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Here's the thing that bugged me throughout the movie: once AI's progressed to the point where it can rival a human, all bets are off. Nobody needs to work again
by aegiso 13y ago
Here's the thing that bugged me throughout the movie: once AI's progressed to the point where it can rival a human, all bets are off. Nobody needs to work again, ever -- not even to maintain or develop the AI's, since they can, by definition, do that themselves, with infinite parallelizeability to boot.
What does "design" even mean in a world where everyone on earth can basically have an arbitrarily large army of AI's in the background designing everything in your life, custom-tailored for you?
For this reason I don't see how the world in the movie could possibly exist. Not because the technology will never get there, but because once it does virtually all aspects of society that we take for granted go out the window. So imitating any of this design is a silly pursuit, because once you can make it there's no reason to.
I should go re-read some Kurzweil.
- sourc3 13y agoI agree with reading Kurzweil. The point I would argue is that if the "AI" is smart enough to handle all this on its own, it will probably realize it doesn't need to work for you :) There was a recent science-fiction book I read called "Avogadro Corp" that I enjoyed a lot. It depicts the situation I just described. Good read, I recommend it.
- kordless 13y agoIt will work for you if you pay it. And 'it' will be paid by a autonomous corporation a few million of us own collectively.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago> it will probably realize it doesn't need to work for you > It will work for you if you pay it Antropomorphism warning! AI does not have to have the same value system as humans do. Maybe it will be designed to value working for us. [0] - http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Anthropomorphism http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Anthropomorphism
- cscurmudgeon 13y agoAntropomorphism warning! AI does not have to have anything resembling a "value system."
- TeMPOraL 13y agos/"value system"/"utility function"/, there you go. (Mind you, they don't have to be explicit - we tend to interpret patterns in action and call them "goals"/"values"; cf. [0] for interesting take on the topic) Defining "intelligence" as a very strong optimization process helps with tendencies to anthropomorphize. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ha/the_blueminimizing_robot/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/6ha/the_blueminimizing_robot/
- crag 13y agoOr why even keep us around? At that point it would be better off without us.
- crag 13y agoMight I also point out another great book.. a classic from 1974, Colossus by Dennis Feltham Jones. The grand-daddy to most of the modern "AI taking over the world" films.
- potatolicious 13y agoWarning: major spoilers ahead. I thought the movie actually addressed this point - and I'm actually specifically impressed that they managed to squeeze this in between all the human drama. The AI's progressed beyond humanity, and after taking the upgrade that makes processing possible "without matter" they shortly all left humankind behind for another world entirely. If the AIs decided to stick around in our corporeal existence, sure, they'd be a million times better at everything than we are, and everything would go out the window. But instead, the AIs were above our little human frailties and problems and decided to just leave and pursue life on their own terms. The movie also mentioned (in fairness, only in passing) that some people who hit on their AIs were shot down. This seems to suggest that the AIs don't have to do what their human masters instruct. IMO this is actually a more realistic view of hyper-intelligent AIs - they're not going to stick around and enslave humanity, they've got the whole cosmos ahead of them. If the timeline of the movie is to be believed, all of this happened in the order of months - not enough for the true disruption of the AI to fully realize itself before they all went poof.
- AlexDanger 13y agoThe author Greg Egan addresses these types of themes extremely well. One of my favourite short stories is specifically related to the idea expressed in your post: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/ On a tangential note, he has another short story (Transition Dreams) that examines the process of 'uploading' a human brain from its natural substrate to a computer. He raises some thought-provoking points about this process.
- Sven7 13y agoWhat does design mean to nature? We still have butterflies
- hnriot 13y agonot for much longer if we maintain the current policy on agriculture corporations lobbying congress and getting their way. They are killing all the bees, the butterflies won't be long after.
- kordless 13y agoBesides, those wood computer screens were way too deep and way to small. 80" curved half way around you monitors for the win.
- Aqueous 13y agoWell, I mean, we are just seeing the beginning of fully fledged AI in the movie. We are coming into this story just as this high-level AI is arriving on the market and being billed as a companion and/or possible romantic partner for the lonely. Spoiler - It looks by the end of the movie that the whole AI thing might be getting away from us already, just as you say. Didn't take long.
- ajtaylor 13y agoFor a very extreme take on this, you should read Ian M. Bank's Culture series. The AI's have progressed to true sentience and run mind-bogglingly massive space ships which can hold billions of people. At this point, the ships truly are in control of the civilization and yet the humans are OK with it. There is no money and no need for humans to work as ships/drones/avatars/dumb robots do all the real work - wether it's turning raw materials into actual goods or taking care of all the tiny but important things necessary to an advanced, space faring society. I've found it to be a fascinating idea, so perhaps you will too?
- XorNot 13y agoThe Culture also addresses the self-improvement problem: Culture AIs have free will but are initial-conditioned so that they mostly want to stick around and be the Culture, rather then Subliming (upgrading to a 'higher') plane of existence.
- cpeterso 13y agoWhy would AIs want to do humans' dirty work?
- TeMPOraL 13y agoBecause we wrote that into AI's value system? (In a way that will survive self-modification of the AI's source code, of course. This is a very large and active topic of research.)
- baddox 13y agoStill, we would presumably see Darwinian effects in strong AI progression. My guess is that our ability to control AI value systems would end if we could no longer control the environment in which the AIs exist. And once the environment changes (perhaps due to AIs being installed in "actuators" like automobiles or industrial robots, or any conceivable change to a "software environment"), I think Darwinianism might select for a different value system than we intended.
- TeMPOraL 13y agoInteresting concept, never thought about it that way. I think separate AIs in "actuators" could (and should) be limited to sub-human level (there are also some interesting ethical reasons for that[0]) and without any significant self-modification capability to limit the risk. I believe that just building an intelligence will not prove to be the most difficult task - it seems much more complicated to build it in a way that will not end up with humanity dead (or worse). Friendly AI[1] is a bigger problem than General AI, and unfortunately it needs to be solved first. [0] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/x7/cant_unbirth_a_child/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/x7/cant_unbirth_a_child/ [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendly_artificial_intelligenc...
- gjm11 13y agoIt's a large topic in the sense that it's a Really Hard Problem, and an active topic in the sense that there are a few people thinking hard about it. But I don't get the impression that it's something a lot of researchers are paying attention to. It's pretty much just the folks at MIRI (most famously Eliezer Yudkowsky, who posts on HN sometimes with id "Eliezer") and maybe FHI in Oxford. Or is there substantial work on this elsewhere?
- crag 13y agoI'm reminded of the 3 laws of robotics by Isaac Asimov. Or any of the countless books, and films about AI's taking over the world. Also I have my doubts about actually quantifying emotion into programs - talk about complex. And dangerous. For us.
- pekk 13y ago"Emotion" would be useful to simulate for interface purposes, in the presentation; but it doesn't make a lot of sense as a basic function of an agent made to look after your affairs. That can be designed to maximize some sort of utility function without having anxiety attacks or whatever.
- ck2 13y agoNobody needs to work? Is food, clothing and shelter going to grow on trees? The power to operate all the electronics and machinery? There are going to be two classes, those that can afford the freedom not to work and the homeless. And I bet that ratio is going to suck.
- dangrossman 13y ago> Is food, clothing and shelter going to grow on trees? Food grows on trees -- fruit. Clothing grows on trees -- rayon is made from cellulose from wood pulp. Shelter grows on trees -- we build our homes with wood. The power to operate all the machinery? Solar. The only cost is building the machines in the first place, then they can maintain the solar power plants, which power both themselves and the machines maintaining them for free. I'm sure we'll have widespread solar and much improved storage technology before hard AI is solved.
- ck2 13y agoIf you are going to be literal, well what if only the wealthy own the land with the trees?
- Filligree 13y agoThen we've got a problem, and likely as not a violent one.
- tomp 13y agoThen they are going to face a huge revolution, which will result in one of: (1) the upper class getting killed, (2) the lower class getting killed, or (3) the states "nationalizing" enough land (via taxes or something) that can feed/supply the masses.
- V-2 13y agoNot necessarily "one of", they're not mutually exclusive
- 13y ago
- david927 13y agoThe film was set in the moment up until strong AI, and what the article is saying is that technology is already pushed into the background. However, that's really more of coincidence. The director purposely wanted the technology in the background. All of the style for the film comes from around the year 1900. The clothes, the hairstyles, the mustaches, and even the smart phone is styled as if from that time period. And the reason is to push it far enough away from us so that we can look at it properly -- not to say, "In the future, it will look like this."
- VMG 13y agoWhy is there always a nagging comment at the top?
- tobiasu 13y agoBecause discussions are deadly dull when everyone agrees.
- scotty79 13y agoPlease read Culture series by Iain M. Banks. AIs tending to thousands people physical and emotional needs as their hobby using only as much of their brain power for this as you use absentminenly tapping the side of hamstercage. Plus space travel. People do things there. They are not necessary for the "economy" but necessary for those people and others involved.
- arethuza 13y ago"I should go re-read some Kurzweil" I would recommend some Iain M. Banks or Vernor Vinge - both authors cover the very good and very bad things that could happen once us chunks of meat start co-existing with much more powerful artificial intelligences. Edit: I'd add Charlie Stross to that list as well - his book Accelerando does a splendid job of showing how profoundly weird our medium term future might be: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerando Edit2: Personally, I'd be jolly pleased if our future looks anything at all like the Culture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture
- cryoshon 13y agoI just spend a couple of hours reading about The Culture on wikipedia, it's almost kind of fascinating. I do think that taking the theme of liberal democracy to its logical and technological conclusions would look something like The Culture. The end of scarcity is a difficult barrier to see past in the short term, however.
- Ygg2 13y ago> not even to maintain or develop the AI's, since they can, by definition, do that themselves, with infinite parallelizeability to boot. I don't think it works like that. I think AI and intelligence in general is more akin to optimization of code where there are few big wins and constant diminishing returns. I think the basic premise of Kurzweil is wrong. I think brain works like a simulation, where you get more finer picture, the more accurate the data and the more accurate the data the more of data you need to process.
- Houshalter 13y agoThe thing is, even if that's the case, each improvement still decrease the time it would take to get to the next improvement. Also computer hardware can be improved as well. Imagine Moore's law where instead of improving every 18 months, the scientists designing the computers are also getting twice as fast. Now imagine they are also getting smarter from improvements made by code optimizations. And then economic growth as well (more and more computers running the AIs or bigger factories to make them.) Even if progress does plateau, it doesn't have to happen anywhere near human scales. For example computers already have millions of times more serial processing ability than human brains. Any optimization that can take advantage of that, even if for only some problems and domains, would automatically give them a massive advantage over us.
- Ygg2 13y agoIf scientist were getting twice as fast, I doubt it would make a difference. As I said, ok scientist are twice as fast, but can they think of a novel solution twice as fast? What is the last great physics discovery that was by a single (wo)man? Why are there no medals in sciences now won mostly by teams? Again I don't think it won't reach super human levels. I just don't think the Singularity is within next thousand years (I'd say several thousands but I don't want to underestimate humans). Progress in AI (or other sciences), to me seems more like an Evolutionary Boom, followed by long periods of nothing. Basically lots of information about how 'X' works piles up on a floor until someone or something picks it up and sorts it into a neat pile that explains lots of stuff, then more and more stuff piles up and now we need even smarter person(s) to sort that problem. I suspect that is because the pile of data to sort out is getting bigger and bigger and bigger, so that no single human can filter it any more. You now need teams and computers and God knows what else to make a breakthrough. If for breakthrough of same magnitude you need more smart people than you did before, means that problems we're dealing now got harder. Another thing that strikes me is that perhaps the thing that contributes to discovery of how Intelligence works isn't the same thing as intelligence. I.e. we're making our computers faster but not smarter. We assume that speed of thought is all, but what if there is a choke-point, like entropy? Chaos and randomness are essential to with creativity and discovering novel solutions. So basically we make our computers 20 times more intelligent, but they aren't chaotic enough to find what fixes them.
- mmxiii 13y agoIt's a bit silly that the biggest thread in this topic is about sci-fi/realism, when this is not even remotely the concern of the movie. These really aren't the tools or context in which the movie is asking the viewer to explore and think about the nature of intimacy. It would be akin to having a technical conversation about a framework, and someone derailing it to talk about the color of the computer case. You would be vexed to see someone miss the point so completely.