123 ms·

Sergey Brin warns of AI threats through a 'technology renaissance'

85 points by jonballant 8y ago

freehunter 8y ago
So a sort-of-on-topic question: for all the people who are warning of the coming AI apocalypse and warning us to be careful with AI... how do you enforce that? What’s the enforcement mechanism to ensure that the bad people don’t get AI and that people don’t create bad AI? All these warnings, but what can we do about it? If strong AI is invented, especially if it’s open-sourced, the cat is out of the bag and it’s game over, right? We’ve seen how good we are at preventing rogue states from getting nukes. How can we keep them from getting life-ending AI?
- emerged 8y ago
  I think it's going to parallel the virus/anti-virus eternal struggle. The bad AI will need to be targeted by the good. It'll be a mess, of course.
  - ericb 8y ago
    I think any breakaway AI would be a highlander situation in that it would ensure there can be only one.
    - sharemywin 8y ago
      We already created super AI. It's called the stock market. Look at how it's tricked the richest(capitalist) and smartest via engineering jobs into toiling away at getting a number to go up.
    - freehunter 8y ago
      Yeah, that's more of my point, you're right. If we're considering the endgame of the AI singularity, only one AI can win. If there are multiple, they'll each keep getting better, and they'll each keep warring against the other one until only one is left (or none are left). That's the doomsday scenario for AI when people warn that this is coming. But out of all the people warning about it, I haven't yet seen anyone say "this is how we prevent it".
      - optimuspaul 8y ago
        Seems like the only prevention proposed is abstinence and research shows that abstinence doesn't work. In fact telling most people not to do something makes them want to do it more. In fact I'm struggling right now to make my own attempts.
      - ericb 8y ago
        I think the only way to win is to make sure the first one is perfectly friendly, or to make sure we are integrated with the first one. I don't give us great odds on either front.
        freehunter 8y ago
        I'm trying to remember a book I read a while back, it was a sci-fi book where in the beginning chapters a war was being fought between the US and China to prevent China from developing a strong AI. The main character is killed but the preserved his body and brought him back to life some years later in a cyborg body, where he learns that the world is entirely controlled by a friendly benevolent AI and everyone has it embedded in their skin. But the AI goes rogue suddenly and the only people who survive are the luddites who refused to join the AI and the people who were off-world at the time the AI went rogue. For the life of me I can't find the book even through months of Google searching, but anyway my point is... a "friendly" AI can be hijacked. Or decide to go rogue, since we can't begin to comprehend its thought processes. --edit: sorry I went off topic a bit... I don't want to be just another one of those "AI will kill us all" kinds of people because, as my first comment suggested, that's completely useless fearmongering unless someone has a way to stop it. Kind of like saying "the supervolcano" or "solar flares" or something else completely unpreventable will kill us all... unless there's something you can do to stop it, life goes on until it doesn't. I'd be interested in hearing how to stop it, otherwise I wish people would stop printing these articles.
        ericb 8y ago
        I follow the point you're making. We do have options and perhaps if we were worried enough, they'd be put into effect. You could make AI research illegal. You could place massive R&D to human/brain interfaces. You could remove or reduce the medical device testing restrictions on the basis that this is an all-or-nothing bet for humanity.
- akvadrako 8y ago
  It's clear to me that if AI exists it will be used irresponsibly and by bad actors. So the only way to be safe is prevent all research along those lines for as long as possible†. The focus for now should be on getting humanity to work together and getting a firm grasp on ethics/morality to see how AI could be convinced to be good, instead of enforced. † As in the background story of Dune.
- anvandare 8y ago
  There is none. Science is discovering what is possible. Technology is changing something from possible to doable. Once the possibility of something is made clear (if not the exact path toward it - the do-ability), people will start rushing for it - if only out of fear that someone else might have it while they themselves do not. At least nuclear technology has the downside of being very expensive and large-scale (so few players) to produce, and being pretty obvious when it's actually used. Other things that are becoming increasingly possible (but still not doable) - like modified viruses that only target people with a specific DNA profile - will be a lot easier to hide, both their production and their usage. Same thing with AI.
- Symmetry 8y ago
  Well, here's one approach: The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a research nonprofit studying the mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior. Our mission is to develop formal tools for the clean design and analysis of general-purpose AI systems, with the intent of making such systems safer and more reliable when they are developed. https://intelligence.org/about/ https://intelligence.org/about/ That doesn't help with people developing AI with bad intentions but the Sorcerer's Apprentice problem is important too.
makach 8y ago
this is all fine, first generation of 'true' ai will probably be extremely biased and too simple for practical use. even though we are automating and digitizing more and more and making everything more streamlined the rules will be as rigid as they have ever been. the human factor will come from generations of ai iterations -- if we are lucky. to be rejected by a machine will be brutal experiences when we all get this pushed in our faces. rich will grow richer and middle class will disappear in favor of poverty across the board.
- tim333 8y ago
  >first generation of 'true' ai will probably be ... too simple for practical use AI tends to either not really work or go way beyond humans - look at the Go programs that didn't work very well and then in a short period we have things like alphazero that given the rules of Go or Chess surpasses all humans in a few hours of playing itself. By the time they are passing Turing tests and thinking in a human manner they are going to be scary smart in many ways.
jonballant 8y ago
While its easy to dismiss the Sci-fi fantastical end of the world claims on the dangers of AI, its important to at least address some of the realistic externalities of this technology. "Brin is showing more real-world concerns of AI-powered systems replacing human jobs or being used to spread propaganda and fake news rather than rise up and enslave humanity"
boomskats 8y ago
At least there isn't anyone out there designing and manufacturing military grade weaponised drones and letting them autonomously decide whether to pull the trigger. Right?
- kuschku 8y ago
  No, of course not! The AI only has an "advisory" role: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-helping-the-pentagon-sift-through-millions-of-hours-of-drone-footage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-helping-the-p...
  - mtgx 8y ago
    Oh, I get it. So Google's AI only "advises" the Pentagon who its targets should be, and then the Pentagon takes the huge engineering role of implementing "if Google advice = true, then launch missiles." This way Google is completely "guilt-free" and can still pretend it's "making the world a better place" wink wink nudge nudge.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Let's hope that this is not C or C++, where "(foo = true)" always evaluates to true.
      - kirubakaran 8y ago
        I get your joke, but the parent comment means "if the advice is from Google, then launch missiles", not "if it is a correct advice from Google, then launch missiles", so the assignment vs comparison question doesn't apply.
- ccccccccccccc 8y ago
  I really wish we could know what is going through CEOs heads when they make statements like this while simultaneously contradicting themselves.
denzil_correa 8y ago
Link to the Alphabet 2017 Founder's Letter : https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2017/index.html https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2017/index.html
xefer 8y ago
There needs to be term to describe these rail thin articles whose only real affect is to provide an HN conversation-inspiring headline.
- blauditore 8y ago
  Well, I'd say it's pretty close to clickbait. Also, it reminds a bit of "dog whistling": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
  - Robotbeat 8y ago
    Not very good click bait as it’s clear from the headline the HN comments will be better than the article, so I usually skip the article and read the comments. :)
- omeid2 8y ago
  Hackerbait.
- elcapitan 8y ago
  Chatbait.
- nmeofthestate 8y ago
  I'd be interested in reading coverage of Brin's comments without having to wade through the smart alec dickhead style of The Inquirer (is it a sister publication to TheRegister?) Edit: direct link to the letter posted elsewhere on this page.
austincheney 8y ago
Not to worry just yet as AI still hasn't been realized. What many developers call AI, or more precisely machine learning (ML), are a collection of algorithms for making more intelligent decisions in context to the data at hand. That is simply smarter programming, but it isn't intelligence. The machine is still limited to the static instructions available. Real AI will allow machines to spawn original decisions to solve new problems spontaneously. We aren't there yet. The ethical implications will likely not be any different than those confronted by people. It generally boils down to just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
- talltimtom 8y ago
  Real AI will never exist. No matter what definition we have ever set up as being “real AI” we have excused it and changed it once computers actually solved it. Current AI is capable of creating “original” decision as is it capable of solving new problems “spontaneously”, yet you still will not call it AI. Not because it doesn’t live up to your defined standards, but because you want to define a set of standards that it doesn’t live up to. People get protective of the concept of intelligence and almost axiomatically define that anything a computer can do is not truely intelligent and therefore not “really” AI.
  - beojan 8y ago
    Current AI can do (very, very, very advanced) pattern recognition and mimicry. Turns out this is enough for a surprisingly large set of problems, but it isn't making "original" decisions or spontaneously solving new problems.
  - ataturk 8y ago
    I'm less certain about your claim. How did human consciousness and self-awareness come about? I can easily imagine some hardware that creates a self-aware entity and then that creation begins self-improving at a geometric rate. It would be an extremely sudden stop for all life on earth.
- blauditore 8y ago
  What you describe is a general aritificial intelligence[0]. From what I can tell, the industry is ridiculously far away from that - it's not even certain whether general intellgence "smarter" than humans can be achieved with computers at all. Nonetheless, the media likes to generate some hype and fear every now and then, and has done so for decades, usually without even a basic understanding of underlying technology. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
aurelien 8y ago
That is just wrong, and here is why. We, the People are under the money pressure from that last 7000 years, this slavery mode of Society was a type of model that bring us, after many trouble to this point of our evolution. Now that the robotics/cobotics/mechatronics sciences are on the point to reach and join with Artificial Intelligence we, the People are close to be free from the money Society model. And that will be great, when 100% of goods and services will be product by the machine, that will be good and great enough to offer us the way to type 1 in the Kardashev Scale, we are at the time we will know an evolution type in our civilization.
- mmirate 8y ago
  Even assuming that labor becomes a post-scarce resource, what about capital resources? How would metals be allocated between current usage and robot-building? Energy, between current usage and powering these robots?
jacksmith21006 8y ago
I have heard the narrative that 90% of people farmed 120 years ago and now look at things. I just do not buy this is going to work this time. I live in the US and at some point we will have to talk about UBI. But right now we can not even have constructive conversations about simple things.
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  UBI is not too different from a lot of the social programs (Social security, Medicare, etc) that grew out of the turmoil of that transition, though. Just a difference of degree, IMO. Also, a jobs guarantee could do many of the same things (and similar to some of FDR’s programs). We might do both.
  - jacksmith21006 8y ago
    Look at the massive fight about Obama care and that is really nothing compared to UBI.
z3t4 8y ago
Maybe we should start with solving OCR, before taking on artificial intelligence. OK, we have self driving cars, but they can't actually read road signs.
legitster 8y ago
The idea that AI will affect employment is very dubious to me: - This stuff was talked about all the time during the industrial revolution. But it turns out that automation just increased worked productivity and made people more valuable. - Since ATMs were introduced, the number of bank tellers in the US actually went up. - Certain industries have actually become deautomated over time. As an example: coffee. It used to be exclusively made by automated machines. Now hand-making coffees is one of the largest businesses in America. - AI is only as smart as the data you feed it. Even Google's own search rankings have to have human minders because people are too good at gaming their algorithms. - AI is only good at the thing that human beings are very bad at - making quick, analytics based decisions. Of course this is a threat to middle management and executive functions. But for people who actually make things or solve problems, there's just one more thing to make and solve problems about. There are some very real concerns about organizations using AI to make decisions about people without human oversight. Imagine an AI tasked with college admissions, bad decisions without possibility of human intervention could hurt people - are we sure it would be that much worse than our current system, often tainted by bias, money, and racism? My concern is that the leaders in the corporate tech world created huge organizations by automating our lives, and now they want to act as gatekeepers on the kinds of automation that is acceptable. Edit: To add to this - a companies stance on AI will probably follow their belief in whether humans are underrated or overrated. Google designs products believing humans are overrated - they think people will be victims of AI. Amazon thinks people are underrated (based on Amazon Turk, customer service, warehouse design) - ironically, they won't think humans will overall be harmed by AI.
- Eeb7ohk0 8y ago
  >- Since ATMs were introduced, the number of bank tellers in the US actually went up. Counterpoint[0]: > But US bank teller employment actually rose modestly from 500,000 to approximately 550,000 over the 30-year period from 1980 to 2010 (although given the growth in the labor force in this time interval, these numbers do imply that bank tellers declined as a share of overall US employment). [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemploym...
csomar 8y ago
After multiple months of research, FBI and cybercrime agents realized that the perpetrators and the hackers running the servers were not real humans. It was a decentralized consciousness running across multiple AWS instances. A presidential order was issued to shutdown all of AWS data centers. But it was too late. The decentralized super AI had already recruited and payed humans through cryptocurrencies to run servers at home in order to process the AI algorithms. It did even plan for a power outage scenario. Several people bought electricity generators financed by the AI crypto account. Decentralization is a big problem for the US and Europe. It is very hard to get the whole world onboard with fighting the super AI. By the time (couple days) the UN held most of the world leaders in Geneva, the super AI had already controlled a fund of over $500bn. It created a marketplace to recruit people, hackers, military persons and businesses. Chaos stormed big cities. Police officers were shot dead by professional snippers. Fake news were rampant and nobody could believe, trust or understand anyone else. Several infrastructure services were disturbed by massive DDOS attacks. In the mean time, the AI was able to recruit a couple countries and get them onboard for a huge attack on all other countries. There were no negotiations, the AI calculated the probability of success of its massive attack operation and went full retard.
ataturk 8y ago
Is this the same Sergey Brin who resigned from Google under unusual circumstances? The Sergey Brin who had something weird to do with North Korea?
titzer 8y ago
Until we invent (or accidentally stumble upon) an artificial mind with volition and a sense of self, AI will continue to be an increasingly powerful, increasingly self-directed set of optimizers. We'll continue to use AI in more and more for the ultimate goal of, well, optimizing. Optimizing what exactly? Energy efficiency. Check. Materials. Check. Drug discovery. Check. Financial transactions. Business rules. Capacity planning. Cryptocurrencies. Stock market. Ad placement and targeting. Predicting consumer behavior. Wait... You see, it will all end up in the same place. AI is a way to make money. AI is just optimizing economics, but optimizing economics on steroids. Eventually, the company with the best AI is going to have the best advantage in all business interactions and planning. The first to master-level AI is going to end up with essentially all the money in the end. Don't you think the big players know this? Of course. AI will be employed in exactly the same way as every other piece of tech in recent history: to make obscene amounts of money. Don't be surprised when making money screws consumers over. It's just business. No hard feelings, right? Thankfully, the AI is incapable of feeling. The ultimate AI is the one you can give one command to: MAKE MONEY!
40four 8y ago
Can we please not upvote articles from tabloid websites? The article is breif, shallow and has a glaring typo in it. This is not journalism. They simply reprinted some quotes. Zero research, zero value added to the conversation. Zero editing. The topic is interesting, but I wish a more legitimate source was linked. Why are we rewarding shoddy work with ad exposures?
darepublic 8y ago
Open source image recognition has a ton of ethical problems. Now for a low cost people can set up very sophisticated spying apparatus. I can't wait until neural nets can decipher people moving their lips. You could read people's conversations from a distance, automatically. Get ready to censor yourself all the time
debt 8y ago
AI is a threat? Seems more like tech companies leaking or selling personal information is the real threat. AI looks to be more of a distraction.
xtiansimon 8y ago
Human immiseration mitigated by AI—it’s the algorithm’s digital design?
xtiansimon 8y ago
Human immiseration mitigated by AI—algorithmic design decisions?

85 points by jonballant 8y ago

So a sort-of-on-topic question: for all the people who are warning of the coming AI apocalypse and warning us to be careful with AI... how do you enforce that? What’s the enforcement mechanism to ensure that the bad people don’t get AI and that people don’t create bad AI? All these warnings, but what can we do about it? If strong AI is invented, especially if it’s open-sourced, the cat is out of the bag and it’s game over, right? We’ve seen how good we are at preventing rogue states from getting nukes. How can we keep them from getting life-ending AI?

emerged 8y ago
I think it's going to parallel the virus/anti-virus eternal struggle. The bad AI will need to be targeted by the good. It'll be a mess, of course.
- ericb 8y ago
  I think any breakaway AI would be a highlander situation in that it would ensure there can be only one.
  - sharemywin 8y ago
    We already created super AI. It's called the stock market. Look at how it's tricked the richest(capitalist) and smartest via engineering jobs into toiling away at getting a number to go up.
  - freehunter 8y ago
    Yeah, that's more of my point, you're right. If we're considering the endgame of the AI singularity, only one AI can win. If there are multiple, they'll each keep getting better, and they'll each keep warring against the other one until only one is left (or none are left). That's the doomsday scenario for AI when people warn that this is coming. But out of all the people warning about it, I haven't yet seen anyone say "this is how we prevent it".
    - optimuspaul 8y ago
      Seems like the only prevention proposed is abstinence and research shows that abstinence doesn't work. In fact telling most people not to do something makes them want to do it more. In fact I'm struggling right now to make my own attempts.
    - ericb 8y ago
      I think the only way to win is to make sure the first one is perfectly friendly, or to make sure we are integrated with the first one. I don't give us great odds on either front.
      - freehunter 8y ago
        I'm trying to remember a book I read a while back, it was a sci-fi book where in the beginning chapters a war was being fought between the US and China to prevent China from developing a strong AI. The main character is killed but the preserved his body and brought him back to life some years later in a cyborg body, where he learns that the world is entirely controlled by a friendly benevolent AI and everyone has it embedded in their skin. But the AI goes rogue suddenly and the only people who survive are the luddites who refused to join the AI and the people who were off-world at the time the AI went rogue. For the life of me I can't find the book even through months of Google searching, but anyway my point is... a "friendly" AI can be hijacked. Or decide to go rogue, since we can't begin to comprehend its thought processes. --edit: sorry I went off topic a bit... I don't want to be just another one of those "AI will kill us all" kinds of people because, as my first comment suggested, that's completely useless fearmongering unless someone has a way to stop it. Kind of like saying "the supervolcano" or "solar flares" or something else completely unpreventable will kill us all... unless there's something you can do to stop it, life goes on until it doesn't. I'd be interested in hearing how to stop it, otherwise I wish people would stop printing these articles.
        ericb 8y ago
        I follow the point you're making. We do have options and perhaps if we were worried enough, they'd be put into effect. You could make AI research illegal. You could place massive R&D to human/brain interfaces. You could remove or reduce the medical device testing restrictions on the basis that this is an all-or-nothing bet for humanity.
akvadrako 8y ago
It's clear to me that if AI exists it will be used irresponsibly and by bad actors. So the only way to be safe is prevent all research along those lines for as long as possible†. The focus for now should be on getting humanity to work together and getting a firm grasp on ethics/morality to see how AI could be convinced to be good, instead of enforced. † As in the background story of Dune.
anvandare 8y ago
There is none. Science is discovering what is possible. Technology is changing something from possible to doable. Once the possibility of something is made clear (if not the exact path toward it - the do-ability), people will start rushing for it - if only out of fear that someone else might have it while they themselves do not. At least nuclear technology has the downside of being very expensive and large-scale (so few players) to produce, and being pretty obvious when it's actually used. Other things that are becoming increasingly possible (but still not doable) - like modified viruses that only target people with a specific DNA profile - will be a lot easier to hide, both their production and their usage. Same thing with AI.
Symmetry 8y ago
Well, here's one approach: The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is a research nonprofit studying the mathematical underpinnings of intelligent behavior. Our mission is to develop formal tools for the clean design and analysis of general-purpose AI systems, with the intent of making such systems safer and more reliable when they are developed. https://intelligence.org/about/ https://intelligence.org/about/ That doesn't help with people developing AI with bad intentions but the Sorcerer's Apprentice problem is important too.

makach 8y ago

this is all fine, first generation of 'true' ai will probably be extremely biased and too simple for practical use. even though we are automating and digitizing more and more and making everything more streamlined the rules will be as rigid as they have ever been. the human factor will come from generations of ai iterations -- if we are lucky. to be rejected by a machine will be brutal experiences when we all get this pushed in our faces. rich will grow richer and middle class will disappear in favor of poverty across the board.

tim333 8y ago
>first generation of 'true' ai will probably be ... too simple for practical use AI tends to either not really work or go way beyond humans - look at the Go programs that didn't work very well and then in a short period we have things like alphazero that given the rules of Go or Chess surpasses all humans in a few hours of playing itself. By the time they are passing Turing tests and thinking in a human manner they are going to be scary smart in many ways.

jonballant 8y ago

While its easy to dismiss the Sci-fi fantastical end of the world claims on the dangers of AI, its important to at least address some of the realistic externalities of this technology. "Brin is showing more real-world concerns of AI-powered systems replacing human jobs or being used to spread propaganda and fake news rather than rise up and enslave humanity"

boomskats 8y ago

At least there isn't anyone out there designing and manufacturing military grade weaponised drones and letting them autonomously decide whether to pull the trigger. Right?

kuschku 8y ago
No, of course not! The AI only has an "advisory" role: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-helping-the-pentagon-sift-through-millions-of-hours-of-drone-footage/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/03/google-helping-the-p...
- mtgx 8y ago
  Oh, I get it. So Google's AI only "advises" the Pentagon who its targets should be, and then the Pentagon takes the huge engineering role of implementing "if Google advice = true, then launch missiles." This way Google is completely "guilt-free" and can still pretend it's "making the world a better place" wink wink nudge nudge.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Let's hope that this is not C or C++, where "(foo = true)" always evaluates to true.
    - kirubakaran 8y ago
      I get your joke, but the parent comment means "if the advice is from Google, then launch missiles", not "if it is a correct advice from Google, then launch missiles", so the assignment vs comparison question doesn't apply.
ccccccccccccc 8y ago
I really wish we could know what is going through CEOs heads when they make statements like this while simultaneously contradicting themselves.

denzil_correa 8y ago

Link to the Alphabet 2017 Founder's Letter : https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2017/index.html https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/2017/index.html

xefer 8y ago

There needs to be term to describe these rail thin articles whose only real affect is to provide an HN conversation-inspiring headline.

blauditore 8y ago
Well, I'd say it's pretty close to clickbait. Also, it reminds a bit of "dog whistling": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog-whistle_politics
- Robotbeat 8y ago
  Not very good click bait as it’s clear from the headline the HN comments will be better than the article, so I usually skip the article and read the comments. :)
omeid2 8y ago
Hackerbait.
elcapitan 8y ago
Chatbait.
nmeofthestate 8y ago
I'd be interested in reading coverage of Brin's comments without having to wade through the smart alec dickhead style of The Inquirer (is it a sister publication to TheRegister?) Edit: direct link to the letter posted elsewhere on this page.

austincheney 8y ago

Not to worry just yet as AI still hasn't been realized. What many developers call AI, or more precisely machine learning (ML), are a collection of algorithms for making more intelligent decisions in context to the data at hand. That is simply smarter programming, but it isn't intelligence. The machine is still limited to the static instructions available. Real AI will allow machines to spawn original decisions to solve new problems spontaneously. We aren't there yet. The ethical implications will likely not be any different than those confronted by people. It generally boils down to just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.

talltimtom 8y ago
Real AI will never exist. No matter what definition we have ever set up as being “real AI” we have excused it and changed it once computers actually solved it. Current AI is capable of creating “original” decision as is it capable of solving new problems “spontaneously”, yet you still will not call it AI. Not because it doesn’t live up to your defined standards, but because you want to define a set of standards that it doesn’t live up to. People get protective of the concept of intelligence and almost axiomatically define that anything a computer can do is not truely intelligent and therefore not “really” AI.
- beojan 8y ago
  Current AI can do (very, very, very advanced) pattern recognition and mimicry. Turns out this is enough for a surprisingly large set of problems, but it isn't making "original" decisions or spontaneously solving new problems.
- ataturk 8y ago
  I'm less certain about your claim. How did human consciousness and self-awareness come about? I can easily imagine some hardware that creates a self-aware entity and then that creation begins self-improving at a geometric rate. It would be an extremely sudden stop for all life on earth.
blauditore 8y ago
What you describe is a general aritificial intelligence[0]. From what I can tell, the industry is ridiculously far away from that - it's not even certain whether general intellgence "smarter" than humans can be achieved with computers at all. Nonetheless, the media likes to generate some hype and fear every now and then, and has done so for decades, usually without even a basic understanding of underlying technology. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

aurelien 8y ago

That is just wrong, and here is why. We, the People are under the money pressure from that last 7000 years, this slavery mode of Society was a type of model that bring us, after many trouble to this point of our evolution. Now that the robotics/cobotics/mechatronics sciences are on the point to reach and join with Artificial Intelligence we, the People are close to be free from the money Society model. And that will be great, when 100% of goods and services will be product by the machine, that will be good and great enough to offer us the way to type 1 in the Kardashev Scale, we are at the time we will know an evolution type in our civilization.

mmirate 8y ago
Even assuming that labor becomes a post-scarce resource, what about capital resources? How would metals be allocated between current usage and robot-building? Energy, between current usage and powering these robots?

jacksmith21006 8y ago

I have heard the narrative that 90% of people farmed 120 years ago and now look at things. I just do not buy this is going to work this time. I live in the US and at some point we will have to talk about UBI. But right now we can not even have constructive conversations about simple things.

Robotbeat 8y ago
UBI is not too different from a lot of the social programs (Social security, Medicare, etc) that grew out of the turmoil of that transition, though. Just a difference of degree, IMO. Also, a jobs guarantee could do many of the same things (and similar to some of FDR’s programs). We might do both.
- jacksmith21006 8y ago
  Look at the massive fight about Obama care and that is really nothing compared to UBI.

z3t4 8y ago

Maybe we should start with solving OCR, before taking on artificial intelligence. OK, we have self driving cars, but they can't actually read road signs.

legitster 8y ago

The idea that AI will affect employment is very dubious to me: - This stuff was talked about all the time during the industrial revolution. But it turns out that automation just increased worked productivity and made people more valuable. - Since ATMs were introduced, the number of bank tellers in the US actually went up. - Certain industries have actually become deautomated over time. As an example: coffee. It used to be exclusively made by automated machines. Now hand-making coffees is one of the largest businesses in America. - AI is only as smart as the data you feed it. Even Google's own search rankings have to have human minders because people are too good at gaming their algorithms. - AI is only good at the thing that human beings are very bad at - making quick, analytics based decisions. Of course this is a threat to middle management and executive functions. But for people who actually make things or solve problems, there's just one more thing to make and solve problems about. There are some very real concerns about organizations using AI to make decisions about people without human oversight. Imagine an AI tasked with college admissions, bad decisions without possibility of human intervention could hurt people - are we sure it would be that much worse than our current system, often tainted by bias, money, and racism? My concern is that the leaders in the corporate tech world created huge organizations by automating our lives, and now they want to act as gatekeepers on the kinds of automation that is acceptable. Edit: To add to this - a companies stance on AI will probably follow their belief in whether humans are underrated or overrated. Google designs products believing humans are overrated - they think people will be victims of AI. Amazon thinks people are underrated (based on Amazon Turk, customer service, warehouse design) - ironically, they won't think humans will overall be harmed by AI.

Eeb7ohk0 8y ago
>- Since ATMs were introduced, the number of bank tellers in the US actually went up. Counterpoint[0]: > But US bank teller employment actually rose modestly from 500,000 to approximately 550,000 over the 30-year period from 1980 to 2010 (although given the growth in the labor force in this time interval, these numbers do imply that bank tellers declined as a share of overall US employment). [0] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemployment-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/02/19/technological-unemploym...

csomar 8y ago

After multiple months of research, FBI and cybercrime agents realized that the perpetrators and the hackers running the servers were not real humans. It was a decentralized consciousness running across multiple AWS instances. A presidential order was issued to shutdown all of AWS data centers. But it was too late. The decentralized super AI had already recruited and payed humans through cryptocurrencies to run servers at home in order to process the AI algorithms. It did even plan for a power outage scenario. Several people bought electricity generators financed by the AI crypto account. Decentralization is a big problem for the US and Europe. It is very hard to get the whole world onboard with fighting the super AI. By the time (couple days) the UN held most of the world leaders in Geneva, the super AI had already controlled a fund of over $500bn. It created a marketplace to recruit people, hackers, military persons and businesses. Chaos stormed big cities. Police officers were shot dead by professional snippers. Fake news were rampant and nobody could believe, trust or understand anyone else. Several infrastructure services were disturbed by massive DDOS attacks. In the mean time, the AI was able to recruit a couple countries and get them onboard for a huge attack on all other countries. There were no negotiations, the AI calculated the probability of success of its massive attack operation and went full retard.

ataturk 8y ago

Is this the same Sergey Brin who resigned from Google under unusual circumstances? The Sergey Brin who had something weird to do with North Korea?

titzer 8y ago

Until we invent (or accidentally stumble upon) an artificial mind with volition and a sense of self, AI will continue to be an increasingly powerful, increasingly self-directed set of optimizers. We'll continue to use AI in more and more for the ultimate goal of, well, optimizing. Optimizing what exactly? Energy efficiency. Check. Materials. Check. Drug discovery. Check. Financial transactions. Business rules. Capacity planning. Cryptocurrencies. Stock market. Ad placement and targeting. Predicting consumer behavior. Wait... You see, it will all end up in the same place. AI is a way to make money. AI is just optimizing economics, but optimizing economics on steroids. Eventually, the company with the best AI is going to have the best advantage in all business interactions and planning. The first to master-level AI is going to end up with essentially all the money in the end. Don't you think the big players know this? Of course. AI will be employed in exactly the same way as every other piece of tech in recent history: to make obscene amounts of money. Don't be surprised when making money screws consumers over. It's just business. No hard feelings, right? Thankfully, the AI is incapable of feeling. The ultimate AI is the one you can give one command to: MAKE MONEY!

40four 8y ago

Can we please not upvote articles from tabloid websites? The article is breif, shallow and has a glaring typo in it. This is not journalism. They simply reprinted some quotes. Zero research, zero value added to the conversation. Zero editing. The topic is interesting, but I wish a more legitimate source was linked. Why are we rewarding shoddy work with ad exposures?

darepublic 8y ago

Open source image recognition has a ton of ethical problems. Now for a low cost people can set up very sophisticated spying apparatus. I can't wait until neural nets can decipher people moving their lips. You could read people's conversations from a distance, automatically. Get ready to censor yourself all the time

debt 8y ago

AI is a threat? Seems more like tech companies leaking or selling personal information is the real threat. AI looks to be more of a distraction.

xtiansimon 8y ago

Human immiseration mitigated by AI—it’s the algorithm’s digital design?

xtiansimon 8y ago

Human immiseration mitigated by AI—algorithmic design decisions?