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I find it frustrating that the null hypothesis for the outcome of Artificial Intelligence is always The Coming Robot Rebellion. The historical roots of this go

by zeteo 15y ago

I find it frustrating that the null hypothesis for the outcome of Artificial Intelligence is always The Coming Robot Rebellion. The historical roots of this go back all the way to the play R.U.R., back in a time when Marxism was all the intellectual rage and all exploited workers were supposedly bound to unavoidably rise and overthrow the hated bourgeoisie. Now we know that was wrong with regards to labour relations; but we're still stuck with an all-pervasive, irrefutable prophecy that intelligent machines are bound to hate us and rebel against us.

liuliu 15y ago
No, it is not about rebellion, it is about resource competition. And no, it is not Marxism, it is Darwinism. If we could ever give birth to the machine intelligence, and if AI can reach the same level as human, the resource competition can be ruthless. It is exactly because we have so much in common and there is no reason for co-existence.
- zeteo 15y ago
  The fact that, ninety years later, (slightly) less outlandish scenarios can be imagined for the human species' Suicide By Robotics does not change the fact that the whole concept was originally a marginal offshoot of thinking about the proletarian revolution. Regarding the particular scenario you propose, natural selection is a much, much more complicated process than that. (Early 20th century racists would be right at home with this kind of simplistic argument, except they would substitute Aryans for AI and be happy about the forecast.) There is no a priori reason for intelligence, even if superior, to drive other forms of existence into extinction. After all, Nobel Prize winners are capable of peacefully co-existing with billions of people who can't understand a single equation from their work.
  - jhamburger 15y ago
    Do those nobel prize winners sometimes eat hamburgers for lunch? To me humans approach to animal life is a better metaphor for what human-robot relations could look like. They won't hate us, they won't want to exterminate us, but we will be so clearly inferior that our concerns just won't register very high.
    - zeteo 15y ago
      Yes, any intelligence can and will be selfish to some degree. But we can live with that. It might require some legal and cultural adjustment, but it's perfectly possible to have artificial intelligence in our midst without having it decide everything for everyone.
- weavejester 15y ago
  If that were true, wouldn't the same apply to resource competition between groups of humans?
  - TheEzEzz 15y ago
    Yes. And look what happens when a more powerful group of humans (Conquistadors) meets a slightly less powerful group of humans (Aztecs). Now imagine the more powerful group is made of steel, have brains that run at gigahertz frequencies, and can copy themselves into available hardware.
    - weavejester 15y ago
      Using force to seize resources from other cultures is certainly a common theme throughout history, but this is quickly becoming an anachronism. Raw resources are no longer the main basis for our economy, as they were in 16th century, and modern warfare tends to involve huge costs with relatively little economic advantage. Secondly, machines can reach resources that are difficult for us air-breathing fragile apes to get to. Why compete over resources on Earth when there are other places in the solar system (and in the galaxy) with more raw materials and more energy?
      - RainFlutter 15y ago
        "Raw resources are no longer the main basis for our economy" It's fashionable to talk about information- and service-based economies, but that's not evolving beyond raw resources; it's merely taking them for granted. We consume ridiculous amounts of raw resources. Just look at what happens every time the price of oil rises.
        weavejester 15y ago
        We still need raw materials, but the value of raw materials only makes up a small fraction of the total value of a modern economy. In the past, raw materials were the majority of the economy, and this meant they were worth fighting over. Nowadays raw materials worth very little compared to things like having good infrastructure, an educated workforce, etc.
orangecat 15y ago
"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf
- zeteo 15y ago
  And the AI also can use you for something else, or leave you alone altogether and follow other pursuits. It's also theoretically possible that some intelligent person you just met is actually dr. Hannibal Lecter and would like to use your constituent atoms for his culinary delight. But you don't worry much about that, do you?
  - jerf 15y ago
    The most common failure case in thinking about AI by far is insisting on putting them in a human context. Whatever else they may be, they will not be human. They will not come with the heritage billions of years of biological evolution, with many of the past several million being spent in increasingly cooperative scenarios which has endowed us with social behaviors so deeply ingrained in our very genes we can hardly conceive of a being not having them. Even our pathological humans like Lecter are still far, far more human than a random AI will be. Hopefully we'll give them something else that will put them on a similar moral footing, but it won't happen automatically, and they still won't be human after that.
    - zeteo 15y ago
      The evolutionary baggage is most definitely not one of cooperation, at least not beyond our immediate "monkeysphere"; millennia of wars and massacres bear witness to that. The primary reason we usually avoid violence is not that we find it irresistibly repugnant, but because we've become intelligent enough to realize it normally creates more problems than it solves. AI not being human (for some definition of human) also means it doesn't have to be jealous, hateful and short-sighted.
      - 15y ago

by zeteo 15y ago

liuliu 15y ago

No, it is not about rebellion, it is about resource competition. And no, it is not Marxism, it is Darwinism. If we could ever give birth to the machine intelligence, and if AI can reach the same level as human, the resource competition can be ruthless. It is exactly because we have so much in common and there is no reason for co-existence.

zeteo 15y ago
The fact that, ninety years later, (slightly) less outlandish scenarios can be imagined for the human species' Suicide By Robotics does not change the fact that the whole concept was originally a marginal offshoot of thinking about the proletarian revolution. Regarding the particular scenario you propose, natural selection is a much, much more complicated process than that. (Early 20th century racists would be right at home with this kind of simplistic argument, except they would substitute Aryans for AI and be happy about the forecast.) There is no a priori reason for intelligence, even if superior, to drive other forms of existence into extinction. After all, Nobel Prize winners are capable of peacefully co-existing with billions of people who can't understand a single equation from their work.
- jhamburger 15y ago
  Do those nobel prize winners sometimes eat hamburgers for lunch? To me humans approach to animal life is a better metaphor for what human-robot relations could look like. They won't hate us, they won't want to exterminate us, but we will be so clearly inferior that our concerns just won't register very high.
  - zeteo 15y ago
    Yes, any intelligence can and will be selfish to some degree. But we can live with that. It might require some legal and cultural adjustment, but it's perfectly possible to have artificial intelligence in our midst without having it decide everything for everyone.
weavejester 15y ago
If that were true, wouldn't the same apply to resource competition between groups of humans?
- TheEzEzz 15y ago
  Yes. And look what happens when a more powerful group of humans (Conquistadors) meets a slightly less powerful group of humans (Aztecs). Now imagine the more powerful group is made of steel, have brains that run at gigahertz frequencies, and can copy themselves into available hardware.
  - weavejester 15y ago
    Using force to seize resources from other cultures is certainly a common theme throughout history, but this is quickly becoming an anachronism. Raw resources are no longer the main basis for our economy, as they were in 16th century, and modern warfare tends to involve huge costs with relatively little economic advantage. Secondly, machines can reach resources that are difficult for us air-breathing fragile apes to get to. Why compete over resources on Earth when there are other places in the solar system (and in the galaxy) with more raw materials and more energy?
    - RainFlutter 15y ago
      "Raw resources are no longer the main basis for our economy" It's fashionable to talk about information- and service-based economies, but that's not evolving beyond raw resources; it's merely taking them for granted. We consume ridiculous amounts of raw resources. Just look at what happens every time the price of oil rises.
      - weavejester 15y ago
        We still need raw materials, but the value of raw materials only makes up a small fraction of the total value of a modern economy. In the past, raw materials were the majority of the economy, and this meant they were worth fighting over. Nowadays raw materials worth very little compared to things like having good infrastructure, an educated workforce, etc.

orangecat 15y ago

"The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else." http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf http://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf

zeteo 15y ago
And the AI also can use you for something else, or leave you alone altogether and follow other pursuits. It's also theoretically possible that some intelligent person you just met is actually dr. Hannibal Lecter and would like to use your constituent atoms for his culinary delight. But you don't worry much about that, do you?
- jerf 15y ago
  The most common failure case in thinking about AI by far is insisting on putting them in a human context. Whatever else they may be, they will not be human. They will not come with the heritage billions of years of biological evolution, with many of the past several million being spent in increasingly cooperative scenarios which has endowed us with social behaviors so deeply ingrained in our very genes we can hardly conceive of a being not having them. Even our pathological humans like Lecter are still far, far more human than a random AI will be. Hopefully we'll give them something else that will put them on a similar moral footing, but it won't happen automatically, and they still won't be human after that.
  - zeteo 15y ago
    The evolutionary baggage is most definitely not one of cooperation, at least not beyond our immediate "monkeysphere"; millennia of wars and massacres bear witness to that. The primary reason we usually avoid violence is not that we find it irresistibly repugnant, but because we've become intelligent enough to realize it normally creates more problems than it solves. AI not being human (for some definition of human) also means it doesn't have to be jealous, hateful and short-sighted.
    - 15y ago