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Arguably this is already happening. Governments and transnational corporations are "AIs" in the sense that their macro-level behavior is largely determined by s
by lukev 8y ago
Arguably this is already happening. Governments and transnational corporations are "AIs" in the sense that their macro-level behavior is largely determined by systematic structure and incentives, not individual decision-making. No individual human has influence over the whole, and those at individual points in the system are incentivized only to fulfill their particular role instead of look out for the system in general.
Capitalism itself, can be viewed as just a giant paperclip maximizer.
- andrepd 8y agoAbsolutely. We're stripping the earth bare of resources, poisoning the air (killing thousands in the process), possibly dooming us to catastrophic environmental failure, and we are doing it to produce ever growing mountains of plastic crap. And we will laugh, and make bank, and rejoice in the great economic growth indicators, all the way to the abyss. There's a comic strip I saw once: looking at a post-apocaliptic scenario from skyscraper window, one executive turns to the other: "My god! We've brought about the apocalypse!", he replies: "Yes, but for one beautiful moment we created a lot of value for our shareholders.".
- AgentME 8y agoThis is part of why I always find it especially mind-bogglingly ridiculous when people say "What's the possible danger of AI? Just don't give it a robot body to control and it can't hurt us". All an AI has to do is find a way to keep people fed, and groups of people will blindly do anything it wants.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y agoIn this way, what the hell is the difference between an AI and any other system, like a government or corporation?
- AgentME 8y agoI'm hopeful that people can occasionally evolve and progress social systems for things that humans value. An AI is likely to have more intelligent defenses against people trying to change it. Also, nearly all human social systems have some kind of human values as the goal. Even the worst social systems, such as a dictatorship that tries to make a society that never contradicts the dictator, if it achieved its goals, would result in a world where humanity survived, friends met, lovers loved, and people continued to have interesting (though suboptimal) lives. In a world where an AI uses humanity to bootstrap itself into a universal paperclip replicator, then the AI achieving its goals would probably result in the destruction of the biosphere of possibly the only planet with life (or maybe the destruction of many planets' biospheres), and the total eradication of anything we would attach moral weight or value to.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago> An AI is likely to have more intelligent defenses against people trying to change it. I'm skeptical of that. The best example we have of intelligence is the human mind, and that has consistently proven to be very malleable.
- mormegil 8y agoMeditations on Moloch is one of the best texts I have ever read, bordering on a spiritual experience. And it left me with an even more pessimistic view of the universe... http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
- ameliaquining 8y agoThere's a weak sense in which this is true, but I want to push back against the notion that it's not really different from an actual general-purpose AI. Here's the argument: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/27/things-that-are-not-superintelligences/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/27/things-that-are-not-su...