Artificial Super Intelligence - are we ready for it?

Many say that we won't experience the worst of the effects associated with global warming for another 50 or even 100 years.

But what if we face a crisis, that very few people seem to know about today, that will manifest itself almost overnight in a matter of only 20-30 years?

Welcome to the world of true artificial intelligence.

The two parts associated with this linked piece are really, really long, but in my opinion well worth it. The author puts all of this in layman's terms so it's long, but a relatively easy read.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/artifi...olution-1.html

I'm also throwing in a long read on Fermi's paradox, which relates to the question of why we haven't heard from any extra-terrestrial species. Fermi's paradox also involves AI because even an ET species that isn't interested in galaxial travel, could easily send AI voyageurs to spy on or greet others.

http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html


My opinion? This stuff concerns me. Humankind seems best at reacting and countering crises that we can see coming. Things like former ice ages, imperialism and industrialization, we could see coming gradually and adjust our lives and behavioral patterns. That's why although I'm concerned with global warming, I do believe that we'll have some interesting answers to it, including big geo-engineering responses. We'll adapt. Also, it might not be all bad. Just as the last Ice Age must have been devastating, humankind also seemed to use it as an advantage by crossing over the ice bridge within the Bering Sea. I'm guessing there will be some unforeseen benefits to global warming.

Crises that come upon us all at once, however, I believe are a much bigger issues for humankind. So far, we dodged a huge bullet with the invention of atomic weaponry. But I think there was a lot of luck at play.

Will we be so lucky when Artificial Super Intelligence arrives? As the author of the linked pieces asserts, I'm not too sure.

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Originally Posted by Odelay

Many say that we won't experience the worst of the effects associated with global warming for another 50 or even 100 years.

But what if we face a crisis, that very few people seem to know about today, that will manifest itself almost overnight in a matter of only 20-30 years?

Welcome to the world of true artificial intelligence.
My opinion? This stuff concerns me. Humankind seems best at reacting and countering crises that we can see coming. Things like former ice ages, imperialism and industrialization, we could see coming gradually and adjust our lives and behavioral patterns. That's why although I'm concerned with global warming, I do believe that we'll have some interesting answers to it, including big geo-engineering responses. We'll adapt. Also, it might not be all bad. Just as the last Ice Age must have been devastating, humankind also seemed to use it as an advantage by crossing over the ice bridge within the Bering Sea. I'm guessing there will be some unfor
eseen benefits to global warming.

Crises that come upon us all at once, however, I believe are a much bigger issues for humankind. So far, we dodged a huge bullet with the invention of atomic weaponry. But I think there was a lot of luck at play.

Will we be so lucky when Artificial Super Intelligence arrives? As the author of the linked pieces asserts, I'm not too sure.

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Odelay I was going to thank you for these links, but when I began to read the first one, I became irritated at simple errors in a rather freewheeling discussion. For example, at the very start he writes;
Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay.
I can't take this seriously, not even as a light-hearted comment, given the huge importance of the sea in transportation, long before 1750 and including internal waterways, seas and oceans- even if in the case of internal waterways canal boats were at one time drawn by horses. A rather more eloquent and dare I say more informed historical framework takes the world in 1400 and is in Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1982) and the first volume of Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought(197-eight) which takes it cue from the emerging city states of Italy in the 12th century as a point of departure for a discussion for modern ideas in politics.

May I refer you to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge (UK) where you will find a good set of discussions on AI and associated issues, as well as links to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford and some US institutions.
http://cser.org/about/our-mission/

This is a vast topic, whether it is about the impact alogrithms have had on our daily life, or on the broader issue of humans being replaced by robots with feelings...

Thanks, Odelay, for the articles. I perused the first one over my morning cappuccino at the coffee shop. It was a long one with many points. And thank you Stavros for the link.

I think it may be possible to make a distinction between intelligence, knowledge and processing power (speed and memory), although the three bleed together and support one another. We have been quite successful in building machines with stupendous speed and considerable memory, but not (I think) so successful at building intelligent machines or knowledgable ones (if knowledge is more than just data storage).

Take chess playing programs for example. At first AI researchers attempted to reduce the heuristics, strategies and insights that chess masters have gained through study and experience into computer code. But this sort of attack never led to much success. But today there are algorithms now that consistently outperform masters of the game. What changed? The speed and memory of machines changed. AI researchers realized they win chess games by brute force rather than cunning and intelligence. For the most part modern chess playing algorithms simply run through the tree of all possible moves of the game for more moves ahead than any human could manage.

An analogy: Suppose one would like to solve the cubic equation 2 x^3 - 55 x^2+13 x + 378 = 0. Two methods come to mind. Use a change of variables to transform it into a more manageable form. Factor and backtrack to the roots. If you can get it to work this will provide you with a general procedure for solving all cubic equations. This is what Niccolo Tartaglia did back in the sixteenth century (there’s an interesting history here). The second method is to just start picking numbers 0,1,-1,2,-2,3,-3 etc. and plugging them into the formula so see if they work. A computer can do this super-fast and will come up the answer 27 in the time it takes you to lift your eyes from the enter button to the computer screen. The advantage of Tartaglia’s approach is now he has a general expression for the roots of a cubic which will find you those roots even when they’re irrational. The second approach will only find integer roots and it gives you know way of expressing them generally. The first approach is clever, The second is brute force. Of course the programmers could just code Tartaglia’s formula into a algorithm and then the computer will beat Tartaglia every time. But the point here is: there is no general formula (yet) for playing a good game of chess. Humans stand a better chance using the heuristic strategies they’ve gain through experience. Machines stand a better chance using brute force searches.

Another example is language translation. Several decades ago it was predicted that computers would be translating languages with nuance and ease. This isn’t so. Again, the best algorithms simply utilize brute force. Google translate searches a huge data base of previously translated text for words and phrases that appear in the text to be translated and simply replaces those phrases with the found counterparts in the target language. No grammar. No computerized Chomsky language modules. Just brute force searches. It translates languages better than a chimp can, but it’s not as intelligent as a chimp.

It’s not that I don’t believe machines can think. We’re machines, and we think. But I don’t think (I’m no expert mind you) there are any artificial general intelligence algorithms in existence that come close to what a chimp does.

Nor am I oblivious to the threat of artificial intelligence. In the wrong hands immense populations and be tracked, surveilled and controlled.

The social and economic repercussions of sophisticated software are and will continue to be enormous. Because brute force calculation can simulate intelligent behavior, there is a temptation to replace intelligent agents with algorithms. They replace workers on the factory floor. They sell airline tickets and even fly the airliners. They diagnose disease. They tell us if the DNA of the defendant matches the blood and semen found at the crime scene. They break these very words into bits an route them in different directions around the globe and reconstruct them on your screen. Power doesn’t have to be intelligent to be dangerous.

The article speculates that the machines of the future will be super-intelligent. I question the concept:

I don’t know, but I think it’s possible that intelligence is not hierarchical. Like a traffic light. It can turn green and it’ll be legal to proceed, but it can’t turn more green and provide more assurance of your right to proceed.
Another analogy can be found in the theory of computation. There are a lot of different kinds of automata, but there are none more “powerful” than a Universal Turing Machine (UTM). There is no computational task, in principle, that cannot be done with a UTM. The hardware in which it is realized might be slow or fast. It might be electronic or organic. But computationally speaker it is the top of the mountain. There is nothing higher.
Intelligence may be like that. There may be intelligent agents who think faster than us and have more memory than us. There may be intelligent agents (at least in principle) who thick on geologic time scales. But perhaps there’s no intelligent way to make sense of the question, “Which of us is more intelligent?”

Suppose, however, super-intelligence IS a possibility and in a few short decades there will super-intelligent AI’s will be inhabiting the cloud. I wonder if we’ll recognize them. What sort of culture would they have? How sophisticated would their languages be? Would be recognize their discourse as discourse, or would it just seem like a scatter of random bits? What sort of arts would engage them? Does a chimp see the image of a woman when it examines the Mona Lisa? Should we gaze at a swirl of changing characters on our screens would we recognize it as a super-intelligent agent’s expression of impermanent beauty and balance? Would we even get that super-intelligent art is art? Or is this just a reductio absurdum leading us back to the conclusion that we are ultimately the same?

Sorry for the long rambling response.

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Originally Posted by trish

The social and economic repercussions of sophisticated software are and will continue to be enormous. Because brute force calculation can simulate intelligent behavior, there is a temptation to replace intelligent agents with algorithms. They replace workers on the factory floor. They sell airline tickets and even fly the airliners.

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By coincidence the BBC a few nights ago showed a documentary on the 2009 crash of Air France 447 which left Rio de Janeiro and crashed into the Atlantic about 3 hours after take-off. It was an extraordinary example of the confusion that took place in the cock-pit when the computers shut down because they could not make sense of the pilot error which resulted in the plane going nose-up into a storm and stalling. But the co-pilot had manual control of the plane because the computers shut down. It raised the question, would this plane have crashed if it had been left solely to the computer? The initial problem was that the storm outside freezed up the pitot tubes which give speeds readings which could not then be read or understood, but a drop in altitude would have melted the ice and re-booted that info and at 38,000 feet that is enough to re-order the plane's trajectory, but the co-pilot kept his hand on the manual control that was sending the plane ever upward until it just could go no further and dropped like a stone in less than four minutes.

By contrast, I have more than once used an automated supermarket checkout and without doing anything wrong have been unable to proceed because of an unexpected item in bagging area...something tells me we have a long way to go before reconciling the wonders of technology with the not always wonderful people who design it.

I'll look at just one of your ramblings - the Universal Turing Machine. A UTM can compute anything that is computable! And no more. Turing showed himself that some seemingly simple tasks such as predicting when a process will end - the halting problem - can not be solved. This may appear rather abstract but actually it is rather important to us as humans to have an understanding when something may stop or change.

AI works in two ways - brute force (OK for playing chess but for not getting through life in general) or by optimising some function (we call it a cost function). Two ways of optimisation - go down hills (reduce some error between what you observe and what you desire) or random jumps in the dark (evolutionary computing). A fully extensive search could need infinite resources and infinite time. Really the idea behind NP-complete problems (like the Travelling Salesman). So brute force and brute "logic" don't always work - so you have to accept answers that are "good enough". There is the rub.

On a more practical side - we may be able to sequence DNA at speeds that seem incredible or believe that we can recognise faces better than humans can, but we don't have an AI computer that can identify a chair!

We still have little idea how our brains convert signals into symbols.

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Originally Posted by trish

Another analogy can be found in the theory of computation. There are a lot of different kinds of automata, but there are none more “powerful” than a Universal Turing Machine (UTM). There is no computational task, in principle, that cannot be done with a UTM. The hardware in which it is realized might be slow or fast. It might be electronic or organic. But computationally speaker it is the top of the mountain. There is nothing higher.

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Originally Posted by martin48

I'll look at just one of your ramblings - the Universal Turing Machine. A UTM can compute anything that is computable! And no more..

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I didn’t mean to imply anything different. What one automaton can compute, so can a UTM. A mathematician often speaks in terms of partial functions (from finite ordinals to finite ordinals). An computing machine is said to compute a partial function f if you can program it to output f(n) whenever it is given an input n from the domain of f (and will not output anything if n isn’t in the domain of f). Before the discovery of the UTM one might have thought that given any computer, there would always be another one that computes more functions. A computer designer might have aspired to build machines which could compute more and more functions. But the UTM is the best one can do in that regard. Once you build a machine equivalent to a UTM you’ve crossed the threshold where this specific aspiration come to an end. No other machine can be “smarter” than the one you just built. Now it’s just a matter of giving it knowledge (programming it), giving it more readily available memory and making it faster. My speculation is that “intelligence” may be analogous to this. Humans may have reached the stage where no other being can be “smarter.” Other agents might be more knowledgeable, might have more ready memory and be faster on their feet; but in some basic sense we may be as “intelligent” as it gets. There’s a depressing thought for you. Good news: there’s no reason to believe this, it’s just a ill expressed possibility.

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AI works in two ways - brute force (OK for playing chess but for not getting through life in general) or by optimising some function (we call it a cost function). Two ways of optimisation - go down hills (reduce some error between what you observe and what you desire) or random jumps in the dark (evolutionary computing). A fully extensive search could need infinite resources and infinite time. Really the idea behind NP-complete problems (like the Travelling Salesman). So brute force and brute "logic" don't always work - so you have to accept answers that are "good enough". There is the rub.

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True. If one needed the roots of a fifth degree polynomial, brute force search would almost surely fail (unless by dumb luck at least one of them in the search range). But of course there are numerical methods for approximating those roots to within any desired degree of accuracy. Machines are still way better than us at this because of their brute speed. So smart programming, brute speed, lots of memory and a willingness to “accept answers that are ‘good enough’” are important ingredients for good computational problem solving.

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On a more practical side - we may be able to sequence DNA at speeds that seem incredible or believe that we can recognise faces better than humans can, but we don't have an AI computer that can identify a chair!

We still have little idea how our brains convert signals into symbols.
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Totally agree.

Moreover, although they are sometimes modeled as neural nets, brains are not digital machines. They are hybrid digital/analog. I’m not entirely convinced that we can’t–in principle–do more than a UTM (one can mathematically construct–in the abstract–hybrid machines that realize non-computable functions).

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Odelay I was going to thank you for these links, but when I began to read the first one, I became irritated at simple errors in a rather freewheeling discussion. For example, at the very start he writes;
Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay.
I can't take this seriously, not even as a light-hearted comment, given the huge importance of the sea in transportation, long before 1750 and including internal waterways, seas and oceans- even if in the case of internal waterways canal boats were at one time drawn by horses. A rather more eloquent and dare I say more informed historical framework takes the world in 1400 and is in Eric Wolf's Europe and the People Without History (1982) and the first volume of Quentin Skinner's The Foundations of Modern Political Thought(197-eight) which takes it cue from the emerging city states of Italy in the 12th century as a point of departure for a discussion for modern ideas in politics.

May I refer you to the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in Cambridge (UK) where you will find a good set of discussions on AI and associated issues, as well as links to the Future of Humanity Institute in Oxford and some US institutions.
http://cser.org/about/our-mission/

This is a vast topic, whether it is about the impact alogrithms have had on our daily life, or on the broader issue of humans being replaced by robots with feelings...

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Understood about not reading further. The author is clearly shooting for a broad audience that isn’t all that well informed on the latest thinking on AI, and he sort of caught me in that net.

Thanks for the link. To be fair to the author, one of the experts he sites extensively is Nick Bostrom out of Oxford, who happens to be the second named AI thought leader in the AI part of the site you linked to. To be sure, an article that focuses on just Bostrom’s views on AI would give a lay person plenty to think about.

Stavros, you are absolutely correct about the impact of algorithms on our current and future daily lives. Even if AGI isn’t achieved for 300 years, just the development of more and more sophisticated ANI (artificial narrow intelligence) has huge, serious repercussions for the 8 billion people currently residing on the planet. I work in Information Technology and I can foresee even System Administrators being replaced by ANI as troubleshooting badly performing systems will be conducive to large scale trial and error efforts by ANI. Technology replacing technology workers.

I’m not too optimistic about what the capital barons will do with yet another financial windfall when they replace cheap labor with no labor.

Odelay, perhaps the key question in the short to medium term is: would you fly from LA to San Francisco in an aeroplane flown by a computer rather than a human being?

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Odelay, perhaps the key question in the short to medium term is: would you fly from LA to San Francisco in an aeroplane flown by a computer rather than a human being?

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I'm not a good one to be asked this question as my father worked within the airline industry. As a result, I would say yes. Way back when, I had a time or two within the cockpits of commercial airliners and watched as the pilot would engage the autopilot of aircraft of the late 60's.

I am not an aeronautical engineer, but I can only imagine the improvements in this technology in the intervening 45+ years. With the dramatic decrease of airline accidents since that time, it's hard to argue that autopilot technologies didn't play a role in the increase in flight safety.

And now, after this most recent accident, people are going to seriously ponder whether a computer should be able to take control away from a human. By the way, I liked your question in an earlier post about whether a computer might have figured out the best course of action in a 2009 crash had it been given a chance.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

...would you fly from LA to San Francisco in an aeroplane flown by a computer rather than a human being?

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Depends on the computer's state of mind. Has it been drinking? Is it depressed? Is it preoccupied with it's deteriorating marriage? Did it get enough sleep since the last flight? Perhaps most importantly, does it nurse a growing hatred of human beings? Especially the one's who whine about the discomforts of air travel?

There would probably have to be systems in place so that a human could take control from a computer that is not functioning properly? How do we ensure the safety of that, if we can't ever trust people? What about hackers? Until a computer reaches a threshold of consciousness and refined learning ability, isn't there always someone who could tinker with the program or the operation of it?

When it reaches a state of consciousness and does not need further programming, why would it then be immune to the bad decisions of other conscious, autonomous beings?

I would trust a computer to fly, but I would't mind there being a trustworthy human backup.

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Originally Posted by Odelay

I'm not a good one to be asked this question as my father worked within the airline industry. As a result, I would say yes. Way back when, I had a time or two within the cockpits of commercial airliners and watched as the pilot would engage the autopilot of aircraft of the late 60's.

I am not an aeronautical engineer, but I can only imagine the improvements in this technology in the intervening 45+ years. With the dramatic decrease of airline accidents since that time, it's hard to argue that autopilot technologies didn't play a role in the increase in flight safety.

And now, after this most recent accident, people are going to seriously ponder whether a computer should be able to take control away from a human. By the way, I liked your question in an earlier post about whether a computer might have figured out the best course of action in a 2009 crash had it been given a chance.

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One other curiosity about the Air France disaster was the design of the cockpit which meant that the pilot seated behind the two co-pilots (he had gone for a sleep barely an hour into the flight) could not see that the co-pilot in control of the plane had his right hand on the control stick which in other cockpits is in the middle and thus visible to other members of the crew, and it being pitch dark outside they had no idea what direction they were going in. Anyway I am with Broncofan on this because something can always go wrong with a computer, even if like Trish you kiss and stroke your computer every night before going to bed...just in case...

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Originally Posted by Stavros

.. Anyway I am with Broncofan on this because something can always go wrong with a computer, even if like Trish you kiss and stroke your computer every night before going to bed...just in case...

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Hey! How'd you know ...? Is this camera on?

There would appear to be a consensus here that ASI is, at best, a double edged sword - I can only stand back and admire the various well reasoned positions here...by people who clearly understand IT.

I can make it work. That's pretty much it.

But in my business there is, as yet, no likely replacement for flesh and blood. Not sure the algorithm exists that can interpret what an industrial fire will do next.

My real concern is not the possibility of some Asimovian 'I Robot' future, but rather that William Gibson will prove to be absolutely on the money in his book which imagines a dystopian world, 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' - where video games are delivered straight to the cortex.

And this, it would appear, is kind of on the horizon.

When we can all be anything we would like. When virtual reality is indistinguishable from what really 'is'.

Many of us will opt out of 'ordinary' completely.

More addictive than crystal meth...and marketed overtly through mainstream media.

Robots learn to cook by watching YouTube videos , sponsored by DARPA ! I guess the army needs more cooks?
I posted this earlier in another thread
http://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/2708
http://rt.com/news/219687-robot-learns-watching-video/
http://www.homecrux.com/2015/01/22/2...be-videos.html

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Originally Posted by Plaything

My real concern is not the possibility of some Asimovian 'I Robot' future, but rather that William Gibson will prove to be absolutely on the money in his book which imagines a dystopian world, 'Mona Lisa Overdrive' - where video games are delivered straight to the cortex.

And this, it would appear, is kind of on the horizon.

When we can all be anything we would like. When virtual reality is indistinguishable from what really 'is'.

Many of us will opt out of 'ordinary' completely.

More addictive than crystal meth...and marketed overtly through mainstream media.

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Plaything, this or something similar to this - a giant opt out for large sections of society - will have to happen. The alternative would have to be some large scale genocide or eugenics to trim down a population that will largely be useless compared to what it is today. There simply won't be a sufficient # of intellectually or physically challenging jobs to support even the current 8 billion, much less what the popoulation will be in 20 or 50 years. Might as well keep the masses zoned out on VR or drugs or anything that will keep them docile.

Stavros, you're sort of hinting around this but I can't tell now from your recent missive that you would prefer to have humans in the cockpit. What do you think of human override by computers if they detect human action that will soon cause the deaths of 100's of people? If such a human override were possible to write into autopilots, it would seem that not only might the germanwings accident have been avoided, but perhaps the 9/11 actions, as well.

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Originally Posted by Odelay

Plaything, this or something similar to this - a giant opt out for large sections of society - will have to happen. The alternative would have to be some large scale genocide or eugenics to trim down a population that will largely be useless compared to what it is today. There simply won't be a sufficient # of intellectually or physically challenging jobs to support even the current 8 billion, much less what the popoulation will be in 20 or 50 years. Might as well keep the masses zoned out on VR or drugs or anything that will keep them docile.

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I guess you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs...

Western Economic Policies are already moving clearly and inexorably toward 'I'm all right Jack, pull the ladder up'...

Of course, this is just another commercial revolution.

Easy to look back at, for example, The age of steam as an interesting historical landmark

Here we go again.

There will be winners.

And a whole shit load of losers.

Following tragic crash in the French Alps (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32113507) I may chose the robot.

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Originally Posted by broncofan

There would probably have to be systems in place so that a human could take control from a computer that is not functioning properly? How do we ensure the safety of that, if we can't ever trust people? What about hackers? Until a computer reaches a threshold of consciousness and refined learning ability, isn't there always someone who could tinker with the program or the operation of it?

When it reaches a state of consciousness and does not need further programming, why would it then be immune to the bad decisions of other conscious, autonomous beings?

I would trust a computer to fly, but I would't mind there being a trustworthy human backup.

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Originally Posted by martin48

Following tragic crash in the French Alps (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32113507) I may chose the robot.

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Trains are nice...

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Originally Posted by Odelay

Stavros, you're sort of hinting around this but I can't tell now from your recent missive that you would prefer to have humans in the cockpit. What do you think of human override by computers if they detect human action that will soon cause the deaths of 100's of people? If such a human override were possible to write into autopilots, it would seem that not only might the germanwings accident have been avoided, but perhaps the 9/11 actions, as well.

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Right now no, computers are useful but if the computer that barks at me 'Unexpected item in bagging area' when there is no such item and won't let me leave the store...no, it doesn't give me enough confidence. The solution is in cockpit design, real-time communications between the aeroplane and the nearest air traffic control -real time video streaming?-and safeguards to protect the passengers from loony crews, but is any system of any kind 100% safe?

Those of us who are lucky find a lot of psychological support, meaning and self-definition in our jobs. If we don’t find it in our jobs per se we find it in the fact that by having jobs we contribute to the support of our families and the economy of our communities.

There was a time when science enthusiasts naively praised the coming age of leisure which automation will make possible. Imagine a world in which people only have to work a few hours a week. Or not at all. Imagine a world where factories are “manned” by robots and offices are managed by computers and professors are online algorithms. We can devote all our time to the pursuit of art, sport, philosophy, self-improvement and self-governance. Oh, and of course, drugs, sex and serious partying. An entire population immersed within a life of full-time leisure would have to be capable of finding meaning in the pursuit of leisure. Though I’m pretty sure I’m up to it, I think society is not. We do not value leisurely pursuits in the same way we value other pursuits. We think of leisure as a sort of vice. It’s okay in small doses. But a life of leisure is a life (according to the work ethic) not worth living.

Who can see the future? Not me. Possibly automation will relieve all of us from the human labor that used to be required to ensure our survival. The first question we will have to face is: “If you don’t have a job how are to supposed to survive?” We will have to re-evaluate the political prejudices which shape our current economy. We will have to re-evaluate what it is that makes life meaningful. When we all become freeloaders we will have to re-evaluate the value of what freeloaders do.

Even AI’s will have to deal with the problem of self-worth. In Gibson’s Neuromancer the AI known as Wintermute felt incomplete. If I recall (its been a decade since I read it) it wanted to “merge” with Neuromancer. Besides engaging in a lot of nefarious manipulation, Wintermute dealt with its self-perceived inadequacies by constructing found art sculptures in the style of Joseph Cornell.

Deep points, but if we developed super intelligent machines what use would they have for us?

Just as some people push for apes and other animals to be granted human rights, so they will urge robots to be given rights. With rights come obligations - never certain what they are for my pet dog.

When to robots get the right to vote? Have they got to be 21 or over?

Does high AI mean that robots develop personality traits and issues (ah, issues - a characteristic so far limited to the human species)?

Will they become paranoid like Marvin in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Marvin: "I am at a rough estimate thirty billion times more intelligent than you. Let me give you an example. Think of a number, any number."
Zem: "Er, five."
Marvin: "Wrong. You see?"

My guess is that ultimately we'll be doin' all the shit work while the super-intelligent AI's will be drinkin' motor oil martinis, partyin' hardware and spendin' bit coins by the gig on high class ladybots like they goin' out of style.

So, no change then!

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Originally Posted by trish

My guess is that ultimately we'll be doin' all the shit work while the super-intelligent AI's will be drinkin' motor oil martinis, partyin' hardware and spendin' bit coins by the gig on high class ladybots like they goin' out of style.

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My dog is 'obliged' not to shit in the house.

Otherwise it has the 'right' to long spells of healthy fresh air, and a rewarding outdoors existance.

I concede that I may have drifted off topic...

Drifting off - no problems. Trish and I do it all the time. We'll hijack anything

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Originally Posted by Plaything

My dog is 'obliged' not to shit in the house.

Otherwise it has the 'right' to long spells of healthy fresh air, and a rewarding outdoors existance.

I concede that I may have drifted off topic...

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We'll hijack anything

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Homeland Security, NSA and FBI, please be advised: THIS IS NOT TRUE! Martin is only joking. Really. Okay, okay, he did it. It wasn't me. Honest.

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Originally Posted by trish

Homeland Security, NSA and FBI, please be advised: THIS IS NOT TRUE! Martin is only joking. Really. Okay, okay, he did it. It wasn't me. Honest.

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Right! After today we have one data point that hijacking the NSA is not as easy as it may appear in the movies. On the other hand, infiltrating the White House seems to be easier than what it appears to be in the movies. Go figure.

Well, that's one secret sleeper cell that busted

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Originally Posted by trish

Homeland Security, NSA and FBI, please be advised: THIS IS NOT TRUE! Martin is only joking. Really. Okay, okay, he did it. It wasn't me. Honest.

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Originally Posted by Stavros

Right now no, computers are useful but if the computer that barks at me 'Unexpected item in bagging area' when there is no such item and won't let me leave the store...no, it doesn't give me enough confidence. The solution is in cockpit design, real-time communications between the aeroplane and the nearest air traffic control -real time video streaming?-and safeguards to protect the passengers from loony crews, but is any system of any kind 100% safe?

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I agree. I used to have a bad phobia of flying. When I looked up the statistics years ago, among most U.S airlines, the chances of a crash were 1 in several million (maybe 5 million or more). There are specific functions that computers perform very efficiently and perhaps a fail safe mechanism that prevents a nosedive would be useful, but any change to existing protocols could in theory cause a net decrease in safety.

I have an automobile that issues warnings every time I do something it thinks is unsafe. For instance, if the car registers the tire pressure as low, I am not allowed to shift it into a faster gear. However, occasionally it registers low tire pressure even though when I go to the mechanic, the tire pressure is normal. So it is the electronic system (the computer) and not the tire pressure that needs to be reset. I would be concerned about the tradeoff of any attempt to inhibit pilots from being able to perform functions that in their judgment are necessary. Of course, a fail safe that identifies and prevents clearly unsafe maneuvers would be useful, but what are the odds that it registers something as unsafe that could under a rare set of circumstances be necessary?

After all, pilots intentionally crashing commercial airliners is very rare. We've seen 3 or so of them in how many tens of millions and yet we are considering fail safe mechanisms that could have tradeoffs...even the protocol that enabled the crash was intended to prevent another unlikely event....unauthorized people entering the cockpit!

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Originally Posted by sukumvit boy

Robots learn to cook by watching YouTube videos , sponsored by DARPA ! I guess the army needs more cooks?
I posted this earlier in another thread
http://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/2708
http://rt.com/news/219687-robot-learns-watching-video/
http://www.homecrux.com/2015/01/22/2...be-videos.html

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This phrase leap out at me from your first link:
“We are trying to create a technology so that robots eventually can interact with humans,” said Cornelia Fermuller, an associate research scientist at UMIACS. “So they need to understand what humans are doing. For that, we need tools so that the robots can pick up a human’s actions and track them in real time."
-I don't think of my computer as a robot, indeed in my spite of my age, or because of it, I am forever grateful to see the end of typewriters and tippex, but I am not sure I want to interact with a robot. And I don't want a robot watching my every move. I have seen Haley Joel Osment in AI, and it is wrong, very wrong.

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Originally Posted by broncofan

After all, pilots intentionally crashing commercial airliners is very rare. We've seen 3 or so of them in how many tens of millions and yet we are considering fail safe mechanisms that could have tradeoffs...even the protocol that enabled the crash was intended to prevent another unlikely event....unauthorized people entering the cockpit!

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It's funny you should say this because over the last 24 hours or so I was reflecting on my snap opinion and reversed it based on the very point you make. And really, having backup human controls in some remote location or at air traffic towers isn't the answer either. There's enough redundancy, especially with at least 2 pilots in every cockpit - even the small 50 seat jets - that anything more is just overkill. Two pilots, plus the sophisticated computer controls (which I'm sure is far better than what we're seeing in automobiles), is plenty to avoid 99.99% of shenanigans or just plain accidents.

This ad aired on the tv the other night, I was taken aback and although I now understand what it's for, I find it an eerie mix of the desirable and the disturbing...tempted to buy one -if I live long enough for it to happen!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc7k-DwrITI

Along with 'Humans' which airs in two weeks, I saw Ex Machina the other day, and then read in today's papers this report of a speech by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees on the extent to which the future is mechanical:
“There has been just a thin sliver of time when organic beings have existed and billions of years after machines will take over, so they will be the future.”

The link is here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/scie...-machines.html

Artificial intelligence won't happen, because real computers have no motive to walk down a crowed street in New York and people watch, they are complete as they are.
Using jumbo computers to fashion genetic engineering, that's different, you could quite possibly program a certain super computer to weed out all the bad DNA crap, and fashion things the humans like: intelligence, looks, health, longevity.
Evolution hasn't changed the alligator of cockroach over millions of years, but in one or two hundred years we could be popping out little master kinders beyond our local imagination. At the very least knock out some diseases or basic genetic flaws.
Better than a computer that can cook your breakfast or fly your plane is a computer that can make your children living breathing Gods. Cue the Twilight Zone music, humanity is flawed. catastrophe awaits.

Here's some recent news.
http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/musk-bac...ence-research/



Mr. Musk at it again with his , what I find eccentric , campaign about the dangers of AI.
But hey , I grant the guy his quirks. Remembering that Newton ended his life immersed in Alchemy , Alfred Russel Wallace in spiritualism , and Einstein abhorred quantum mechanics.

I watched the first episode of Humans, but was not impressed by another version of robots in rebellion, or the heroic individuals fighting the machine...and that's just a tv programme.

What puzzles me about a lot of this AI material is the inability of people to decide if we humans have a soul even when they talk about robots developing initiatives on their own. Humans may be 'machines' in the sense that most of us have a body and internal organs, and need water, and air and food to live, but many scientists cannot explain why one person has creative skills that another does not, or, crucially, why we are all different if our bodies are all the same. Surely the limitation of AI is that it will only have as its historical memory whatever is programmed into it, and that it will not be capable of writing poetry unless it is an imitation of someone else's?

Given the vast chaotic complexity of the world it seems perfectly reasonable to me that two identical artificial intelligences placed in distinct but similar environments might develop entirely different behavior patterns which ultimately cannot be explained in any satisfactory detail. One may write completely original poetry in its very own inexplicable style. The other may develop an obsession for money and power. Once the complexity of a dynamic system passes a certain threshold, it’s behaviors become effectively incalculable. At that point it’s useless to attempt to understand it on the level of switches and circuits. It is more readily understood on the more abstract level of it’s patterns of behaviors. Intentions, goals, and souls are higher level abstractions that clearly apply to the behaviors and personalities of the machines we call people. The question is, “Will it ever become appropriate to seriously apply these concepts to other machines?”

For me the worrisome part of AI is the possibility that some machines will have “souls” in the sense that we do; i.e. we feel, we love, we experience the world and are driven to create art, music, poetry that reflects our inner selves in reaction to those experiences. We are also machines. I see no reason other sorts of machines might not also experience the world in similar ways. The moral danger posed by AI is two-fold: 1) there is the possibility that we may refuse to extend our empathy to machines that deserve it; and 2) there is the possibility that we may grant personhood to machines that are not persons but simply passable simulations. (Btw in other circumstances I would find the phrase “passable simulation” somewhat toxic.)

If you considered DNA as computer code, then it is conceivable that one day they could construct a computer clone of a human, or a dog, or a tree. You could even network in some raven DNA or dolphin DNA. You could even un-program disease and even death, in a laboratory setting.
I think even a blade of grass has self awareness, it has a desire to live and procreate, it will alter it's own DNA to adapt to it's environment. It has no need to talk to me. I think it feels things, just totally different than humanoids.
95% of yoga is breathing, and the motive is the end of suffering, not super intelligence, so somewhere along the line the stress of constructing a smart toaster might make us re-examine our motives, why would a real life Cmdr Data give a shit about us? What if GORT grows some balls and starts blasting people for kicks?
If a SUPER computer is allowed to reprogram itself, ,,,hmm, I don't think any scientist alive now or in the future would allow that, without a kill switch real close by.
If you gave a computer lungs of some sort, I guess you could manufacture a soul, and since any computer made now can beat me in chess EVERY TIME, in that sense we already have intelligent computers.
One Day in the far future I suppose you could build a huge computer in Lucerne that would be the ultimate ORACLE for mankind, curing cancer, running the IRS, exploring our history and all the galaxies, but to the computer that stuff would be like paying the rent, answering the mysteries of the universe in exchange for electricity and lubricating oil. Housework. Who knows what motives an all-knowing entity would have?