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Experts pledge to rein in AI research
- rndn 12y agoThis was discussed two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8870456 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8870456
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- jheriko 12y agoThis sounds like a publicity stunt... My real concern with all of this is always the uncontrolled ecosystem of steadily evolving viruses and malware. We will never have control of that... and there is no telling what it can become in the future. I think it will be a simple error induced by some random mutation in one of these malicious progams, not some vast artificial intelligence, that causes us problems in this arena first.
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- drcomputer 12y agoWe need more AI working in the domain of computer security. Stuff that learns under specific guidelines to restrict computational behavior, given specifications of expected behavior.
- jacquesm 12y agoYou'll have AI working the other side of the arms race just the same. Tools aren't just used by the good guys.
- drcomputer 12y agoThat won't stop the bad guys from making those tools while the good guys don't, because they are afraid their tools will be used by the bad guys. Ignorance is not a good defense strategy.
- walterbell 12y agoInadvertent bad guys (good intentions with unpredictable errors) can be more damaging than intentional attacks.
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- drcomputer 12y agoCan you cite an example?
- walterbell 12y agoAny well-known vulnerability, e.g. heartbleed, gotofail, etc.
- drcomputer 12y agoI am genuinely interested in hearing the 'good intention' explanation of these bugs.
- maaaats 12y agoI wonder: Why should we care about what Musk and Hawking mean about AI? This article doesn't mention too much bad stuff, but earlier they have said that we should be afraid of AI/singularity. With my thesis now in AI, I probably know far more than those two about this. And we're sooo far away from AI being a superforce destroying mankind.
- rndn 12y agoYou can probably assume they are in contact with the leading experts in the field. From the letter: The initial version of this document was drafted by Stuart Russell, Daniel Dewey & Max Tegmark, with major input from Janos Kramar & Richard Mallah, and reflects valuable feedback from Anthony Aguirre, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ryan Calo, Tom Dietterich, Dileep George, Bill Hibbard, Demis Hassabis, Eric Horvitz, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, James Manyika, Luke Muehlhauser, Michael Osborne, David Parkes, Heather Roff Perkins, Francesca Rossi, Bart Selman, Murray Shanahan, and many others.
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- herewego 12y ago>> And we're sooo far away from this being a problem. If we're far away from this being a problem, we may be far away from understanding how to solve it. We certainly wouldn't want the former to outpace the later, given what is at stake.
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- DennisP 12y agoThey aren't the only ones who signed it, they just get top media billing because they always do. Other people who signed include AI researchers. Peter Norvig, for one.
- ThomPete 12y agoI haven't read your thesis but does it take things like exponential progress, deep learning and higher and higher privileges and control over infrastructure into account? It doesn't have to be conscious to be dangerous.
- Beltiras 12y agoAI would, and should, succeed human intelligence properly implemented. We are nowhere near even understanding it as a problem, much less solving it. I attended an AGI conference a couple of years ago (summer of 2012 iirc). The general feeling was that we are still a lifetime away from a solution.
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- bsaunder 12y ago"In the short term, this could mean research into the economic effects of AI to stop smart systems putting millions of people out of work." This seems unfortunate and somewhat challenging to do. Our current economic model encourages improving efficiency of systems. This seems like a good thing. Its really too bad that people "need" jobs. Jobs should be creating value or they shouldn't exist. Artificially "creating" jobs to prop up the systems feels like fighting against reality and a bad long term plan.
- bulletsvshumans 12y agoHow about a tax on AI that goes towards unemployment benefits of some kind?
- maaaats 12y agoBut what is "AI"? Once something in AI gains traction, it quickly becomes part of the standard computer-science-toolkit. For instance, programmatically tuning some variables can be considered a standard task, either with some bruteforce or a small search between the possible combinations. This was earlier considered AI, but is now a common approach. AI now would probably be to do more advanced problems with genetic algorithms or similar. But where to draw the line?
- matt4077 12y agoA nice and steep tax on capital gains would do fine. As technology progresses and machines contribute more and more value the income they generate returns to those that financed them.
- rndn 12y agoI think, the perceived danger here is more the lack of social acceptance of unemployed people. I think however, that if a large part or even a majority of the population is unemployable it will necessarily lead to social acceptance. People will simply have a lot of leisure time.
- brador 12y agoSo long as we can pull the plug or disconnect the interfaces we'll be ok with AI. Once we can't, then we have a problem. In effect the scariest AI is distributed, self propogating and can't be unpowered. Effectively a virus. I have yet to see a meaningful distributed AI, even in concept.
- Cakez0r 12y agoBut it's not inconceivable that in the near-future an AI could train itself to mutate (even if this means interfacing with mechanical turk or freelance websites and paying humans to do it).
- faizshah 12y agoI don't know much about the philosophy of AI and I'm only familiar at a basic level with modern AI algorithms. From what I have been exposed to I don't see any reason to think AI is any more than a set of statistical frameworks. Is there any reason to believe that these statistical frameworks are comparable to biological intelligence? Am I thinking about this the wrong way?
- harshreality 12y agoIt sounds like you're talking about the kinds of AI in use today? That's not what the cautions are about, since current "AI" however good at reading individual words or flying drones is not yet capable of human-level thought. The cautions are about trans-sapient AI, which doesn't exist yet. Even if it's simply a beefed up "set of statistical frameworks" linked in the right way to get a computer behave like a human, humans develop and use nuclear weapons, humans go on shooting sprees, humans decide to go to war...
- faizshah 12y agoI see, I didn't think about that. So you mean AI that are not necessarily intelligent or conscious but are just more integrated in our lives, for example in the military or law enforcement? I can see how a bug in those kinds of systems could cause things like that without necessarily being conscious or intelligent.
- Swizec 12y agoThe implication is that humans are just statistical algorithms. We have so far not found any evidence to the contrary.
- unseraphim 12y agoNo, you are not thinking about it the wrong way. Neither Hawking nor Musk is an expert in AI; their only contribution to the discussion is their fame. Curbing research into AI at this stage is like banning rock smashing research in the Palaeolithic Era because it could lead to uncontrolled fission. The "leading experts" in AI are not so leading and not so expert. It is simply our ego, self-focus, and arrogance that allows the notion that AI research could be anywhere near posing a danger. We're not all that, and it is self-flattery to have this discussion in 2015 at more than the level of mild curiosity.
- amelius 12y agoWhy not do the same with all of technology? Why do shareholders of big corporations profit from science in a grossly non-proportional way, while more than 50% of world's population has to live on under $2 a day? It is time for the world's greatest minds to start thinking about how to fix capitalism, because it seems to be seriously broken. And we need it fixed more than we need e.g. iPhone 7.0, or Google Adwords 2.0.
- tljr 12y agoWow. Went strait to 11 there didn't you. Though I must say, I can't disagree with any particular point.
- mseebach 12y agoYes! So broken! Must fix now! http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-billion-people-have-been-taken-out-extreme-poverty-20-years-world-should-aim http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21578665-nearly-1-bill...
- blfr 12y agoComing from a formerly communist country, I have a severe distrust towards "great minds" with some radical fix for capitalism. Actually, we should start treating social fixes like we do technical rollouts. Prove it on a small scale somewhere first, and then carefully expand. This seems like common sense. Yet for some reason changes in policies tend to be sweeping, national or even international.
- kylebrown 12y agoClinical medicine is a better analogy than technical rollouts. But you're right, modern development economics argues that social fixes (policies) should be empirically driven using evidence-based randomized control trials. Esther Duflo has pushing this approach at the MIT Poverty Action Lab. The main insight is to reject grand generalizations and broad theorizing. Sitting in an armchair pondering how to "fix capitalism" is unlikely to lead to useful lines of thought. Society is too complex a system, cause & effect relationships can be highly localized and context-dependent; formulaic thinking just leads one down ideological rabbit holes.
- saalweachter 12y agoI'm glad someone is finally addressing this, what with a major advance in artificial intelligence being only five or ten years away.
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- sigzero 12y agoPeople make mistakes. That is all.
- walterbell 12y ago> Research into AI, using a variety of approaches, had brought about great progress on speech recognition, image analysis, driverless cars, translation and robot motion, it said. How much of this progress required training data generated by working humans? What would feed future statistical algorithms if this source of training data was greatly reduced?