RE: Can we build AI without losing control over it? | Sam Harris
November 4, 2016 at 3:46 pm
(This post was last modified: November 4, 2016 at 3:49 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
(November 4, 2016 at 3:34 pm)Mathilda Wrote: He makes me seethe. Yet there are real problems in store for us. He talks about 50 years ahead. Well maybe he should talk about 100 hundreds years ahead. That's how many harvests we have left. Maybe he should talk about global climate change, the chance of a pandemic destroying our increasingly fragile social order, the need for asteroid mining due to the exponential curves of increase demanding and increasing depletion of resources (which would greatly benefit from AI by the way)We -should- talk about those things....and we do, but shouldn;t we also talk about the potential risks of AI? Harris didn't advocate for sticking our heads in the ground on anything, in the video I watched. This is a complete "wtf" objection both to the man himself and to the presentation in any case. Maybe physicists should lay off the dangers of nuclear weapons and talk about the disappearance of the purple horned peckleswagger for a change?
(November 4, 2016 at 3:39 pm)Tiberius Wrote: I understand he wasn't talking about robot takeover in the video. My point was a lot of people equate the two incorrectly.Right, and that isn't the sort of ai Harris was referring to, not even remotely, and he did acknowledge that the type of ai he -is- referring to may never materialize, but for that to be the case, you have to object to one of three premises. Which, in your case, bares itself out as true. You object to premise 2. Even if we could improve our thinking machines, maybe we wouldn't..maybe we would intentionally limit them to the sort of relative inanities in the examples of ai you just presented. I find that unlikely, but I don't have a crystal ball, so.
In regards to your comment on letting AI out of the box, again it really depends on what AI we are talking about. Tesla's cars already have an AI that is out in the wild, but it's an AI that is tasked with one job: keeping your car in the correct lane on a highway. It's literally impossible for that AI to develop new functionality. The only "intelligence" it has is to interpret its sensors and react accordingly according to a set of rules which is has to follow.
This is the state of AI at the moment, and likely will be for a long time, maybe forever. AI is designed to do a specific job; it's not designed to do anything further than that job, and in many ways it can't.
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