached around 500 million years ago where more "interesting", larger life starts to develop. But again for another half a billion years nothing that much happens other than evolution continuing playing its game of optimizing for gene replication in more and more interesting ways. Around one hundred thousand years ago, an interesting branch of a species has been developing in ways that indicate the rise of general intelligence (their few pounds of squishy matter in their heads are pretty neat: http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/power/ http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/power/). But they don't seem to be doing all that much until about 10-20 thousand years ago. And even then, less than 10 thousand years ago, they built some interesting structures like the pyramids, but their population is still tiny and their global influence is limited. And it wasn't until about 500 years ago when things really started picking up in population growth and world influence (some mark that as the discovery of a formal scientific process to build and record more and more truths about the world that are actually true). Just around 100 years ago, this species developed air travel. In about 60 years after that, they went beyond their planet to their moon. This species at present could wipe out almost all life from the planet (if it wanted, which it doesn't) in multiple ways, to really get every last bit of life exterminated would take some doing but in a large enough time span doesn't seem impossible. An alien species would have to be observing this planet at very frequent intervals to be able to catch any of these recent developments -- because if millions of years ago they determined nothing interesting was happening, and decided to only look in every five hundred thousand years or so, it's very likely the last time they looked our species wasn't even around. Now you take the development of an AI that is roughly human level intelligent with a given amount of resources. If you give it the same amount of resources again, it can "breed", copy itself perfectly onto them, and now we have a "population" of two AIs whose combined intelligence should roughly match that of two twin humans. Maybe it doesn't even copy perfectly, maybe it switches some things about to see if it can create something smarter without modifying its own code directly. In any case its breeding is only restricted by its ability to breed and desire to breed in the first place and the compute and power resources it needs to run a new copy, and these can always get lower than initially. What does the long-term look like? Even if the initial resources for the first one are astronomical (e.g. all computing power in use on the planet as of 2016), I would still bet you that left to breed without any other restriction it would take the AI family far less time than 100 thousand years to reach 7 billion instances. So you're looking at many, many more AIs than non-AIs, plus each with human level intelligence that isn't distributed normally (assuming soft eugenics doesn't become widespread in non-AI populations) but is mainly all the same with perhaps increases here and there (assuming a soft takeoff), each coordinating with the same goals in mind. This situation without further specification can be either extremely good for the non-AIs or extremely bad for the non-AIs. The question of whether this will happen (and whether it happens in that exact form, personally I think hard takeoff from a single AI is likely) in the next 100 years or the next hundred thousand years (perhaps a near-extinction-level event occurs forcing our species to basically start over but with an even harder battle to survive since many low-hanging-fruit resources have been depleted) might help you determine whether to worry now about doing actions that make the extremely-good more likely than the extremely-bad, but if one thinks human-level AI can't happen at all in any amount of time, that there's something special about our squishy brains or something inherently limiting about our so-far-general intelligence such that we can't solve the engineering problem of creating another intelligence directly and must always go through breeding, the argument needs to take place at a different level. The paperclip maximizer argument (not sure if Bostrom repeats it in his book) is yet another level of argument but it's meant for those who already buy the premise of human level AI and self-improving AI but who also think increased intelligence will naturally converge to a human-loving benevolent AI that sees how self-evidently obvious it is to love all life or whatever, that we don't have to worry about all the messy details around Friendliness because they'll just fall out of the entity naturally. No one is actually worried about Clippy tiling the solar system with himself, its probability is epsilon. But a lot of people just see this one argument out of context and infer the arguer believes it to be a relevant possibility to worry about and write off the whole group as crazy...
conjectures 11y ago
Ridley Scott's alien is inevitable. Human history and scientific progress has been driven by conflict. Whenever a better weapon is within reach, we reach out for it. Modern genetics is advancing very fast. We'll definitely have Ridley Scott's alien in our lifetime. It's very likely to kill us all.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  You're so clever. Alien, el oh el. I said that it would take a book to explain. You are parodying an extremely shortened summary of a complicated subject. The difference between AI and "alien" is no one is trying to make alien. There aren't research labs and billions of dollars in funding. There is no incentive at all. And the problem is far more difficult. AI is just algorithms. Second, aliens arent actually that powerful. Superintelligent AI would be godlike in power to us. I'd much rather have aliens.
  - conjectures 11y ago
    Similarly my own views are the result of a wealth of material not summarisable in a HN comment. I intend to read the book, although I'm sceptical that AI will be established as an issue of political urgency. The purpose of my facetious approach is to make clear that statements such as, "Superintelligent AI would be godlike in power to us," are more likely to have originated by analogy to science fiction than from a grounded understanding of what is possible or realistic in the relevant future. Being "just algorithms" doesn't really mean very much. It's like saying breeding the Alien is "just genetics". It's something we imagine might be possible, but is far beyond our current capabilities.
    - Houshalter 11y ago
      All speculation about the future will sound like science fiction. Someone in 1800 making accurate predictions about 1900 would have sounded crazy. Someone predicting the atomic bomb in 1900 would have sounded crazy. Or airplanes, or television, or the internet, etc. Just because something sounds absurd doesn't mean it's not possible. We live in a world where the only intelligences are humans. The idea of superintelligent minds seems absurd to us, because it isn't something we've ever encountered in reality before. But there is absolutely no law of nature that says it's impossible, or even difficult. If you look at history, it'd actually be really surprising if it was. Human minds were just the very first intelligence coughed up by evolution. We are far from the limits of what is possible. And there is a difference between genetic engineering and AI research. Biology is incredibly complicated. Like millions of complicated, interconnected, moving parts. It really is impossible to make Alien, or really anything beyond modifications to existing biology. Algorithms are a whole nother ball game. Our current AI algorithms are actually reasonably intelligent at many tasks, even smarter than humans at some things. And they are extremely simple. Could be described in a line or two of equations, or a few paragraphs of text. Not because they are primitive, but because simple algorithms work. And they have been improving every single year for a long time, and will likely improve well into the future. But you don't have to take my word for it. If you survey AI researchers and experts, they almost unanimously agree that AI will be invented in our lifetime. If you survey biologists, I highly doubt they would make similar claims about Alien.