RE: Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris
November 4, 2016 at 10:26 am
(This post was last modified: November 4, 2016 at 10:32 am by I_am_not_mafia.)
I need to start a thread called "Can Sam Harris talk about AI without me losing control?"
I've ranted on the thinking atheist about Sam Harris. He's fear mongering and is talking out of his arse on this one I'm afraid Alisdair. At the same time destroying all credibility of the field when it's difficult enough to get any kind of work in it as it is compared to other scientific fields. He clearly has no practical experience of Artificial Intelligence and makes layman assumptions that demonstrate this.
I won't repeat myself but in a nutshell what he's talking about is so far in the future that he could just as easily be standing up there warning of the dangers of space travel because one day we might invent some kind of inter-galactic drive, meet aliens and get destroyed.
It's mere speculation or fantasy, because we just don't know what kind of technology would allow us to achieve strong AI of the level he is talking about, so we can't say what form the AI would take. As I've said elsewhere, a quantum computer will give us completely different AI to a biological or DNA computer.
Another more relevant example, it is as equally far fetched to stand up there and say that we shouldn't be researching neuroscience because we might edit ourselves to extinction. Yet he doesn't warn about this. After all, the knowledge that would be required would be the same for us to create the kind of AI that he's talking about. Neuroscience is a top down field which tells us what the brain does, computational neuroscience tells us how it does it, artificial intelligence tells us why it does it. All three are necessary scientific endeavours for understanding ourselves, you can't have one without the other, so as a neuroscientist he should really shut the fuck up or admit to being a total hypocrite.
I've ranted on the thinking atheist about Sam Harris. He's fear mongering and is talking out of his arse on this one I'm afraid Alisdair. At the same time destroying all credibility of the field when it's difficult enough to get any kind of work in it as it is compared to other scientific fields. He clearly has no practical experience of Artificial Intelligence and makes layman assumptions that demonstrate this.
I won't repeat myself but in a nutshell what he's talking about is so far in the future that he could just as easily be standing up there warning of the dangers of space travel because one day we might invent some kind of inter-galactic drive, meet aliens and get destroyed.
It's mere speculation or fantasy, because we just don't know what kind of technology would allow us to achieve strong AI of the level he is talking about, so we can't say what form the AI would take. As I've said elsewhere, a quantum computer will give us completely different AI to a biological or DNA computer.
Another more relevant example, it is as equally far fetched to stand up there and say that we shouldn't be researching neuroscience because we might edit ourselves to extinction. Yet he doesn't warn about this. After all, the knowledge that would be required would be the same for us to create the kind of AI that he's talking about. Neuroscience is a top down field which tells us what the brain does, computational neuroscience tells us how it does it, artificial intelligence tells us why it does it. All three are necessary scientific endeavours for understanding ourselves, you can't have one without the other, so as a neuroscientist he should really shut the fuck up or admit to being a total hypocrite.
