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

[The Grand Nudger]

No. We cannot make that assumption for the myriad of reasons I have already laid out.

It might happen. It very well might not.

Personally my best guess is as someone who develops strong AI is that we'll end up with the robot equivalent of animals for very specific environments. We've been using animals for a very long time now.

Which he -also- addressed.  Referencing the incredibly longshot that we hit upon the perfect ai design the first go round, with no safety concerns inherent -to- the design.  It becomes a human concern.  He aptly called it an oracle, and described how possession of such an oracle under our current political and economic system would or could be disastrous for reasons not at all related to the design itself.  Yes, we have been using animals for some time, do you need a list of the deleterious ways we've used them....?

I absolutely do not think that AI research has reached a critical point, but I wouldn't blame anyone for thinking that it has. The problem is one of scalability and many companies and research projects have failed because people do not appreciate this pitfall. They create a prototype or some smart program that works in a very specialised case and then think that because it works for that then they can do something useful with it. But then they find that they can't scale up their AI.

It's called the curse of dimensionality and it doesn't just affect AI but any computer program where you need to take into account multiple real world variables. Say for example you have 10 different sensors on a fighter aircraft and want to predict when a component will fail. You could plot all this on a graph and try and analyse the hyperdimensional space. Add one more sensor though and the space that you need to work with grows exponentially. The travelling salesman problem is a classic example of this. Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once and returns to the origin city? Add too many cities and you very soon run out of enough computing time available in the history of the universe.

Here;s that bizarre objection again.  Granted, some things may not be computable on grounds of time..but is intelligence one of them...because, as I;ve already mentioned...it seems like an unguided and unoptimized series of trail and error happened upon intelligence in a lot less time than all of the time in the universe.  You have an example between your ears.

There is a reason why the human brain has so many neurons and such a high connectivity between each neuron.

That reason might actually be hereditary inefficiency.  

So the problem is that people expect progress to follow exponential curve. It's taken this long to be able to achieve self driving cars what will happen in another five years? But what they aren't taking into account is that we reached this point because of the exponential doubling of processing power from Moore's law over many decades. Our understanding of intelligence hasn't progressed as fast, in fact nothing else has. And Moore's law is coming to an end.

again, preempted.  He specifically stated both that and why he doesn;t require moores law to continue, or exponential growth.  Progress, just progress, at any rate, eventually get us there.  

Another aspect to the issue of scalability, is that each small progression in AI has large changes because it affects many people. So for example, there used to be whole call centres full of people that can now be replaced by an automated system. The automated system is extremely constrained but that doesn't matter much to the thousands of people looking for new jobs. Sure, talk about this, it's an issue of socio-economics rather than AI. What Sam Harris is talking about is science fantasy.

Strange, because he -did- reference the socioeconomic impact of hypothetical ai........you just keep parroting his points, and mouthing objections he goes to the trouble of working out...all the while, claiming he doesn't address this or that, makes assumptions he explicitly disavows /w reasoning to support....clearly and ardently believing that you both disagree with the man, and that you're correcting his mistakes......