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

[The Grand Nudger]

Perhaps in any of the ways he describes in the video............or that you yourself have expressed

I'd source it for you, again, but we saw how fruitful that was the last go round. To summarize, AI is a potential threat to us for all of the same reasons that we are an -actual- threat to ourselves and other creatures, based in many instances, purely on the products and effects of our greater relative intelligence and (assumed as a matter of definition when speaking of the sort of AI being referred to) and goal seeking...without a necessity of malice or intent of harm, or even noticing that we do it, even when we try to go out of our way -not- to harm. Maybe, just maybe, the more intelligent machine -correctly- weighs given human lives lower than some other value...and whilst we might say that would be "wrong" -despite doing it ourselves..it's hard to imagine why an ai of the type envisioned would have the sort of convenient but ultimately nebulous kneejerk aversion to harming people that our biological evolution hardwired into us. We might imagine that we could control it, but we have trouble controlling the relatively lesser intelligence of human beings in precisely the same regard..and these things, in his view, have us outclassed by a wide margin. Hence the prudence in worrying about it -before- they're too smart for our own good.

None of this even approaches malfunction, or mans use -of- ai, worries all their own....or the societal crisis that such machines would almost invariably create unless they were, as he puts it, immediately put to use for the benefit of all mankind rather than their erstwhile owners. This one, amusingly, is a risk no matter how strictly we limit the function of AI, if we can...because if we use it as nothing other than a disconnected researcher to crunch data that we hand feed it..without giving it access to the outisde world...whomever happens upon it first, even if it's only as smart as a human being, ends up thousands of years ahead in the research race in short order on processing speed alone, before the next person happens upon a similar technology. He lays this out explicitly...in the video. Hopefully, we're talking about almost unfathomably benevolent human inventors here, but I doubt that's going to be the case.

Like -any- paradigm shift in technology it has immense potential for both good and harm..just as understanding nuclear forces can help us build a powerplant or a bomb, understanding intelligence could help us to lift ourselves up out of the mire, or drop us firmly back into it. Tech is neutral like that, and human beings are poor assessors of risk. We might want to have a good headstart on that count.