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If the Morris Worm of '88 is anything to go by, shell scripts cannot be contained either, let alone a superintelligence. We won't need anything approaching gene
by motohagiography 5y ago
If the Morris Worm of '88 is anything to go by, shell scripts cannot be contained either, let alone a superintelligence. We won't need anything approaching general AI to have to deal with electronic parasites, which may ironically "die" or leave bits of code around that another virus could discover and adapt to propagating.
I'd bet we see the first autonomously-evolving botnet in less than 5 years, one or two now that I've mentioned it. As soon as we write something that can reason about the features of a program by scanning a binary without running it, and then adapt components like it's using tools, it will have everything it needs to persist and spread itself.
- pron 5y agoBut that's not intelligence. Viruses autonomously evolve and adapt more successfully than humans. "Reasoning about [some] features of a program" is also long done much better by machines than by humans.
- motohagiography 5y agoA better version of my point is it doesn't need to meet the bar of intelligence to cause almost all the same problems that an intelligence could. Viruses indeed evolve and adapt more flexibly than humans, to where arguably today, the only existential threat humans face comes from biological viruses, which are also not intelligent. We don't need to come up with fun thought experiments to describe what intelligence is when we have enough trouble with the question of, for what is intelligence either sufficient or necessary? Diminishingly little, I'd say. Hence I'd be more concerned about virulent scripts than waiting for general AI.