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Contributor to Deeplearning4j here. I deeply disagree with Sam’s assessment of the dangers of SMI and his prescriptions to regulate it. 1) In our lifetimes, h

by vonnik 12y ago

Contributor to Deeplearning4j here. I deeply disagree with Sam’s assessment of the dangers of SMI and his prescriptions to regulate it. 1) In our lifetimes, humanity is much more likely to damage itself through anthropogenic climate change and nuclear disasters both deliberate and accidental than it is vulnerable to the development of SMI. If anything, machine intelligence will probably allow us to approach those other significant problems more effectively. 2) For regulatory limits on the progress and use of technology to be effective, the rules must be global, and the technology must be detectable. Neither of those conditions is likely to be fulfilled in this situation. Any law that requires the agreement of and enforcement by every nation in the world fails before it is even formulated. Humanity has shown very little capacity to agree on a global scale. The proliferation of nuclear arms and the persistence of human trafficking are two cases in point. 3) Unlike nuclear testing, the development of SMI would not be detectable with Geiger counters. It does not produce explosions that are seismologically measurable half a planet away. While the US should incentivize the “right” research into machine intelligence through financing and other means, onerous regulations and absurd government bodies will simply shift research offshore to other countries looking for an edge. (Machine learning research does not require large facilities. All you need is a keyboard and the cloud.) That offshoring would be disastrous for the United States, because our competitive advantage in the world economy is technological innovation. At the same time, regulation by slow-moving committees will simply drive military/intelligence research underground. I doubt the three-letter agencies will acquiesce to a law that puts them at a disadvantage to their peers. In other words, if SMI is possible, then it is inevitable. It will be put to many uses, like all technology. If we are technological liberals at all, then we must trust that the positive affects of machine intelligence, on balance, will outweigh the negative ones. We should not be the ones sowing fear.

sanxiyn 12y ago
> Humanity has shown very little capacity to agree on a global scale. The proliferation of nuclear arms and the persistence of human trafficking are two cases in point. This is very true. Therefore you think regulations on nuclear arms and human trafficking are worthless?
- vonnik 12y ago
  Worthless is a strong word. When you consider the number of unstable nation-states that have nuclear arms, I would say that non-proliferation has been very ineffective. Likewise human trafficking laws. I agree with their intent, but they are not working well. What I am arguing here is that the nation that regulates first is at a disadvantage. I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage, and I do not believe that this problem is one the law can solve.
  - sanxiyn 12y ago
    As a non-US person, I think it would be laudable for US to put up with a little disadvantage for the safety of the world, just as US expends a lot of resource to keep world peace. I have no standing to demand anything, but "I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage" sounds very selfish to me.
    - vonnik 12y ago
      This is a very good point. And I understand why my argument might not appeal to a non-US person. I have lived outside the US for more than a decade, and experienced many other governments. While I can see that the US is a deeply imperfect country, I believe it is less corrupt and more functional than many other nations both domestically and internationally. Therefore, I do not wish to see it at a disadvantage. Many of the alternative hegemons are worse. In addition, the US has a special relationship to technology. We export innovation. If we stop innovating, then we have very little to export. This is very different from other countries. Asking the US government to regulate innovation is like asking the Saudi government to crack down on oil exports. It is the foundation of our economy. Without it, we fail. What I'm really saying though is that US regulations will not increase the safety of the world. They will merely shift the locus of research.
jkramar 12y ago
Partial measures do matter; in fact, currently most of the advances are coming from the US. And research can be regulated. Probably noone will catch an independent researcher working alone and not releasing anything, but progress tends to come from teams of experts who have come through elite labs/universities. Furthermore having significant data&hardware seems to be helpful for making progress. It doesn't require mass surveillance for something like this to work. I'm not saying there are clear positive next steps, just that blanket dismissals on the basis that perfect enforcement won't be reached are silly. We shouldn't actually trust that positive effects of every technology outweigh negative ones; that seems obviously wrong (think about weapons tech for example).
- vonnik 12y ago
  Many of the advances we know of are coming from outside the US. Notably teams at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal, DeepMind in the UK, and Juergen Schmidhuber's group in Switzerland. Geoff Hinton is British, Yann LeCun is French, Andrew Ng was born in the UK to Hong Kong parents and graduated in Singapore, Quoc Le is Vietnamese. Machine intelligence research is very international. When you consider all the data being processed in the world in different ways, and all the optimization algorithms being run on public and private clouds and various in-house data centers, I think you will appreciate how difficult it is to even detect advances in machine intelligence.
  - vkrakovna 12y ago
    Fair point, though most of the advances are still coming from the Western countries, which can agree on a regulation more easily than the world as a whole.
    - vonnik 12y ago
      The advances are happening in Western countries, for now. Members of the top teams come from all over the world. It would be very easy for them to relocate.
      - 12y ago
jimrandomh 12y ago
The technologies leading towards AGI/SMI are advancing. The technologies needed to make it safe are also advancing. The goal is not to ban SMIs - it's to ensure that it's safe. Think of it as a race, between research into capabilities into safety and control measures. If the safety and control research is sufficiently advanced when SMI appears, then it can solve humanity's other problems for us. If that safety research isn't sufficiently advanced, then we're in very serious trouble. This is the idea behind differential technological advancement: favor technologies that help us make safe AGIs that will help us, over technologies that are too risky. Right now, safety-oriented AGI research is severely under-funded, so it's hard to tell the difference. Hence the need for monitoring and research. And while we certainly hope that safety will get on track to win the race, if it looks like it isn't, a regulatory body and regulatory framework may provide a saving throw.
RoboTeddy 12y ago
> we trust that the positive effects, on balance, will outweigh the negative ones. So far, the positive effects from technology definitely seem like they've outweighed the negative ones. Technology has raised our standards of living, and we've managed to work around many potential downsides. Most technologies to date have a fairly limited per-use radius of impact. Guns for example, are local: bullets don't travel more than a couple miles. Mishaps with guns (e.g. shooting sprees) can be terrible, but they have a small radius of impact, so they're not the end of the world. As technologies become more powerful, it's reasonable to assume that maximum radius of impact will also increase. If a radius of impact is the size of the earth (or larger), we have to worry very much about accidents, even if we can expect accidents to be rare. AI might be one of the first technologies humanity comes up with that has a global per-use effect radius. Extreme caution is warranted.
Houshalter 12y ago
Climate change could make some cities uninhabitable, and nuclear war could set a country back a century. But AI will exterminate every organism alive. We are playing with fire and saying its ok since the rusty knives and paint chips we were playing with first didn't kill us.
- vonnik 12y ago
  I think your extremely dystopian prediction about AI's consequences is as unrealistic as the hype surrounding it, and I wonder why you downplay the consequences of climate change while emphasizing those of SMI. What evidence do you have to support the assertion that it will exterminate everything alive? We are playing with fire on many levels. It's a Promethean moment. No one thinks it's unimportant. The question is whether this is a problem the law can solve. I don't think so.
  - Houshalter 12y ago
    Entire books have been written about this, but in a sentence: AI is very likely to be dangerous by default, since it won't have human values/morality by default, and formalizing human values is very difficult. Seriously look at Superintelligence, or the the Intelligence Explosion FAQ (http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/ http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/) for far more depth into these issues.

by vonnik 12y ago

sanxiyn 12y ago

> Humanity has shown very little capacity to agree on a global scale. The proliferation of nuclear arms and the persistence of human trafficking are two cases in point. This is very true. Therefore you think regulations on nuclear arms and human trafficking are worthless?

vonnik 12y ago
Worthless is a strong word. When you consider the number of unstable nation-states that have nuclear arms, I would say that non-proliferation has been very ineffective. Likewise human trafficking laws. I agree with their intent, but they are not working well. What I am arguing here is that the nation that regulates first is at a disadvantage. I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage, and I do not believe that this problem is one the law can solve.
- sanxiyn 12y ago
  As a non-US person, I think it would be laudable for US to put up with a little disadvantage for the safety of the world, just as US expends a lot of resource to keep world peace. I have no standing to demand anything, but "I do not want the US to be at a disadvantage" sounds very selfish to me.
  - vonnik 12y ago
    This is a very good point. And I understand why my argument might not appeal to a non-US person. I have lived outside the US for more than a decade, and experienced many other governments. While I can see that the US is a deeply imperfect country, I believe it is less corrupt and more functional than many other nations both domestically and internationally. Therefore, I do not wish to see it at a disadvantage. Many of the alternative hegemons are worse. In addition, the US has a special relationship to technology. We export innovation. If we stop innovating, then we have very little to export. This is very different from other countries. Asking the US government to regulate innovation is like asking the Saudi government to crack down on oil exports. It is the foundation of our economy. Without it, we fail. What I'm really saying though is that US regulations will not increase the safety of the world. They will merely shift the locus of research.

jkramar 12y ago

Partial measures do matter; in fact, currently most of the advances are coming from the US. And research can be regulated. Probably noone will catch an independent researcher working alone and not releasing anything, but progress tends to come from teams of experts who have come through elite labs/universities. Furthermore having significant data&hardware seems to be helpful for making progress. It doesn't require mass surveillance for something like this to work. I'm not saying there are clear positive next steps, just that blanket dismissals on the basis that perfect enforcement won't be reached are silly. We shouldn't actually trust that positive effects of every technology outweigh negative ones; that seems obviously wrong (think about weapons tech for example).

vonnik 12y ago
Many of the advances we know of are coming from outside the US. Notably teams at the Universities of Toronto and Montreal, DeepMind in the UK, and Juergen Schmidhuber's group in Switzerland. Geoff Hinton is British, Yann LeCun is French, Andrew Ng was born in the UK to Hong Kong parents and graduated in Singapore, Quoc Le is Vietnamese. Machine intelligence research is very international. When you consider all the data being processed in the world in different ways, and all the optimization algorithms being run on public and private clouds and various in-house data centers, I think you will appreciate how difficult it is to even detect advances in machine intelligence.
- vkrakovna 12y ago
  Fair point, though most of the advances are still coming from the Western countries, which can agree on a regulation more easily than the world as a whole.
  - vonnik 12y ago
    The advances are happening in Western countries, for now. Members of the top teams come from all over the world. It would be very easy for them to relocate.
    - 12y ago

jimrandomh 12y ago

The technologies leading towards AGI/SMI are advancing. The technologies needed to make it safe are also advancing. The goal is not to ban SMIs - it's to ensure that it's safe. Think of it as a race, between research into capabilities into safety and control measures. If the safety and control research is sufficiently advanced when SMI appears, then it can solve humanity's other problems for us. If that safety research isn't sufficiently advanced, then we're in very serious trouble. This is the idea behind differential technological advancement: favor technologies that help us make safe AGIs that will help us, over technologies that are too risky. Right now, safety-oriented AGI research is severely under-funded, so it's hard to tell the difference. Hence the need for monitoring and research. And while we certainly hope that safety will get on track to win the race, if it looks like it isn't, a regulatory body and regulatory framework may provide a saving throw.

RoboTeddy 12y ago

> we trust that the positive effects, on balance, will outweigh the negative ones. So far, the positive effects from technology definitely seem like they've outweighed the negative ones. Technology has raised our standards of living, and we've managed to work around many potential downsides. Most technologies to date have a fairly limited per-use radius of impact. Guns for example, are local: bullets don't travel more than a couple miles. Mishaps with guns (e.g. shooting sprees) can be terrible, but they have a small radius of impact, so they're not the end of the world. As technologies become more powerful, it's reasonable to assume that maximum radius of impact will also increase. If a radius of impact is the size of the earth (or larger), we have to worry very much about accidents, even if we can expect accidents to be rare. AI might be one of the first technologies humanity comes up with that has a global per-use effect radius. Extreme caution is warranted.

Houshalter 12y ago

Climate change could make some cities uninhabitable, and nuclear war could set a country back a century. But AI will exterminate every organism alive. We are playing with fire and saying its ok since the rusty knives and paint chips we were playing with first didn't kill us.

vonnik 12y ago
I think your extremely dystopian prediction about AI's consequences is as unrealistic as the hype surrounding it, and I wonder why you downplay the consequences of climate change while emphasizing those of SMI. What evidence do you have to support the assertion that it will exterminate everything alive? We are playing with fire on many levels. It's a Promethean moment. No one thinks it's unimportant. The question is whether this is a problem the law can solve. I don't think so.
- Houshalter 12y ago
  Entire books have been written about this, but in a sentence: AI is very likely to be dangerous by default, since it won't have human values/morality by default, and formalizing human values is very difficult. Seriously look at Superintelligence, or the the Intelligence Explosion FAQ (http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/ http://intelligence.org/ie-faq/) for far more depth into these issues.