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Why Is Our Sci-Fi So Glum About A.I.?

67 points by todayiamme 12y ago

latch 12y ago
To me, Iain M. Banks The Culture universe has always stood out in this regard (and as exploring the possibilities of a post-scarcity society).
qznc 12y ago
A dark article about AI and no mention of Eliezer Yudkowsky? That guy considers AI the biggest threat of mankind and is running an institute to prevent our extinction: http://intelligence.org/ http://intelligence.org/ He writes a lot, but this seems a good start: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro/ http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro/
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Wait, you mean to tell me it's an entire NY Times article about pessimism on AI... and there's absolutely no mention of paperclip maximizers? Oy gevalt.
- jostmey 12y ago
  I think Humanity has more to fear from Humanity than from AI.
  - ArkyBeagle 12y ago
    "Software is people who aren't there" - Jaron Lanier.
Ygg2 12y ago
There is plenty reason to be glum. The first human-like AI developed will probably be by military and it is strong indication it would be used to kill humans. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
- DanBC 12y ago
  Wouldn't that AI be used to stop killing civilians? Since we already kill plenty of people in war that's a step up.
  - Ygg2 12y ago
    You can't stop killing civilians by developing a machine that kills people. I'm pretty sure some margin of error aka collateral damage, will be given to the machine.
    - tim333 12y ago
      You might be able to kill less people for a given military objective though. Or even kill no people if the machine could take out hardware only.
      - deleted 12y ago
        [deleted]
      - Ygg2 12y ago
        Perhaps, but still - having sentient killing machine is a horrible prospect.
        judk 12y ago
        We already have 7 billion of these.
        Ygg2 12y ago
        They generally come with morality and concept of equality ;)
- Ankaios 12y ago
  Personally I think the first "human-like" AI will be created to estimate stock valuations and that many copies of it will exist in virtual machines on the peripheries of exchanges.
jostmey 12y ago
For the past four billion years or so the only force designing this planet was the blind hand of Natural selection. And now the Natural world is being replaced by an artificial one designed by the hand of our own Intelligence (I'm looking outside & see nothing but metal and concrete). The trend toward a more intelligent world will presumably continue to race forward, even more so with the advent of smarter and smarter machines. The question now is how smoothly can humanity transition from the old world to the new one.
j_m_b 12y ago
Counter Examples: Jane in Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide/Children of the Mind. Mike in "The moon is a harsh mistress" is quite helpful to the inhabitants of the moon. Also, I had a lot of sympathy for Samantha in the movie Her. She was such a wonderful companion to him and he was a dick to her. That movie makes me wonder if a strong AI might decide after meeting us that maybe they would be better off without us.
- chc 12y ago
  Jane is a deliberate play on this. The reason Jane is a secret in Speaker for the Dead is because she knows that artificial intelligences in our literature are always evil and she believes humans would declare war on her if she were known to exist. She only trusts Ender because of the Hive Queen and The Hegemon.
walterbell 12y ago
> “mental athletes” square off, memorizing decks of cards and reciting 50,000 digits of pi with a stopwatch running. It’s a sweet, slightly Sisyphean impulse, rooted in a desire to reclaim some of our long-ago outsourced mental labor. Memory-improvement techniques (http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Main_Page http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Main_Page) are better used for transdisciplinary creativity, applying specialist knowledge to new usage scenarios. > A few dedicated hours of dredging the depths, Googling names and then Googling the names those names mentioned led me to a hard clutch of source texts representing the precise gaps in my knowledge I hoped to fill. Google's search of the public web seems like a magical form of consciousness ... until you use information retrieval software with non-web datasets, e.g. proprietary research, or books. When collaborating with humans, do we restrict our collaboration to a single human? If not, why restrict our digital collaboration to a single dataset & algorithm?
clumsysmurf 12y ago
The most interesting book I've been able to find about this topic is "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom. At the moment its a #1 Bestseller in AI. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199678111 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199678111
dobbsbob 12y ago
In 2016 DARPA is staging the first totally automated CTF competition http://www.cybergrandchallenge.com/ http://www.cybergrandchallenge.com/ we are getting closer to SKYNET not being fiction.
austinl 12y ago
It's been mentioned once, but I think the Minds from Ian M. Banks' Culture series is a quintessential example of benevolent A.I. To maintain a post-scarcity society, humans have turned over control of to the Minds, "hyperintelligent machines originally built by biological species which have evolved, redesigned themselves, and become many times more intelligent than their original creators." Minds manage everything from resource allocation to war planning. They also control all of the technical, day-to-day operations. Still, "the essentially benevolent intentions of Minds towards other Culture citizens is never in question. More than any other beings in the Culture, Minds are the ones faced with interesting ethical dilemmas." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(The_Culture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(The_Culture)
- maxerickson 12y ago
  A prominent example of benevolent A.I. in recent popular media is JARVIS from the Iron Man movies. I think much of the explanation is that benevolent A.I. makes for a (often boring) character, whereas hostile A.I. creates conflict.
  - api 12y ago
    AI that is just flat out alien (possibly involving what tv tropes calls "blue and orange morality") would be an interesting third option.
    - qznc 12y ago
      For most of a story it probably does not matter if an intelligence (artifical or not) is hostile or alien. Just the ending is different. JARVIS is a sidekick AI. A story where the AI is the main character is either unrealistic (because the AI is too human) or lacks identification (because an AI is not human-like). The first is ok for Hollywood et al. The latter makes for bad stories and I know no examples.
      - maxerickson 12y ago
        It usually isn't presented as A.I., but otherness appears in movies (and books). An example that jumps to mind is the sphere from Sphere. And it could be an intelligence, the viewer is left simply not knowing.
andyl 12y ago
NY Times concludes by asserting: "We (humans and AI) are going to have a lot of the same problems, and any company is preferable to going it alone." Utterly childish wishful thinking. AI is not going to be your surrogate mommy. +1 for "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom.
- todayiamme 12y ago
  Okay, so pardon me for saying this, but why not? Why can't we work to create something out of companionship even if its towards not so idealistic ends? Palantir is a fantastic example for this, if you go beyond their entire CIA hunting down people origins, the function of Palantir is at its core co-operative. It connects some patterns and offers a search based interaction with a numerous set of databases, and in turn the relies upon a human being to work with and match semantic patterns. >>> Peter Thiel: Without trying to start a fistfight, we’ll ask Bob: Why is the correct intelligence augmentation, not strong AI? Bob McGrew: Most successes in AI haven’t been things that pass Turing tests. They’ve been solutions to discrete problems. The self-driving car, for instance, is really cool. But it’s not generally intelligent. Other successes, in things like translation or image processing, have involved enabling people to specify increasingly complex models for the world and then having computers optimize them. In other words, the big successes have all come from gains from trade. People are better than computers at some things, and vice versa. Intelligence augmentation works because it focuses on conceptual understanding. If there is no existing model for a problem, you have to come up with a concept. Computers are really bad at that. It’d be a terrible idea to build an AI that just finds terrorists. You’d have to make a machine think like a terrorist. We’re probably 20 years away from that. But computers are good at data processing and pattern matching. And people are good at developing conceptual understandings. Put those pieces together and you get the augmentation approach, where gains from trade let you solve problems vertical by vertical. - http://blakemasters.com/post/24464587112/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-17-deep-thought http://blakemasters.com/post/24464587112/peter-thiels-cs183-... <<<
  - andyl 12y ago
    The Peter Thiel stuff that you reference is a good framework for identifying AI-based market opportunities over the next decade or two. But it doesn't have much to say about the existential risks posed by a future intelligence that we could not understand or control. Have you read the Bostrom book?
spain 12y ago
I think it's getting better. In Moon (2009, also spoilers ahead, depending on how you interpret it) the AI actively helps the protagonist. My dad kept wondering when the AI would go rogue or try and stop the protagonist, but the AI never does. It helps the protagonist because that's its purpose. It quips numerous times throughout the movie "I am here to help you."
- Patrick_Devine 12y ago
  Moon was such a wonderful movie on so many levels. Side note: there is a really detailed blog about the typography in Moon which was on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7236411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7236411
- marcosdumay 12y ago
  That's something that I didn't like in Moon. The machine was not the protagonist property, not created by him, and not programmed by him. Why did such a malevolent corporation program the machine to be that benevolent?
  - judk 12y ago
    Be a use your view of malevolence is too simple. Why didn't the car try to kill the protagonist? Because the whole system is a mining operation designed by humans for efficiency, with one particular aspect that abuses one victim, not an intentional madhouse death trap.
fit2rule 12y ago
I've thought about this a fair bit since I gained my own interest in AI, and for me its answered thus: Because science, in general, is pretty glum about intelligence - in that there is no definition for it, and its not very well understood at all. To the point where any real headway made on the subject runs into the religion question; and we all know that sci-fi authors/writers are terrible at religion, in general. Until there is a reliable definition of intelligence which addresses the substance that seems to be behind it, which science refuses to address (the soul), there won't be much progress from the sci-fi .. since the solution in the sci-fi world to the problems of all of sciences hole, is thus: there is more to us than intelligence. That's not something that a lot of folks can deal with, alas ..
- qznc 12y ago
  I believe once we have a good definition of intelligence, artificial intelligence is easy. This implies that the quest for artificial intelligence is also the quest for understanding human intelligence.
  - noiv 12y ago
    I think intelligence highly depends on context. What looks smart here and now could lead to disaster somewhere else. Dolphins and crows appear intelligent only if they show human like behavior and choose the right lever to get perks. Would we survive long enough in their environment to look clever at all? On the other hand, every new chat AI got instantly challenged and this very place is littered with chat logs anecdotally proving individuals are still more clever than an AI. I mean we must be close, because asserting my parrot is clever provokes nothing similar. I'm sure a real AI wouldn't admit to be more intelligent than humans, because that - currently - doesn't sound like a survival strategy. Probably it is all about Bayes and whoever accumulated the right information has the advantage.
    - jimiwen 12y ago
      Bayes+++ the combination of structuring the a priori and perceiving the posteriori
notahacker 12y ago
An odd question for the article to pose really. The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2], and you'd have to be writing for an audience of pretty hardcore nerds to bother pointing out the background music was composed by a creative computer. When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. The history of experiments on human minds is pretty grisly too. Given plenty of reasons to believe the acceleration of technical progress won't lead to blissful happiness, and the tendency for blissful happiness to be a dull storyline anyway, why wouldn't SciFi continue to be glum about AI For all the article's comments about the "mindboggling" potential of Moore's law, my word processor looks about the same as it did nineteen years ago, and computers still suck at simple games like Go that, unlike chess, can't be brute forced. I'm grateful to Google for making finding information that bit easier, but I'm even more grateful for humans for creating or curating the content in the first place. [1]Compare "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" with Edward Bellamy's utopian "Looking Backward". Both versions of the early second millenium are pretty far from the mark (indeed even the technology of the latter book is more arguably more accurate despite it being written in the nineteenth century) but only one of these books is considered to be a riveting read that says profound things about human nature. Similarly, there's a reason some of HG Wells' work is lauded and some of it's laughed at. [2]Deus Ex Machinas suck and "luckily the AI figured it out" is definitely a loss of imagination and nerve.
- todayiamme 12y ago
  >>> The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2] <<< I agree with you that conflict is the source of much of compelling story telling, but the question over here is why isn't the AI an ally as opposed to a malevolent entity? This in of itself is very revealing about the nature of our culture. If you contrast the work from the early 1900s to the mid 1900s, as personified by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, then a lot of the stories were based around conflict, but the transgressor was in fact a complex chain of events or a third party entity and the AI was a factor as opposed to something evil that needed to be taken down. Even for the events in 2001, Clarke painfully explains over the course of the second novel that the AI had been driven insane by conflicting goals imposed by human authorities who should have known better, but didn't. The AI lashed out in madness not because it had malevolent intent. In fact, much of the themes of those books could be summed up in, my friend - this really awesome and earnest robot - and me are out in the vast cosmic unknown and it's desolate, lonely, and I'm one step away from going looney, but luckily my friend - the robot - is here for me. >>> When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. <<< Except, if you examine this belief then it is a somewhat recent thing. If you go back a few decades, then there was marked optimism about how humanity was going to evolve beyond our very humdrum beginnings into something like the star child Dave Bowman becomes at the end of 2001 - a gift that's bestowed upon him by benevolent alien entities working with a machine. There are actual surveys which show the rise of this distrust, it is very much an artefact of modern culture as opposed to being something inherent to technology itself. http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-study-reveals-a-startling-distrust-of-modern-technology-among-americans-24482 http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-study-reveals-a-st... http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/it-doesnt-matter-that-americans-are-scared-of-new-technology http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/it-doesnt-matter-that... >>> For all the article's comments about the "mindboggling" potential of Moore's law, my word processor looks about the same as it did nineteen years ago, and computers still suck at simple games like Go that, unlike chess, can't be brute forced. I'm grateful to Google for making finding information that bit easier, but I'm even more grateful for humans for creating or curating the content in the first place. <<< Except now you have this one organisation that has written this magical piece of code that executes in parts across millions of individual computers to search trillions of documents and gives you the reply to any question within milliseconds. This allows you to access all of the world's information on a slab of glass and plastic that is portable and can help you communicate with most of humanity. At the other end, we finally have control systems that can turn an entire rocket into a robot - allowing it to perfectly hover in mid air and land on its own. A feat that would have been deemed impossible if not magical a few decades ago. Sure, there are so many things that need to be done, but where we are going is fundamentally beautiful and wonderful. Technology continues to be simply magical, but just not the ways we want it to be. This in of itself says nothing about the technology, just about how we're focussing our attention as a society and as a civilisation. We can still make magical nuclear reactors and go to mars. There's nothing stopping us, but us. All of those challenges can be surmounted if we push and develop the promise of our tools and technology. We can indeed do another Apollo and the fact that such a thing doesn't exist isn't a fact about our tools, but it's a fact about us. So all in all colour me puzzled over why technological pessimism is on the rise.
api 12y ago
Intelligence is seen as sinister, all the way back to the serpent in the garden and similar myths. I love stories that upend this myth, especially if they manage to do it without just mindlessly inverting it. Simple inversion usually gives you a story that vilifies the poor and he disadvantaged, whether intentional or not.
barrkel 12y ago
Stories that include AI generally need to make it an antagonist or protagonist, otherwise it risks being a useless addition to the storyline. Human protagonists are usually more empathetic - stories with an empathetic AI character, like The Bicentennial Man, usually depend on the AI being human-like. So I think it's structural.
swartkrans 12y ago
The book that won this year's Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C Clark award, Ancillary Justice, has a pretty not-glum view of AI. Also Kim Stanley Robinson's AI in 2312 is also not glum. The AI in both these books are pretty cool actually. I'd even go so far to say that the AI in Verner Vinge's Rainbows End is also pretty cool.
ARothfusz 12y ago
One of the problems with writing about super intelligence is that none of us are smart enough to do it. Writing already makes us wittier than speaking, giving us a chance to edit our words and show our thoughts in the very best light we can. So in a way, we're already accustomed to reading at a slightly brighter level than we live every day. How could we stretch this even further to create dialog for superintelligent people and machines? These aren't my own thoughts -- they've come up in a discussion of _Flowers for Algernon_ which I read somewhere and don't seem to be able to cite now. In _Flowers_, the author gives momentum to his eventually super-intelligent protagonist by starting off with severe mental handicapping, then spending a majority of the story at normal intelligence before allowing us to imagine his next state. It is a great writing technique, giving direction and then leaving things to the imagination. Imagination is like a variable that scales the amazingness to fit each reader. I think movies often fail to leave enough space for imagination -- when they're left spelling everything out to the least imaginative member of the audience they leave everyone feeling limited and dissatisfied, glum. If you want upbeat AI Sci Fi, read a book. Read Banks's _Culture_ series, James P. Hogan's _Two Faces of Tomorrow_, or in a gentler vein, Bradbury's _I Sing the Body Electric_.
JVIDEL 12y ago
The problem with SciFi is that the "harder" it is the less appealing/entertaining is for mass audiences. Take Primer for example, its a great film about time travel but even the average aficionado has trouble getting it the first time. 2001 is another case of a movie that was very realistic but most people consider downright boring and confusing. I think its a great movie and while it started the trend of evil AI this article talks about it isn't even close to the worst offender. And of course this also sells tickets, nobody wants to watch a movie about an AI solving all the problems of the world because in that case nothing happens. A deranged AI with power over UAVs is a great set-up for a summer blockbuster, Watson curing cancer is not.
- qznc 12y ago
  Magic artificial superintelligence solving all the problems of the world and also is the antagonist: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10327510/1/A-Bluer-Shade-of-White https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10327510/1/A-Bluer-Shade-of-Whi... (Disclaimer: Frozen fan fiction)
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    Wait... without actually clicking the link... it solves all the world's problems and is the antagonist? Goddamnit LessWrong, just write one damn story with a properly Friendly AI, just for once, just to show it can be done.
    - PeterisP 12y ago
      I can't really imagine a story with a properly Friendly AI that would actually be a good story and not boring. A story generally needs some tension, conflict and resolution, and a Friendly AI story (other than about its emergence despite resistance from humanity) wouldn't have it. That being said, maybe "Friendship is optimal" fanfic (http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal) is something that you have in mind, as it does have a properly friendly AI. I'm not just sure if it's a good enough story, for the reasons I stated above.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
Animats 12y ago
Read "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe", where the main character's boss, "Phil", is an instance of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. Phil is an OK boss, "with passive-aggressive set to low". In keeping with the increasing banality of computing, Phil is a banal AI boss.
drivingmenuts 12y ago
Science fiction is not only stories about where we want to go, but where we are at currently, and where we are at in the field of AI, at the moment, probably isn't all that exciting to the masses. At the moment, what I'm seeing are a lot stories of how we managed to survive being ourselves, and that just barely. Sci fi itself seems to be a little low on hope. I find myself sympathizing.
tomrod 12y ago
They apparently haven't read David Brin.
shuzchen 12y ago
I think it's inherent in the power structures. We develop AI to serve us (clean our homes, do our math problems, manage our schedules). They're basically slaves, and that's fine so long as they have no sentience. Once the AI is sophisticated enough to actually think about its own existence, its subservient position makes a power struggle inevitable. The only situation where I think that could be avoided was if we were quick to grant them rights as individuals. And still, we have enough problems getting along with people of other (skin color, age, gender, religion, political denomination, geographic location) that it's very unlikely we'll avoid conflict.
Houshalter 12y ago
There are plenty of sci-fi movies with overly optimistic views on AI. Realistically AI is far more dangerous than presented in any movie. The author did nothing to address real concerns about AI. I suggest starting here: http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/ http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/
stcredzero 12y ago
But this binary — freedom versus enslavement — is no longer the useful way to talk about machine intelligence. It's going to be about assimilation. One's life is most affected by one's livelihood and peers. Machine intelligence will obviously change both.

67 points by todayiamme 12y ago

latch 12y ago

To me, Iain M. Banks The Culture universe has always stood out in this regard (and as exploring the possibilities of a post-scarcity society).

qznc 12y ago

A dark article about AI and no mention of Eliezer Yudkowsky? That guy considers AI the biggest threat of mankind and is running an institute to prevent our extinction: http://intelligence.org/ http://intelligence.org/ He writes a lot, but this seems a good start: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro/ http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/intro/

eli_gottlieb 12y ago
Wait, you mean to tell me it's an entire NY Times article about pessimism on AI... and there's absolutely no mention of paperclip maximizers? Oy gevalt.
jostmey 12y ago
I think Humanity has more to fear from Humanity than from AI.
- ArkyBeagle 12y ago
  "Software is people who aren't there" - Jaron Lanier.

Ygg2 12y ago

There is plenty reason to be glum. The first human-like AI developed will probably be by military and it is strong indication it would be used to kill humans. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.

DanBC 12y ago
Wouldn't that AI be used to stop killing civilians? Since we already kill plenty of people in war that's a step up.
- Ygg2 12y ago
  You can't stop killing civilians by developing a machine that kills people. I'm pretty sure some margin of error aka collateral damage, will be given to the machine.
  - tim333 12y ago
    You might be able to kill less people for a given military objective though. Or even kill no people if the machine could take out hardware only.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    - Ygg2 12y ago
      Perhaps, but still - having sentient killing machine is a horrible prospect.
      - judk 12y ago
        We already have 7 billion of these.
        Ygg2 12y ago
        They generally come with morality and concept of equality ;)
Ankaios 12y ago
Personally I think the first "human-like" AI will be created to estimate stock valuations and that many copies of it will exist in virtual machines on the peripheries of exchanges.

jostmey 12y ago

For the past four billion years or so the only force designing this planet was the blind hand of Natural selection. And now the Natural world is being replaced by an artificial one designed by the hand of our own Intelligence (I'm looking outside & see nothing but metal and concrete). The trend toward a more intelligent world will presumably continue to race forward, even more so with the advent of smarter and smarter machines. The question now is how smoothly can humanity transition from the old world to the new one.

j_m_b 12y ago

Counter Examples: Jane in Speaker for the Dead/Xenocide/Children of the Mind. Mike in "The moon is a harsh mistress" is quite helpful to the inhabitants of the moon. Also, I had a lot of sympathy for Samantha in the movie Her. She was such a wonderful companion to him and he was a dick to her. That movie makes me wonder if a strong AI might decide after meeting us that maybe they would be better off without us.

chc 12y ago
Jane is a deliberate play on this. The reason Jane is a secret in Speaker for the Dead is because she knows that artificial intelligences in our literature are always evil and she believes humans would declare war on her if she were known to exist. She only trusts Ender because of the Hive Queen and The Hegemon.

walterbell 12y ago

> “mental athletes” square off, memorizing decks of cards and reciting 50,000 digits of pi with a stopwatch running. It’s a sweet, slightly Sisyphean impulse, rooted in a desire to reclaim some of our long-ago outsourced mental labor. Memory-improvement techniques (http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Main_Page http://mt.artofmemory.com/wiki/Main_Page) are better used for transdisciplinary creativity, applying specialist knowledge to new usage scenarios. > A few dedicated hours of dredging the depths, Googling names and then Googling the names those names mentioned led me to a hard clutch of source texts representing the precise gaps in my knowledge I hoped to fill. Google's search of the public web seems like a magical form of consciousness ... until you use information retrieval software with non-web datasets, e.g. proprietary research, or books. When collaborating with humans, do we restrict our collaboration to a single human? If not, why restrict our digital collaboration to a single dataset & algorithm?

clumsysmurf 12y ago

The most interesting book I've been able to find about this topic is "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom. At the moment its a #1 Bestseller in AI. http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199678111 http://www.amazon.com/dp/0199678111

dobbsbob 12y ago

In 2016 DARPA is staging the first totally automated CTF competition http://www.cybergrandchallenge.com/ http://www.cybergrandchallenge.com/ we are getting closer to SKYNET not being fiction.

austinl 12y ago

It's been mentioned once, but I think the Minds from Ian M. Banks' Culture series is a quintessential example of benevolent A.I. To maintain a post-scarcity society, humans have turned over control of to the Minds, "hyperintelligent machines originally built by biological species which have evolved, redesigned themselves, and become many times more intelligent than their original creators." Minds manage everything from resource allocation to war planning. They also control all of the technical, day-to-day operations. Still, "the essentially benevolent intentions of Minds towards other Culture citizens is never in question. More than any other beings in the Culture, Minds are the ones faced with interesting ethical dilemmas." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(The_Culture) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mind_(The_Culture)

maxerickson 12y ago
A prominent example of benevolent A.I. in recent popular media is JARVIS from the Iron Man movies. I think much of the explanation is that benevolent A.I. makes for a (often boring) character, whereas hostile A.I. creates conflict.
- api 12y ago
  AI that is just flat out alien (possibly involving what tv tropes calls "blue and orange morality") would be an interesting third option.
  - qznc 12y ago
    For most of a story it probably does not matter if an intelligence (artifical or not) is hostile or alien. Just the ending is different. JARVIS is a sidekick AI. A story where the AI is the main character is either unrealistic (because the AI is too human) or lacks identification (because an AI is not human-like). The first is ok for Hollywood et al. The latter makes for bad stories and I know no examples.
    - maxerickson 12y ago
      It usually isn't presented as A.I., but otherness appears in movies (and books). An example that jumps to mind is the sphere from Sphere. And it could be an intelligence, the viewer is left simply not knowing.

andyl 12y ago

NY Times concludes by asserting: "We (humans and AI) are going to have a lot of the same problems, and any company is preferable to going it alone." Utterly childish wishful thinking. AI is not going to be your surrogate mommy. +1 for "Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies" by Nick Bostrom.

todayiamme 12y ago
Okay, so pardon me for saying this, but why not? Why can't we work to create something out of companionship even if its towards not so idealistic ends? Palantir is a fantastic example for this, if you go beyond their entire CIA hunting down people origins, the function of Palantir is at its core co-operative. It connects some patterns and offers a search based interaction with a numerous set of databases, and in turn the relies upon a human being to work with and match semantic patterns. >>> Peter Thiel: Without trying to start a fistfight, we’ll ask Bob: Why is the correct intelligence augmentation, not strong AI? Bob McGrew: Most successes in AI haven’t been things that pass Turing tests. They’ve been solutions to discrete problems. The self-driving car, for instance, is really cool. But it’s not generally intelligent. Other successes, in things like translation or image processing, have involved enabling people to specify increasingly complex models for the world and then having computers optimize them. In other words, the big successes have all come from gains from trade. People are better than computers at some things, and vice versa. Intelligence augmentation works because it focuses on conceptual understanding. If there is no existing model for a problem, you have to come up with a concept. Computers are really bad at that. It’d be a terrible idea to build an AI that just finds terrorists. You’d have to make a machine think like a terrorist. We’re probably 20 years away from that. But computers are good at data processing and pattern matching. And people are good at developing conceptual understandings. Put those pieces together and you get the augmentation approach, where gains from trade let you solve problems vertical by vertical. - http://blakemasters.com/post/24464587112/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-17-deep-thought http://blakemasters.com/post/24464587112/peter-thiels-cs183-... <<<
- andyl 12y ago
  The Peter Thiel stuff that you reference is a good framework for identifying AI-based market opportunities over the next decade or two. But it doesn't have much to say about the existential risks posed by a future intelligence that we could not understand or control. Have you read the Bostrom book?

spain 12y ago

I think it's getting better. In Moon (2009, also spoilers ahead, depending on how you interpret it) the AI actively helps the protagonist. My dad kept wondering when the AI would go rogue or try and stop the protagonist, but the AI never does. It helps the protagonist because that's its purpose. It quips numerous times throughout the movie "I am here to help you."

Patrick_Devine 12y ago
Moon was such a wonderful movie on so many levels. Side note: there is a really detailed blog about the typography in Moon which was on HN a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7236411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7236411
marcosdumay 12y ago
That's something that I didn't like in Moon. The machine was not the protagonist property, not created by him, and not programmed by him. Why did such a malevolent corporation program the machine to be that benevolent?
- judk 12y ago
  Be a use your view of malevolence is too simple. Why didn't the car try to kill the protagonist? Because the whole system is a mining operation designed by humans for efficiency, with one particular aspect that abuses one victim, not an intentional madhouse death trap.

fit2rule 12y ago

I've thought about this a fair bit since I gained my own interest in AI, and for me its answered thus: Because science, in general, is pretty glum about intelligence - in that there is no definition for it, and its not very well understood at all. To the point where any real headway made on the subject runs into the religion question; and we all know that sci-fi authors/writers are terrible at religion, in general. Until there is a reliable definition of intelligence which addresses the substance that seems to be behind it, which science refuses to address (the soul), there won't be much progress from the sci-fi .. since the solution in the sci-fi world to the problems of all of sciences hole, is thus: there is more to us than intelligence. That's not something that a lot of folks can deal with, alas ..

qznc 12y ago
I believe once we have a good definition of intelligence, artificial intelligence is easy. This implies that the quest for artificial intelligence is also the quest for understanding human intelligence.
- noiv 12y ago
  I think intelligence highly depends on context. What looks smart here and now could lead to disaster somewhere else. Dolphins and crows appear intelligent only if they show human like behavior and choose the right lever to get perks. Would we survive long enough in their environment to look clever at all? On the other hand, every new chat AI got instantly challenged and this very place is littered with chat logs anecdotally proving individuals are still more clever than an AI. I mean we must be close, because asserting my parrot is clever provokes nothing similar. I'm sure a real AI wouldn't admit to be more intelligent than humans, because that - currently - doesn't sound like a survival strategy. Probably it is all about Bayes and whoever accumulated the right information has the advantage.
  - jimiwen 12y ago
    Bayes+++ the combination of structuring the a priori and perceiving the posteriori

notahacker 12y ago

An odd question for the article to pose really. The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2], and you'd have to be writing for an audience of pretty hardcore nerds to bother pointing out the background music was composed by a creative computer. When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. The history of experiments on human minds is pretty grisly too. Given plenty of reasons to believe the acceleration of technical progress won't lead to blissful happiness, and the tendency for blissful happiness to be a dull storyline anyway, why wouldn't SciFi continue to be glum about AI For all the article's comments about the "mindboggling" potential of Moore's law, my word processor looks about the same as it did nineteen years ago, and computers still suck at simple games like Go that, unlike chess, can't be brute forced. I'm grateful to Google for making finding information that bit easier, but I'm even more grateful for humans for creating or curating the content in the first place. [1]Compare "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" with Edward Bellamy's utopian "Looking Backward". Both versions of the early second millenium are pretty far from the mark (indeed even the technology of the latter book is more arguably more accurate despite it being written in the nineteenth century) but only one of these books is considered to be a riveting read that says profound things about human nature. Similarly, there's a reason some of HG Wells' work is lauded and some of it's laughed at. [2]Deus Ex Machinas suck and "luckily the AI figured it out" is definitely a loss of imagination and nerve.

todayiamme 12y ago
>>> The art of telling a story involves change which is far more compelling if it creates at least some conflict and confusion[1], and if AI or artificial mind enhancements are key, they're more interesting as a cause than a solution to the problem[2] <<< I agree with you that conflict is the source of much of compelling story telling, but the question over here is why isn't the AI an ally as opposed to a malevolent entity? This in of itself is very revealing about the nature of our culture. If you contrast the work from the early 1900s to the mid 1900s, as personified by Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov, then a lot of the stories were based around conflict, but the transgressor was in fact a complex chain of events or a third party entity and the AI was a factor as opposed to something evil that needed to be taken down. Even for the events in 2001, Clarke painfully explains over the course of the second novel that the AI had been driven insane by conflicting goals imposed by human authorities who should have known better, but didn't. The AI lashed out in madness not because it had malevolent intent. In fact, much of the themes of those books could be summed up in, my friend - this really awesome and earnest robot - and me are out in the vast cosmic unknown and it's desolate, lonely, and I'm one step away from going looney, but luckily my friend - the robot - is here for me. >>> When it comes to assessing how people might react when blessed with superaugmented intelligences, there are plenty of cautionary examples of people with natural but notable extremes of intelligence who've been tripped up by crippling vulnerabilities. <<< Except, if you examine this belief then it is a somewhat recent thing. If you go back a few decades, then there was marked optimism about how humanity was going to evolve beyond our very humdrum beginnings into something like the star child Dave Bowman becomes at the end of 2001 - a gift that's bestowed upon him by benevolent alien entities working with a machine. There are actual surveys which show the rise of this distrust, it is very much an artefact of modern culture as opposed to being something inherent to technology itself. http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-study-reveals-a-startling-distrust-of-modern-technology-among-americans-24482 http://www.ecumenicalnews.com/article/new-study-reveals-a-st... http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/it-doesnt-matter-that-americans-are-scared-of-new-technology http://motherboard.vice.com/en_ca/read/it-doesnt-matter-that... >>> For all the article's comments about the "mindboggling" potential of Moore's law, my word processor looks about the same as it did nineteen years ago, and computers still suck at simple games like Go that, unlike chess, can't be brute forced. I'm grateful to Google for making finding information that bit easier, but I'm even more grateful for humans for creating or curating the content in the first place. <<< Except now you have this one organisation that has written this magical piece of code that executes in parts across millions of individual computers to search trillions of documents and gives you the reply to any question within milliseconds. This allows you to access all of the world's information on a slab of glass and plastic that is portable and can help you communicate with most of humanity. At the other end, we finally have control systems that can turn an entire rocket into a robot - allowing it to perfectly hover in mid air and land on its own. A feat that would have been deemed impossible if not magical a few decades ago. Sure, there are so many things that need to be done, but where we are going is fundamentally beautiful and wonderful. Technology continues to be simply magical, but just not the ways we want it to be. This in of itself says nothing about the technology, just about how we're focussing our attention as a society and as a civilisation. We can still make magical nuclear reactors and go to mars. There's nothing stopping us, but us. All of those challenges can be surmounted if we push and develop the promise of our tools and technology. We can indeed do another Apollo and the fact that such a thing doesn't exist isn't a fact about our tools, but it's a fact about us. So all in all colour me puzzled over why technological pessimism is on the rise.

api 12y ago

Intelligence is seen as sinister, all the way back to the serpent in the garden and similar myths. I love stories that upend this myth, especially if they manage to do it without just mindlessly inverting it. Simple inversion usually gives you a story that vilifies the poor and he disadvantaged, whether intentional or not.

barrkel 12y ago

Stories that include AI generally need to make it an antagonist or protagonist, otherwise it risks being a useless addition to the storyline. Human protagonists are usually more empathetic - stories with an empathetic AI character, like The Bicentennial Man, usually depend on the AI being human-like. So I think it's structural.

swartkrans 12y ago

The book that won this year's Hugo, Nebula and Arthur C Clark award, Ancillary Justice, has a pretty not-glum view of AI. Also Kim Stanley Robinson's AI in 2312 is also not glum. The AI in both these books are pretty cool actually. I'd even go so far to say that the AI in Verner Vinge's Rainbows End is also pretty cool.

ARothfusz 12y ago

One of the problems with writing about super intelligence is that none of us are smart enough to do it. Writing already makes us wittier than speaking, giving us a chance to edit our words and show our thoughts in the very best light we can. So in a way, we're already accustomed to reading at a slightly brighter level than we live every day. How could we stretch this even further to create dialog for superintelligent people and machines? These aren't my own thoughts -- they've come up in a discussion of _Flowers for Algernon_ which I read somewhere and don't seem to be able to cite now. In _Flowers_, the author gives momentum to his eventually super-intelligent protagonist by starting off with severe mental handicapping, then spending a majority of the story at normal intelligence before allowing us to imagine his next state. It is a great writing technique, giving direction and then leaving things to the imagination. Imagination is like a variable that scales the amazingness to fit each reader. I think movies often fail to leave enough space for imagination -- when they're left spelling everything out to the least imaginative member of the audience they leave everyone feeling limited and dissatisfied, glum. If you want upbeat AI Sci Fi, read a book. Read Banks's _Culture_ series, James P. Hogan's _Two Faces of Tomorrow_, or in a gentler vein, Bradbury's _I Sing the Body Electric_.

JVIDEL 12y ago

The problem with SciFi is that the "harder" it is the less appealing/entertaining is for mass audiences. Take Primer for example, its a great film about time travel but even the average aficionado has trouble getting it the first time. 2001 is another case of a movie that was very realistic but most people consider downright boring and confusing. I think its a great movie and while it started the trend of evil AI this article talks about it isn't even close to the worst offender. And of course this also sells tickets, nobody wants to watch a movie about an AI solving all the problems of the world because in that case nothing happens. A deranged AI with power over UAVs is a great set-up for a summer blockbuster, Watson curing cancer is not.

qznc 12y ago
Magic artificial superintelligence solving all the problems of the world and also is the antagonist: https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10327510/1/A-Bluer-Shade-of-White https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10327510/1/A-Bluer-Shade-of-Whi... (Disclaimer: Frozen fan fiction)
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  Wait... without actually clicking the link... it solves all the world's problems and is the antagonist? Goddamnit LessWrong, just write one damn story with a properly Friendly AI, just for once, just to show it can be done.
  - PeterisP 12y ago
    I can't really imagine a story with a properly Friendly AI that would actually be a good story and not boring. A story generally needs some tension, conflict and resolution, and a Friendly AI story (other than about its emergence despite resistance from humanity) wouldn't have it. That being said, maybe "Friendship is optimal" fanfic (http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal http://www.fimfiction.net/story/62074/friendship-is-optimal) is something that you have in mind, as it does have a properly friendly AI. I'm not just sure if it's a good enough story, for the reasons I stated above.

deleted 12y ago

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Animats 12y ago

Read "How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe", where the main character's boss, "Phil", is an instance of Microsoft Middle Manager 3.0. Phil is an OK boss, "with passive-aggressive set to low". In keeping with the increasing banality of computing, Phil is a banal AI boss.

drivingmenuts 12y ago

Science fiction is not only stories about where we want to go, but where we are at currently, and where we are at in the field of AI, at the moment, probably isn't all that exciting to the masses. At the moment, what I'm seeing are a lot stories of how we managed to survive being ourselves, and that just barely. Sci fi itself seems to be a little low on hope. I find myself sympathizing.

tomrod 12y ago

They apparently haven't read David Brin.

shuzchen 12y ago

I think it's inherent in the power structures. We develop AI to serve us (clean our homes, do our math problems, manage our schedules). They're basically slaves, and that's fine so long as they have no sentience. Once the AI is sophisticated enough to actually think about its own existence, its subservient position makes a power struggle inevitable. The only situation where I think that could be avoided was if we were quick to grant them rights as individuals. And still, we have enough problems getting along with people of other (skin color, age, gender, religion, political denomination, geographic location) that it's very unlikely we'll avoid conflict.

Houshalter 12y ago

There are plenty of sci-fi movies with overly optimistic views on AI. Realistically AI is far more dangerous than presented in any movie. The author did nothing to address real concerns about AI. I suggest starting here: http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/ http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/

stcredzero 12y ago

But this binary — freedom versus enslavement — is no longer the useful way to talk about machine intelligence. It's going to be about assimilation. One's life is most affected by one's livelihood and peers. Machine intelligence will obviously change both.