Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris

[The Grand Nudger]

Thanks, I was trying to remember 2 and 3 but didn't want to watch that video again.

2. We might not be able to indefinitely improve our intelligent machines. The assumption he is making is that progress will speed up exponentially. He cannot make that assumption.

He acknowledges, at the very outset, that at some point we may not be able to improve our intelligent machines further, with the example of the two doors..in fact, and again he calls it the worst thing that would have ever happened to humanity.  Secondly, he does not..I can't stress this enough -does not- make any such assumption.  He specifically takes the time to explain why such an assumption is unneccessary more than once.  He notes, however that on processing speed alone, if it's possible to make an intelligent machine, it would be able to do more work than a human being in less time.  That's already an exponential increase.  That's not an assumption, that's objectively true even of the machines we have today...it's why we use them in the first place.  

We are limited by how long it takes us to measure, to understand, to experiment, to publish etc. We have so much that needs to be done to create the kind of AI that he is talking about, we cannot make assumptions about how society will look in a couple of hundred years time. Maybe we're in a golden age right now and it will be a steady decline as we don't make the transition to a cheaper and more abundant form of energy and the cheap oil runs out. Maybe we'll all be living in a theocracy or a fascist dictatorship. Maybe corporate capitalism will fail. There is plenty of reason to recognise it as being unsustainable in its current form. Maybe resource wars or a pandemic will destroy our increasingly fragile just in time society.  He's making the assumption that the society and economy we have now will be with us in the future. Even if our economic system continues smoothly on for the next few hundred years we still can't predict what the needs of that society will be.

Again, he acknowledges those things that would prevent us from improving our machines even if it were possible....right at the outset.....and you canl;t have actually watched that video and missed that, because he keeps referring to those things throughout the entirety of the presentation.

3. The space of possible intelligence is limited by your environment. The AI that we see now is statistical trickery. Google translate does not actually understand what you are saying. There is absolutely no way that it can. This is because it doesn't actually use that language that relate it back to itself. Understanding comes from being embodied in an environment.

....................that doesn't speak, at all, to the assumption you responded to with it.........are you trying to imply here that we -are- at or near the summit of intelligence..that human beings are the smartest possible thing in the available space...or that we couldn't "embody" an ai in an environment?