8 ms·

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

• bradleybuda 9y ago
  Even in retirement, I’d wager Henry Kissinger is far more likely to mean the end of human history than AI is.
  • wmil 9y ago
    Hey, he's committed himself to improving the world by sitting on the boards of innovative companies like Theranos.
  • thankthunk 9y ago
    Retirement? The guy visited china and met with the leader of china to calm relations after trump got elected. http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/2051284/china-watching-us-leadership-transition-closely-xi http://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy-defence/article/205... A german born professor with a thick accent to National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State overnight ( the third most powerful position in government )? How does that happen? The guy is a war criminal but the media is in love with him.
• clarkmoody 9y ago
  Henry Kissinger: concerned humanist I love dark irony first thing in the morning...
  • thankthunk 9y ago
    It's funny how any comment critical of kissinger is downvoted immediately. Could it be the pesky russian bots? /s > Henry Kissinger: concerned humanist Well The Atlantic was fawning over the saudi prince just a few weeks ago. If kissinger is a concerned humanist, then the saudi prince must have been a concerned feminist. > I love dark irony first thing in the morning... It isn't irony. It's propaganda. I too love the smell propaganda in the morning...
• samirillian 9y ago
  > immobilizes his or her opponent by more effectively controlling territory I like how he even talks about go like an imperialist.
• bpizzi 9y ago
  At the article's end: '[...] AI developers, as inexperienced in politics and philosophy as I am in technology [...]'. What a nice piece of flawed logic: 'I am not educated in technology but I'm educated in politics and philosophy, therefore anyone educated in technology is not educated in politics nor philosophy'.
  • bobthechef 9y ago
    I don't see how you could read that from the sentence. There's no logical inference in that fragment, just a claim that people in technology are as inexperienced in politics and philosophy as he is in technology. On the whole, that is an accurate observation.
    • theoh 9y ago
      From the Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures "In his opening address at the Munich Security Conference in January 2014, the Estonian president Toomas Hendrik Ilves said that the current problems related to security and freedom in cyberspace are the culmination of absence of dialogue between "the two cultures": "Today, bereft of understanding of fundamental issues and writings in the development of liberal democracy, computer geeks devise ever better ways to track people... simply because they can and it's cool. Humanists on the other hand do not understand the underlying technology and are convinced, for example, that tracking meta-data means the government reads their emails."[12]"
      • AstralStorm 9y ago
        They're perfectly fine with the last point. While the govt ous not reading emails they can infer enough just given the metadata that reading the actual contents is irrelevant. (A detective can do so as well. But that is much more expensive and doesn't scale.)
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• AndyMcConachie 9y ago
  Can't Henry Kissinger just die already? He won the Nobel Peace Prize for ending the Vietnam War. Only in the 90's we learned that he and Nixon torpedoed the '68 Vietnam peace talks under Johnson to make Johnson look bad before the election. <https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/notes-indicate-nixon-interfered-1968-peace-talks-180961627/> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/notes-indicate-nix... This is public information. We know that part of what Nixon was looking for during the Watergate break ins was evidence that Johnson kept about this. Yet publications like The Atlantic still allow this criminal Kissinger to publish. From: <https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-confirms-nixons-vietnam-treason> https://www.commondreams.org/views/2014/08/12/george-will-co... In the Price of Power (1983), Seymour Hersh revealed Henry Kissinger—then Johnson’s adviser on Vietnam peace talks secretly alerted Nixon’s staff that a truce was imminent. According to Hersh, Nixon “was able to get a series of messages to the Thieu government [of South Vietnam] making it clear that a Nixon presidency would have different views on peace negotiations.” Johnson was livid. He even called the Republican Senate Minority Leader, Everett Dirksen, to complain that “they oughtn’t be doing this. This is treason.” “I know,” was Dirksen’s feeble reply. Johnson blasted Nixon about this on November 3rd, just prior to the election. As Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com has written: “when Johnson confronted Nixon with evidence of the peace-talk sabotage, Nixon insisted on his innocence but acknowledged that he knew what was at stake.” Said Nixon: “My, I would never do anything to encourage….Saigon not to come to the table….Good God, we’ve got to get them to Paris or you can’t have peace.” But South Vietnamese President General Theiu—a notorious drug and gun runner—did boycott Johnson’s Paris peace talks. With the war still raging, Nixon claimed a narrow victory over Humphrey. He then made Kissinger his own national security adviser. In the four years between the sabotage and what Kissinger termed “peace at hand” just prior to the 1972 election, more than 20,000 US troops died in Vietnam. More than 100,000 were wounded. More than a million Vietnamese were killed.
  • AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    This entire post is ad-hominem and does not make an argument against the content of the linked article.
    • 9y ago
• JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  The idea about 'untethered AIs' is a good one - what will ground an AI in human ethics? Currently they are designed to win. Will it be even possible to create an AI that 'cares' about the outcomes its calculating? Even if it is possible to 'tether' AIs, won't we just remove those limits? Look what we do to fake persons today - corporations. They are like AIs in that small calculations made throughout the entity guide the decisions as a whole. We cyclicly add boundaries to what they're allowed, then the next administration removes those boundaries in the interest of unbridled growth. We'll do the same with AIs. They'll calculate a 'best outcome' of letting millions die in Indonesian drought, because average standard of living will increase for everyone else. In one administration we'll want to temper such decisions with humanity; in the next we'll just want more beer.
  • AndrewKemendo 9y ago
    what will ground an AI in human ethics? What grounds humans in "human ethics?" Is it thoughtful rational decision making or whims of the powerful at the time? And which human ethics are you grounding in? Aristotelian, Cynic, Stoic, Theological? There seems to be a common idea that humans all share some ethical framework or thread that is similar. I don't think that holds. In fact I don't know if there is any single ethic that you could argue every single human holds similarly. Maybe you could argue, will to survive and reproduce, but even that is highly variable. The idea that we should or could build some kind of ethical homogeneity into our engineered intelligent systems is absolutely silly.
    • RobertoG 9y ago
      There are some characteristics, shaped by evolution, that are typically human. For instance, humans are social. That doesn't mean that you can derive a formal system of ethics that is "true", but there are clearly some trends. Trends that an AI, that have not evolved as us, don't need to share. I don't think is a sterile debate.
      • AndrewKemendo 9y ago
        For instance, humans are social As are honeybees. I fail to see how this (or any) feature is distinguishing when describing how one should build an ethical framework into an engineered system. If however there was a more nuanced pro-social univerally attributable aspect that could be described and modeled, then I think that would be a helpful addition. I don't think is a sterile debate. It's anything but sterile. However what is sterile is the idea that there exists a desirable ethical system for AGI that is based on human ethics.
• coldtea 9y ago
  Well, Kissinger's interventions have meant the end of many humans in history as well...
• gumby 9y ago
  Ironically this reads like a very well written student essay despite being written by a statesman at the dusk of his life. Why? Well, as he says at the front of his essay, he'd never considered AI (a field funded by ARPA (later DARPA) through the height of his power) and so his musings (whoah, a car driver needs to consider novel situations! People ask the Internet for stuff immediately relevant to their needs and interests!) are, frankly, the first thoughts anyone will have when they first think of machines that think. The thoughts I had as a teenager in the 1970s and I don't claim to have had any special talent. I always believed that Kissinger is very smart, and this essay doesn't change that. But I always believed he was intellectually extremely lazy (rather than being the steely-eyed Vulkan of Realpolitik who could see through the bullshit) and this essay also doesn't change that.
• hprotagonist 9y ago
  History ended in 1989. Surely Kissinger was listening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_of_history
• 3pt14159 9y ago
  Kissinger is right. The number of strategic threats due to AI are exploding. Social media manipulation online, voice to text from tiny microphones, hacked autonomous devices, hyper targeted predictions of unstable systems, autonomous devices smuggling dangerous material (arms, fentanyl, fissile material), or even hard AI in the far future. It's even decaying democracy itself. I know plenty of good people that would make great politicians but absolutely refuse to run because they understand how much dirt OSINT would pull up on them and AI only makes this worse because of advanced stylometry. The problems with cyber are real. AI and cyber security in an increasingly cyber physical world are something we aren't prepared for. We can't even get non-trivial amounts of humans to believe that global warming is happening let alone anthropogenic. Since at least 2016 the CIA has listed cyber as the number one threat to global security each year, despite the DPRK getting access to usable nuclear weapons and ICBMs. That's the scale of the risk / hazard we face with AI and cyber security over the next decade. It's worse than North Korea getting nuclear weapons.
• joe_the_user 9y ago
  This is a good article. Kissinger begins not at the purely hypothetical "singularity" of Ray Kurweil or superintelligence of Nick Bostrom but at the present where the unbridled flow of data on the Internet already threatens human society's ability to coherently consider it's future. Nearly every AI scare story (Musk, Bostrom, etc) talks about the threat of thinking-AI while ignoring the increasing and immediate impact of "dumb-AI" as an extension of the blind data driven logic of today.
• tgb29 9y ago
  I still haven't found a good talk or essay about how exactly 'AI' will change anything. The only obvious difference is shifts in wealth. The Google Duplex appears to be a great breakthrough. But what happens if it's sold and deployed? More wealth to an already wealthy Google. Low income earners who can barely make it as a receptionist will be out of work. In the restaurant example, owners cut costs and possibly earn more -- which is great for these types of operators. But as someone who wants to schedule an appointment, my life doesn't change. Google also just released auto complete and response emails. How does something like this change my life? Any drastic change in AI is abstract and hypothetical, based more in science fiction than reality. In the 1940s, with advances in Nuclear research, it was thought that nuclear power for energy would change the world. 70 years later, we're still using over 80% fossil fuels. Not a great example, but I'll hold this line about 'AI' until I'm convinced otherwise.
  • WorldMaker 9y ago
    I'm in a similar skepticism camp. I studied a lot of AI and Big Data in Graduate school, but haven't done much with it after graduation. My impression from my studies and what I read of things today is that the tools haven't really changed since the last big AI boom in the '60s. There have been incremental enhancements to many of the algorithms, but the algorithms themselves haven't had major breakthroughs. What has changed is we've accelerated GIGO to an extraordinary level that the '60s could have only imagined/dreamed of. With a firehose of inputs on one side and a firehose of outputs on the other side, it's easy for the man-behind-the-curtain/model-in-the-machine to seem quite capable/intelligent, but how are we QA/QCing that that is actually the case? Take everyone's growing frustrations with auto-correct systems using words they'd never themselves use, are those mistakes in the model that will get trained away eventually or representative of the firehose of garbage-in/garbage-out. Similarly, when was the last time that YouTube's "Auto-Play" feature was useful to you? I find I've turned it off on every device I own because it is nonsensical and useless and often full of literal garbage. Some of the early logic mathematicians such as Boole and Bayes, names that come up commonly in AI algorithms, thought they might find proof of God in probability theory, and I sometimes wonder if we may find that probability theory may not prove God, but could definitely prove that (soylent) Devils are real. What's going on with machine learning in YouTube and in the ad spaces frightens me in aggregate, and the problem is still people, but we've massively accelerated GIGO around people.
• NickLamp 9y ago
  Towards the end of the article Kissinger states "Other countries have made AI a major national project. The United States has not yet, as a nation, systematically explored its full scope, studied its implications, or begun the process of ultimate learning. This should be given a high national priority, above all, from the point of view of relating AI to humanistic traditions." Which seems to me a disappointing end to the article. An appeal for a national effort to manage AI. "Other countries have major AI projects" but what exactly should the US model itself after? "The United States has not yet systematically explored it's scope" but US publishes the second most research papers on AI (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/data-bites/which-countries-and-universities-are-leading-ai-research https://www.timeshighereducation.com/data-bites/which-countr...) which I think in general is a bad metric but if you're looking at the output that a system produces, it's the best metric you're going to get. Looking at the private sector, the AI makeup of the leading AI/Robotics ETF $BOTZ (https://www.globalxfunds.com/funds/botz/ https://www.globalxfunds.com/funds/botz/) is comprised of mostly American companies. Similarly, look at the sheer number of ML/AI startups in SV. So I fail to see where the crisis is. If American universities are among the leaders in AI research and American companies are among the leaders in the AI economy, why is there such a tone of urgency in this article? Kissinger's argument leads me to believe that he's advocating for a blanket "AI" initiative but he doesn't have a clear idea of what he wants this initiative to do. Without a clear direction for how he wants the US to be "relating AI to humanistic traditions", whatever he's proposing here is just the marriage of shallow musings about the consequences of AI and some kind of blind belief in federal government initiative.
• lostmsu 9y ago
  So, any new thought?
• starchild_3001 9y ago
  Rather: "Human society unprepared for the misuse of ML by other humans". Fear other humans, not machines (yet).