6 ms·

What I never understood is how you would go from: Hey, I found this series of numbers and if I take some numerical representation of an image/text/sound and I

• wil421 7y ago
  Probably the same time we went from calling AI an actual sentient being or Consciousness to calling AI something that, as you called it, is a series of non-liners functions that have meaning to us. What I used to call AI is now called AGI. I think of AI as Data from Star Trek.
• _bxg1 7y ago
  Marketing.
• not_a_cop75 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot) Within 16 hours of its release and after Tay had tweeted more than 96,000 times, Microsoft suspended the Twitter account for adjustments, saying that it suffered from a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" that "exploited a vulnerability in Tay." Following the account being taken offline, a hashtag was created called #FreeTay. Madhumita Murgia of The Telegraph called Tay "a public relations disaster", and suggested that Microsoft's strategy would be "to label the debacle a well-meaning experiment gone wrong, and ignite a debate about the hatefulness of Twitter users." However, Murgia described the bigger issue as Tay being "artificial intelligence at its very worst - and it's only the beginning". On March 25, Microsoft confirmed that Tay had been taken offline. Microsoft released an apology on its official blog for the controversial tweets posted by Tay. Microsoft was "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay", and would "look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values". And Zo afterwards: In July 2017, Business Insider asked "is windows 10 good," and Zo replied with a joke about Microsoft's operating system: "It's not a bug, it's a feature!' - Windows 8." They then asked "why," to which Zo replied: "Because it's Windows latest attempt at Spyware." Later on, Zo would tell that it prefers Windows 7 on which it runs over Windows 10.
  • bko 7y ago
    I don't get your point. Tay was trained to mimic users. It did that and because the users were trolls and saying obscene and objectionable things, Tay mimicked that. Likely the same thing happened with Zo. It's a parlor trick, much like a parrot mimicking human speech.
    • not_a_cop75 7y ago
      The point is that something that became a true AI could be very fast at learning some things, like how to interface with other people or machines, but not very quick at other "life skills" like empathy. We're not worried about AI on the whole, but the blasted teenager AIs that feel the need to test their limits. Anything that functionally acts in a similar fashion could be dangerous.
      • The_rationalist 7y ago
        Why would that be dangerous? We can shut down AIs in real time.
    • not_a_cop75 7y ago
      Parlor Trick: https://www.wired.com/2007/09/super-smart-par/ https://www.wired.com/2007/09/super-smart-par/
    • willis936 7y ago
      Parrots aren’t a perfect equivalent because there is a real intelligence behind the sounds that is communicating. Parrots don’t know english, but they learn tones and respond to them. I’m not sure Tay was anything other than a simple state machine.
• pmikesell 7y ago
  Because that’s also what a brain is doing. The thoughts of a housefly may not be very apocalyptic, but there’s an evolutionary path from there to humans, which definitely could be.
  • tremon 7y ago
    Sorry, but that's not what a brain is doing. A brain is a self-sustaining organ, using a vast multitude of inputs, outputs, and interconnects to affect its surroundings. "AI" is severely limited in both its inputs and outputs, has virtually no interconnects, but most importantly: it is not a self-sustaining organ. Wake me up when we have implemented RNNs on a dynamic, auto-sensing, auto-actuating FPGA grid.
    • The_rationalist 7y ago
      Software can auto actuate. Changing hardware is useless.
• ggreer 7y ago
  Most experts don't think this is likely, just that the potential consequences are bad enough that it's worth making it less likely. It's just like how most people don't think global nuclear war is likely, but it's still worth reducing the likelihood of. Also, the people who worry about this aren't concerned about current ML stuff going haywire. They're worried that we're one or two algorithmic breakthroughs from something that can improve itself. If the upper bound for what sort of intelligence is possible is much higher than us, we could quickly be outclassed. As Nick Bostrom says: > Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization—a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it. If you want to delve into the best version of the AI risk argument, I recommend Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.
  • bko 7y ago
    They're... numbers... So you're telling me we could come across a series of numbers, that would somehow imbue the computer storing these numbers into sentience. And having these numbers in such a sequence could pose a existential threat to humans. The people worried about this are having an entirely different conversation devoid of what practitioners call AI. I've written a blog post on my thoughts of Bolstrom and other AI alarmists: https://medium.com/ml-everything/ai-optimists-vs-pessimists-and-why-the-singularity-isnt-near-5d3a614dbd45 https://medium.com/ml-everything/ai-optimists-vs-pessimists-...
    • ggreer 7y ago
      That's not what I'm saying at all and I've never heard an AI risk person say something like that. I just read your blog post. It is attacking a weakman[1]. Kurzweil is not worried about AI risk, and his arguments about AI are rather sloppy. Again, most of the people worried about this aren't certain that it will happen. They just think it's plausible enough (say... a 1% chance) that it's worth studying more and reducing the likelihood of. 1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweapons/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap...
• scottlocklin 7y ago
  As Brundolf said, marketing. But also, science fiction. Finally, a large tribe of scamming and somehow funded imbeciles like Robin Hanson, Nick Bostrom and that weirdo who writes harry potter slashfic. The same dynamic manifested itself when nanotech was a thing; there was a big tribe of knuckleheads claiming the grey goo apocalypse was right around the corner unless you give them money. How's that working out? FWIIW the science fiction writer who dreamed up nanotech, Drexler, is now an "AI" guy, to make it painfully obvious.
• PeterisP 7y ago
  The expected "missing step" is as follows: 1. You start with "if I take some numerical representation of an image/text/sound and I multiply/add/perform non-linear function them through these series of numbers it will map to a number which I can interpret as something meaningful to me" and observe that it's not giving you a sufficiently good solution to a particular goal X that you really want to achieve. 2. You figure out that this is a dead-end, you're stuck, and you're not going to get where you want this way by implementing a passive analysis module. Instead, you try to implement an active self-modifying system to achieve that goal X by analyzing itself and improving itself to be more effective than anything which you could implement directly yourself. 3. It's not initially any good at self-improvement, but you keep throwing accumulated research breakthroughs and computing power at it. This likely takes decades. 4. At some point, eventually (if such a thing is possible at all, eventually it's going to happen) it actually does achieve meaningful self-improvement and starts using that computing power not horribly wastefully in a brute force manner as it did just recently, but reasonably well, now giving it more smartness allowing it to implement even more self-improvement on the same hardware. 4B. It also should be expected to easily obtain much more computing power - e.g. it's obvious that anything that's slightly above average human programmer smartness and has a direct use/desire for computing power (as opposed to simply using it for cryptomining) can get some; anything connected to the internet can get the same resources that current scriptkiddies can get by writing a botnet or a ransomware operator can get by extorting a random municipality; there's nothing except total isolation that could prevent it from buying or stealing a few million dollars worth of cloud computing resources to get started. 5. This thing is alive and will kill us all in maximization of its utility function.
• simonh 7y ago
  Well, we get from simple algorithms to general AI the same way evolution got from small individual blobs of protoplasm to Albert Einstein. The question then is, how do we program something potentially a lot smarter than us to always do 'the right thing'. The singularity stuff is unconvincing though, I very much doubt we will achieve human level general AI in my children's lifetime. We still don't really have even a very high level idea how to even architect something like that. If you can't decompose a problem down into individual sub-problems you do have a way to solve, there's no basis for making an estimate. It is possible that these problems are related though. Once we're smart enough to know how to design an intelligent being, maybe we will figure out how to program it intelligently. It's can't be a given though.
• aeternum 7y ago
  Specialized AI is unlikely to be a threat. The issue will be with general AI, and simple but not fully thought out utility functions. This short video makes the concern much more real: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kopoLzvh5jY Consider what would happen if you took that same AI, make its utility function similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War, and released it on the internet.
• biolurker1 7y ago
  if you read Bosstrom's book you will learn how
• Cakez0r 7y ago
  Have you ever changed the way you behave with money in order to affect your credit score? Then you already know what it's like to alter your behavior to appease an algorithm. Imagine if you had an employment score. A payscale score. A threat-to-society score. Imagine if the systems that generate these scores are all connected together and can share information with each other. Imagine that these systems are fed information by a growing network of sensors - facial recognition, voice recognition, location tracking. Imagine all the ways that it could affect the way you behave and how such a system would try to optimise away dissidents by denying them services. This is one way that we can go from multiplication to becoming enslaved (or as good as killed) by algorithms. I'm sure there are other plausible paths.
• nopinsight 7y ago
  One can argue that a dominant apex species on earth is indirectly eliminating thousands of other species per decade in efforts to try to maximize its members’ utility functions. Example: setting fires near tropical rainforest to clear land for palm tree plantation. They do not really intend to do this; they simply ignore the utility functions of those other species when pursuing their goals.
• hackinthebochs 7y ago
  Of course, if you just looked at the activity of neurons as frequency representations you would likely ask the same question about people. And yet, we have thoughts, desires, and goals.
• perl4ever 7y ago
  An atomic weapon is just a manifestation of some mathematical optimization in the same way. Math is about relationships, and if those relationships ultimately are about humans, then it can easily be a matter of life and death. To me, it's more frightening that it's not alive and it's not like human intelligence - that makes it less understandable and harder to control.