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This guy is smart, and dead on: - People who don't understand AI are afraid of it; those who do know how fragile and limited it is. - The call for "regulation

by tbabb 9y ago

This guy is smart, and dead on: - People who don't understand AI are afraid of it; those who do know how fragile and limited it is. - The call for "regulation" of technology that doesn't exist is too vague to be useful. - It's the AI in self-driving cars which has the most potential to immediately kill/save thousands of people, and it's telling that it's not this technology that Elon seems to be calling to be regulated. Whether or not regulation is the right thing to do, any argument for/against regulation of self-driving cars could be applied just the same to a hypothetical super AI, but the former is tied to real, practical problems which exist today. Brooks clearly knows what's up. Also, to add my own commentary: - The dystopian robot future we should all be afraid of is not the [paperclip maximizer](https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer) Musk and friends wave their arms about, but marketing/business algorithms that have ripple effects at the scale of societies-- the Facebook, YouTube, and Google ranking algorithms are examples of this. We could shortly be in a place where large scale human behavior is shaped by algorithms with more data and insight about collective human behavior than any single human could have, and it will be used to optimize for money making instead of stability, fairness, or cultural values. Some society-shaping decisions/policies could even be made without any human awareness of the reasoning behind them. This is not less scary if they're being made by fragile/flaky algorithms.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Exactly. Our lack of awareness of political, social, and economic consequences is far more of a problem than any hypothetical paperclip demon. AI isn't terrifying. AI built with our current values is an horrific prospect.
- deleted 9y ago
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- cirgue 9y ago
  You don't need AI to have a paperclip demon. You just need complex systems that impact people's lives and aren't well understood. Capitalism is arguably the example of the paperclip deamon, and that will not get better with the permeation of sophisticated, fragile, poorly tuned machine learning techniques.
Veedrac 9y ago
"Fragile and limited" does not mean safe. It is a strange idea that AI would need to be any of robust, general or complete to be risky. If anything, the main take-away from today's AI is that many problems that previously looked hard turned out to be solvable at superhuman levels with such unsophisticated machinery. This realisation should be extrapolated. The call for regulation also need not be specific to be useful, though I suspect it would help. The greatest hurdle with AI risk is getting acceptance that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with ahead-of-time. Even if Elon does nothing but improve awareness, he has been useful. Self-driving cars are actually the least in need of extra regulation. They are already regulated, their effects are observable, there is market pressure for them to perform along lines beneficial to humanity, there is little to no incentive to extend their AI to anything more general, etc. My expectation is that the AI that is most dangerous is the AI developed behind closed doors for purely private interests on broad domains. I personally dislike the paperclip maximizer analogy; although it serves as a meaningful explanation of the AI alignment problem, people take the literal meaning too seriously, and the absurdity of it discredits the actual risk.
- anth1988 9y ago
  > The greatest hurdle with AI risk is getting acceptance that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with ahead-of-time. Even if Elon does nothing but improve awareness, he has been useful Or he's distracted people from real problems, spreading fear and misinformation along the way, while real experts are sitting around without anyone listening to them because the god king elon is talking.

by tbabb 9y ago

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

Exactly. Our lack of awareness of political, social, and economic consequences is far more of a problem than any hypothetical paperclip demon. AI isn't terrifying. AI built with our current values is an horrific prospect.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
cirgue 9y ago
You don't need AI to have a paperclip demon. You just need complex systems that impact people's lives and aren't well understood. Capitalism is arguably the example of the paperclip deamon, and that will not get better with the permeation of sophisticated, fragile, poorly tuned machine learning techniques.

Veedrac 9y ago

"Fragile and limited" does not mean safe. It is a strange idea that AI would need to be any of robust, general or complete to be risky. If anything, the main take-away from today's AI is that many problems that previously looked hard turned out to be solvable at superhuman levels with such unsophisticated machinery. This realisation should be extrapolated. The call for regulation also need not be specific to be useful, though I suspect it would help. The greatest hurdle with AI risk is getting acceptance that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with ahead-of-time. Even if Elon does nothing but improve awareness, he has been useful. Self-driving cars are actually the least in need of extra regulation. They are already regulated, their effects are observable, there is market pressure for them to perform along lines beneficial to humanity, there is little to no incentive to extend their AI to anything more general, etc. My expectation is that the AI that is most dangerous is the AI developed behind closed doors for purely private interests on broad domains. I personally dislike the paperclip maximizer analogy; although it serves as a meaningful explanation of the AI alignment problem, people take the literal meaning too seriously, and the absurdity of it discredits the actual risk.

anth1988 9y ago
> The greatest hurdle with AI risk is getting acceptance that this is a problem that needs to be dealt with ahead-of-time. Even if Elon does nothing but improve awareness, he has been useful Or he's distracted people from real problems, spreading fear and misinformation along the way, while real experts are sitting around without anyone listening to them because the god king elon is talking.