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The difference between a ball of uranium and a nuclear bomb is... a slightly bigger ball. Dangerous autonomous software is very easy to imagine. What if someo

by soup10 12y ago

The difference between a ball of uranium and a nuclear bomb is... a slightly bigger ball. Dangerous autonomous software is very easy to imagine. What if someone hid code in flight control software that activated at a given time and sent all planes flying into the nearest building. Software is only safe because we program it to be safe. The more capable and widespread software becomes the more dangerous it becomes.

jsprogrammer 12y ago
>The difference between a ball of uranium and a nuclear bomb is... a slightly bigger ball. And a very precise detonation device strapped around said ball of uranium. Software is not by itself dangerous. It only exists in the most abstract sense. What is dangerous is creating physical devices that have the ability to cause physical damage if manipulated in a certain way. Allowing those devices to be controlled autonomously through a software-hardware interface is where the danger from "AI" comes in.
- MattHeard 12y ago
  Or if you plug the software into major financial trading hubs... oh...
  - firebones 12y ago
    No, they'll just roll back selected transactions arbitrarily like they did in past flash crashes. We're much closer to runaway biological threats than we are to AI-inspired ones. Or maybe that's my knowledge gap in the two domains speaking and we're equally far away in each.
  - jsprogrammer 12y ago
    Market should take care of it, no?
jeffreyrogers 12y ago
Yes, but no physicist will tell you its safe to leave uranium lying around. Virtually everyone working in AI, including the biggest names in the field, will tell you that the methods are very domain specific (they generalize, but you have to train them specifically for a given domain), and bear no resemblance to sentience as it is typically understood other than that they give rise to seemingly intelligent behavior. Which actually isn't so much intelligence, as discovering a function mapping inputs to outputs. And no one is arguing that software can't be dangerous. It clearly can, just like poorly constructed bridges or cars can be dangerous. But the idea of machines thinking for themselves is science fiction. There is no indication that we're anywhere close to that happening.

by soup10 12y ago

jsprogrammer 12y ago

>The difference between a ball of uranium and a nuclear bomb is... a slightly bigger ball. And a very precise detonation device strapped around said ball of uranium. Software is not by itself dangerous. It only exists in the most abstract sense. What is dangerous is creating physical devices that have the ability to cause physical damage if manipulated in a certain way. Allowing those devices to be controlled autonomously through a software-hardware interface is where the danger from "AI" comes in.

MattHeard 12y ago
Or if you plug the software into major financial trading hubs... oh...
- firebones 12y ago
  No, they'll just roll back selected transactions arbitrarily like they did in past flash crashes. We're much closer to runaway biological threats than we are to AI-inspired ones. Or maybe that's my knowledge gap in the two domains speaking and we're equally far away in each.
- jsprogrammer 12y ago
  Market should take care of it, no?

jeffreyrogers 12y ago

Yes, but no physicist will tell you its safe to leave uranium lying around. Virtually everyone working in AI, including the biggest names in the field, will tell you that the methods are very domain specific (they generalize, but you have to train them specifically for a given domain), and bear no resemblance to sentience as it is typically understood other than that they give rise to seemingly intelligent behavior. Which actually isn't so much intelligence, as discovering a function mapping inputs to outputs. And no one is arguing that software can't be dangerous. It clearly can, just like poorly constructed bridges or cars can be dangerous. But the idea of machines thinking for themselves is science fiction. There is no indication that we're anywhere close to that happening.