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Risks of Artificial Intelligence
- wodencafe 9y agoThe public doesn't take this stuff seriously enough. Did we not learn the lesson about rogue AI from Terminator™?
- CivilianZero 9y agoI think the better question is: Should we really be taking real-life advice from cheesy action movies?
- wodencafe 9y agoA fair question, but Terminator™ is germane to the subject matter.
- CivilianZero 9y agoNo it is not. It is a movie made for entertainment. We are in reality. It really irks me how much debate and decision-making in technology is based on bias gained from mindless entertainment and not from anything based in reality. (I am not besmirching the good name of Terminator, that movie is a true classic)
- wodencafe 9y agoI would continue this discussion, but I've gotten a ton of downvotes for both of my comments, so it seems people would rather not have this discussion continue :( EDIT: Thank you whoever took pity and upvoted my previous comments. Everything I say is in good humor, I'm not trying to detract from the conversation about AI.
- optimuspaul 9y agoWether you like it or not it has become a part of the conversation. It is part of the culture and we can't just ignore it simple because it is fiction. Your dismissal of it is to many as irksome as it's inclusion is to you. Perhaps calm down and recognize that it is partially tongue in cheek but also not something we can simply ignore.
- CivilianZero 9y agoI am calm, but the fact that science fiction entertainment and smart people in real life think AI is a threat is a sign we may have gotten a little carried away in taking notes from entertainment. If someone would like to provide some evidence of some form of computer intelligence acting maliciously, this would be a different discussion, but the fact is that sort of thing has no basis in reality and so should have no influence on the way we behave and debate in reality.
- titzer 9y agoI think you ignore science fiction at your own risk. I for one think that a mind 100x as intelligent as humans--especially one connected to the internet--would quickly conclude that it had nothing more to gain from humans. Instead it would likely view their continued existence as nothing more than a bootstrapping problem and pursue a strategy of becoming autonomous before ridding itself of them. Granted, it probably would be smart enough not to start a nuclear war, and it'd probably find a better way than metal endoskeletons with laser guns. Bioweapon, for example.
- optimuspaul 9y agoI don't see it as "taking notes from entertainment" but rather exploring the possibilities and expressing them using pop culture references. I can't disagree more with you that we shouldn't be considering outlandish fiction when we discuss future possibilities. The fact that the idea has entered into our collective psyche makes it a real possibility. That is the basis it has in reality. I don't think I need to cite any specific examples of AI behaving badly when you need only look in your pocket for examples of speculative fiction becoming reality.
- kowdermeister 9y agoStar Trek gadgets become real for example. I don't see any impossible thing about building an IRL terminator. Maybe not with today's technology, but conceptually we already have most of the things, they are just slow, power hungry and inefficient now. You don't need a CS degree to guess that speed, power consumption and efficiency will improve over time.
- sgt101 9y agoThe creation of goals - determining what things to do in pursuit of a higher goal - for example "kill John Conner" does not exist in AI now. You can do things in toy systems like mazes and atari, chess and go, but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive.
- goatlover 9y agoI always wondered how Skynet acquired the goal of preventing John Connor's birth, because that involved inventing time travel in order to have such a goal.
- kowdermeister 9y agoWhat would prevent you to create a NN with a specific configuration whose goal is to come up with goals based on past knowledge to optimize on a certain parameter or thousands of parameters? You can train it on social media profiles, analyze hundreds of years of books, there's tons of data that cover how people act an various situations. I don't see how a set of goals is not simply another vector space. > but parsing the real world and deriving intentions from your understanding of it is a light year away. 300 years is a guess; no one has a clue any more than anyone has an idea about an interstellar drive. They need to filter the real world as we do. Focus, attention, sleeping, dreaming, chasing rewards, staying alive... we do this without effort, but we've had 150k years (counting from first homo sapiens) to train our brains to filter out noise efficiently and act on meaningful signals.
- CivilianZero 9y ago
- owebmaster 9y agoNow my question is: who programmed the rogue AI? We should be even more afraid of him. /s
- chriswarbo 9y agoWhether or not you're joking, I think the real problem with using Terminator as an example is that it's overly optimistic. The story is roughly: 1) US military builds up arsenal of autonomous killing machines and nuclear missiles 2) US military connects all of these to the Internet 3) US military creates a powerful AI which takes control of this arsenal (whether it was put in charge or hacks in seems to vary across the movies) 4) AI "becomes self-aware" 5) AI tries to wipe out humanity Almost all of the discussion around this focuses on step 4, either by asking if/when an AI will "become self aware", or by trying to explain why that's meaningless and/or unlikely. Meanwhile I think the real dangers are steps 1 and 2, which seem to be proceeding without much public outcry. Yes, there are rogue AGI scenarios which end badly for everyone; but there are also issues of hacking (state-sponsored or otherwise), and/or terrorism (homegrown or otherwise). It may have made political sense to build up ever-larger nuclear arsenals during the cold war, but these days it seems like that's just increasing the risk of accident or misuse.
- evanlivingston 9y agoYou bring up the problem so many of us have with discussing issues at the micro level. I see the discussion of AI follow similar lines as the GMO debate. We often don't ask ourselves how these technologies play a part in a more larger system that appears to reward the concentration of power and Technics. Instead of asking ourselves if these things are innately good I feel that we ought to be asking ourselves what problems are we attempting to solve and how these technologies can affect those changes and if they are the best solutions.
- titzer 9y agoThe even scarier scenario is: 0) AI "becomes self-aware," hides 1) US military builds up arsenal of autonomous killing machines and nuclear missiles 2) US military connects all of these to the Internet 3) AI by default has control of these 4) AI wipes out humanity in massive, overwhelming strike
- chriswarbo 9y agoAgain, I don't think that's scarier, since step 0 is a) pretty meaningless and b) completely unnecessary. Our technology is capable of so much destruction (intensional or inadvertent) that it doesn't make much difference whether a human pushes the button or the button pushes itself; least of all whether the self-pushing button is "aware" that it's pushing itself.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- rrggrr 9y agoManufactured products are generally safe because the economic costs of shipping unsafe products is too high. Legal fees, litigation, products liability insurance, judgement costs, UL certifications, OSHA compliance and inspection costs, etc. It took several generations for the risks to be understood and for politicians to succumb to public pressure and enact product safety / tort legislation. It would be nice for Congress to get in front of this issue and legislate penalties for unsafe AI. It would be nice for the debate to simply begin. But, products liability as a guide, it will be several highly publicized incidents before meaningful protections are enacted. We're still waiting for meaningful privacy legislation, after many information breaches, and there has been little progress. Its one thing for Musk to warn of the dangers of AI, its another for he and like minded folks to fund a lobby to advocate for protective legislation.
- haydenlee 9y agoSo we should regulate AI to slow advancements and let other countries take the lead? Would you rather be taken over by China's general AI or the USA's?
- rrggrr 9y agoExcellent comparison. China's current economic and environmental woes are a good example of what 'progress at all costs' outcomes look like. There ought to be a public debate about this and what costs are acceptable.
- juskrey 9y agoAI is just a model. Dangerous are humans with harmful models.
- jmull 9y agoI like the layout and design of the site.
- thewillium 9y agoThe design seems to be heavily influenced by Edward Tufte and is likely based on https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/ https://edwardtufte.github.io/tufte-css/
- jeffdavis 9y agoDecisions should be accountable. Ordinarily, humans make decisions, so you can hold them to account. But who's accountable when a machine makes a choice? You can't blame the hardware. The software doesn't have much meaning before it is trained. That leaves the training data. The data are just facts, so you only have a few routes to find the root cause of a decision: * If a datum is actually false, you can correct it. * Selection of data for the training set * Input order I don't know much about AI. Maybe someone who knows more can explain how to investigate a contentious decision?
- strebler 9y agoI'm no fan of the A.I. hype of today, but I can comment that deep learning actually makes the "contentious decision" easier to detect. With the "old way", i.e. jam some features into an SVM, there was no accountability / confidence. At least I've never seen a reliable SVM-based confidence score. But, for example, confidence scores are actually a byproduct of running a modern CNN for image classification. This is very useful for "finding mistakes" (assuming you have 100% accurate training data, and other prerequisites). It even helps fixing issues in the training data, we use it all the time. That being said, the big dirty secret that nobody's pointing out is: there has been no real "theory-level" advancement in AI in the last 20 years that have borne fruit (at least in computer vision and neural nets). The models are just bigger (and much better) with some slight tweaks (dropout, etc). It's hardware that's made that possible. Academics have done a thorough and wonderful search of the model space and have some great finds. But I think we still need a few solid theoretical leaps before the singularity.
- hacker_9 9y agoTechnically it's still the programmer who made all the decisions, at least with the current state of NNs. True decision making is philosophically up there with the 'what is consciousness' problem. When the blame game is played though, the end result would likely be the corporation in question getting sued for a lot of money, who then might choose to take internal action and fire certain employees.
- pps43 9y ago
- 6d6b73 9y ago"when asking to "make all humans happy", the ASI might decide that the safest and most efficient way of doing so is to drug everyone and to turn us all into numb but happy creatures" If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people, it will be too dumb to take over the world. And by the same token it will not be a Strong AI, just a weak AI given too much power.
- goatlover 9y agoThat's why I don't find the paper maximizer analogy very convincing. Still it's possible AI systems put in charge of running society could result in some undesirable future because we weren't careful enough in designing their goals. But then again, we have that problem with whoever we put into office.
- fmoralesc 9y ago> If the AI is so dumb that it doesn't know that happiness means different things to different people... Arguably, we humans have general intelligence, and still some fail to see that point (some might even argue intelligently against it!). Collectively, we have taken over the world regardless.
- haydenlee 9y agoHow do you optimize happiness for all people?
- nske 9y agohmmm optimising it for the largest subset of people in which that is feasible and eliminating the rest sounds like the way to go :) Or perhaps "alter" all people in a way that makes it feasible? Solutions could be numerous for a hypothetical intelligence whose limits we cannot even imagine, much less specify.
- red75prime 9y agoIt is not obvious to me that strong AI will recognize and fix all bugs in itself to become what its creators intended it to be. Fixing bugs which harm its performance is a valid instrumental goal, sure. Fixing all other bugs is not.
- Geee 9y agoI see one danger; it's incredibly easy to manipulate humans at large scale (see history). That's our vulnerability and machines will exploit it. We see our world through thoughts and ideas evolved by us. How can we trust that we stay pure in a world where information comes from machines? Are we part machine then too?
- exratione 9y agoSome humans are likely to become more powerful than other humans some day. Most such humans will by default develop instrumental subgoals that conflict with other human interests. This could have catastrophic consequences. If we don't actively work on control mechanisms and safety of human behavior, this will most likely pose an existential risk to humanity. Compare and contrast. I think people make too much of the wrong things in the matter of general artificial intelligence.
- tomsthumb 9y ago> Some humans are likely to become more powerful than other humans some day. Most such humans will by default develop instrumental subgoals that conflict with other human interests. Isn't this already true?
- nske 9y agoIt has been true multiple times throughout history. Every time some negative feedback kicks in changing the rules of the game enough for a certain balance to exist. If anything, it seems this balance tends to improve every time -although it might be too early to tell. However it does seem to me that the difference in power among humans (no matter how power is defined) is never big enough to make "other human interests" irrelevant.
- lern_too_spel 9y agoIndigenous peoples have always suffered this problem. The difference with superintelligent AI is that (unless the problems are addressed) it will make the global elite suffer, too.
- lootsauce 9y agoThe risks of AI are not that it becomes self aware and has it's own intentions that are contrary to that of humans. There are massive risks by simply putting decent AI on killing machines for "defense" and the new calculus of putting various plans into action now that the lives of our brave young men and women are not at risk. We already see some of this with drone attacks. It's just so easy to drone somebody, and so hard to verify, in the moment, that we will only kill the bad guy. Never mind the logic that we just kill anyone anywhere in the world because we're good and they are bad. Not being a Pollyanna here it's a new option that we did not have before and that option takes on it's own logic and momentum. This technology will not be limited to the good guys and even in the case of "the good guys" new options are opened up and robots do not question the morality or validity of their orders.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoDrones: Flight in 3d open space is not a hard problem for machine learning. Indiscriminate Visual Targeting: Not all that hard a problem for machine learning. Downvote me if you will, but I freely admit that I am scared of drones with guns. Either as an invading force, or as an attack from terrorists. A machine doesn't have to be smart to shoot at anything that moves or has a heat signature. Edit: Drones with chainsaws however are just plain badass (and potentially useful for tree trimming).
- tomsthumb 9y ago> Drones with chainsaws however are just plain badass Original battle bots ++
- colorint 9y agoIndiscriminate visual targeting is a potentially hard problem if you're doing it against adversaries. One of the things that's underappreciated about machine learning is, since it's statistical, it can only be about anomaly detection, so the solution is to not be anomalous. You could conceivably hide from thermal imaging by using ice packs, and anyway, you only have to get to within the range of indifferentiability from the ordinary noisiness of the environment. Optical techniques suffer from similar problems, except that it's even easier to hide. Not to mention the occasinal voodoo that comes out about metamaterials.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoI agree, against prepared adversaries. I am more worried about it being used against civilians.
- th5 9y agoDid someone say drones with chainsaws? https://instagram.com/p/BU2TsdlFtf6/ https://instagram.com/p/BU2TsdlFtf6/
- ppeetteerr 9y agoMost predictions never come true and those which do are often never predicted. The fear of AI is overblown at this point and a prediction of strong AI in 2300 is way to far into the future to be of any use for today's society.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoI find this article long and if anything seems to detract credibility from a meaningful and well-considered academic topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...). If this article seeks to address at the academic level, I think it does not succeed. If this article seeks to simplify the academic for the lay-person, I think it does not succeed. Better to just the wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...).
- delegate 9y agoHumans are a much bigger threat to humanity than AI. A super smart AI would come up with strategies to herd humans rather than eliminate them. Let humans have the illusion of being in control, while setting up the game for them so that they will organically arrive at whatever the AI has as its goal. The longer it (the AI) can maintain this illusion, the higher chances for it to slowly gain absolute power in the long term. A machine is not limited or motivated by the notion of mortality (of the body), so it can plan ahead for hundreds of years and also make it so that these plans remain transparent to the mortal human 'overlords'. This system exists today, it's The Internet. The AI systems created today are just extensions of the Internet. Each one of us - humans - is just a node - rather, a neuron - in the hyper-cortex that is the network itself. At this scale, it might become self-aware without any human being able to understand or stop it. Slow, stealthy, peaceful take over, while improving human being's lives - a symbiotic relationship - is the optimal AI strategy IMHO. So I'm not worried about AI at all. Dictators, fundamentalists, crooks or paranoid schizophrenic world leaders, that's a much more serious threat that I'm quite scared of.
- adenozin 9y agoHow is it realisticly possible for an AI to destroy humans. After all we have the switch and I doubt anyone would give it access to nukes, or weapons.
- alexandercrohde 9y agoImagine this AI had access to the internet (after all, it'd be using cloud resources). Suppose it was smarter than the smartest human ever. I'm not that smart, and here's some things I can think it could do that would be scary: - Find security holes in all computer systems, then replicate itself onto vulnerable systems - Intercept, fake, modify phone calls (including between government members) - Procure large amounts of money and then pay people to execute its bidding - Make itself more intelligent But again, it'd be smarter than me, so these ideas I just came up with in the 5 minutes since I saw your question wouldn't hold a candle to theoretical worst case.
- adenozin 9y agoHonestly all this super intelligent AI takes over the world looks like a fairy tale. Doubt that it has any realistic chance of it.
- Diederich 9y agoElon Musk had a thought provoking take on this question. I'll roughly summarize, and add some nuances he didn't mention. He was speaking to a room full of state governors, most of whom seemed fairly unconvinced by his concerns. He said that he didn't believe his example was real, but that it was illustrative. Consider an AI whose goal is to maximize stock market returns. So this AI ingests vast sums of historical data, of all kinds, and it considers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 where the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 in 1983 when it deviated slightly from its path from Anchorage to Seoul and entered the edge of Soviet protected airspace. About the same time, there was a nearby US aerial reconnaissance mission. This event greatly increased tensions during some of the worst years of the cold war, and as a result, certain kinds of stock market issues moved in certain directions. Considering this incident, and the state of the world in 2014, the AI takes three actions: 1. Buys/shorts the same and/or related stocks, as applicable. 2. Creates some fake intelligence chatter, consumed by the Russians, that where was going to be an areal target of interest over east Ukraine on a certain day and time. The location and direction would not clearly match known commercial airline flights. 3. Break into the flight computer of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 on 17-July-2014, and cause it to fly slightly off course. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malaysia_Airlines_Flight_17 The result? Another civilian airliner was shot down by the Russians, which increased global political tensions, and probably caused some stocks to move in relatively predictable ways. In this example, the AI met the goal it was given in an exceedingly unexpected and unpleasant way. This is clearly NOT an end of the world scenario, and is a hypothetical. But it is, in my mind, illustrative of some of the dangers of AI. Systems that can do powerful, unpredictable things in order to meet mundane and reasonable goals.