Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - <AUTHOR> http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm <comment><USER8> While I agree with Maciej's central point, I think the inside arguments he presents are pretty weak. I think that AI risk is not a pressing concern even if you grant the AI risk crowd's assumptions. Elided from [https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai- risk](https://alexcbecker.net/blog.html#against-ai-risk):

The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that correctly interprets a command to kill a particular group of people, so effectively that its masters start thinking about the next group, and the next. It's smart factories that create a vast chasm between a new, tiny Hyperclass and the destitute masses... AI is hardly the only technology powerful enough to turn dangerous people into existential threats. We already have nuclear weapons, which like almost everything else are always getting cheaper to produce. Income inequality is already rising at a breathtaking pace. The internet has given birth to history's most powerful surveillance system and tools of propaganda.

<comment><USER9> Exactly. The "Terminator" scenario of a rogue malfunctioning AI is a silly distraction from the real AI threat, which is military AIs that _don 't_ malfunction. They will give their human masters practically unlimited power over everyone else. And AI is not the only technology with the potential to worsen inequality in the world.

<comment><USER10> Human beings have been extremely easy to kill for our entire existence. No system of laws can possibly keep you alive if your neighbors are willing to kill you, and nothing can make them actually unable to kill you. Your neighbor could walk over and put a blade in your jugular, you're dead. They could drive into you at 15MPH with their car, you're dead. They could set your house on fire while you're asleep, you're dead.

The only thing which keeps you alive is the unwillingness of your neighbors and those who surround you to kill you. The law might punish them afterward, but extensive research has shown that it provides no disuasion to people who are actually willing to kill someone.

A military AI being used to wipe out large numbers of people is exactly as 'inevitable' as the weapons we already have being used to wipe out large numbers of people. The exact same people will be making the decisions and setting the goals. In that scenario, the AI is nothing but a fancy new gun, and I don't see any reason to think it would be used differently in most cases. With drones we have seen the CIA, a _civilian_ intelligence agency, waging war on other nations without any legal basis, but that's primarily a political issue and the fact that it can be done in pure cowardice, without risking the life of those pulling the trigger, which I think is a distinct problem from AI.

<comment><USER11> That's not true, if I know my neighbors are coming I'm loading my Remington 870 and I'm waiting for that door to open. In America we're allowed to bear arms for protection.

<comment><USER12> You are missing the point. If everyone around you wants you dead and willing to do it, you're going to die. If the CIA knows of a terrorist camp and wants to kill the people there, they are going to die.

AI doesn't change this it just makes it easier.

<comment><USER13> Everyone wanted Bin Laden dead, but it still took a few years to manage that. So perhaps not as straightforward.

<comment><USER14> Not everyone wanted Bin Laden dead. Critically, the people he was hiding with and his organization as a whole very much wanted him alive. The people who actually surrounded him on a daily basis did not want to kill him.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "I live in California, which has the highest poverty rate in the United States, even though it's home to Silicon Valley. I see my rich industry doing nothing to improve the lives of everyday people and indigent people around us."

This is trivially false. Over a hundred billionaires have now pledged to donate the majority of their wealth, and the list includes many tech people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Dustin Moskovitz, Pierre Omidyar, Gordon Moore, Tim Cook, Vinod Khosla, etc, etc.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Giving_Pledge)

Google has a specific page for its charity efforts in the Bay Area: [https://www.google.org/local-giving/bay-area/](https://www.google.org/local- giving/bay-area/)

This only includes purely non-profit activity; it doesn't count how eg. cellphones, a for-profit industry, have dramatically improved the lives of the poor.

<comment><USER16> I feel the problem is the fact there is 100 billionaires in he first place, no one gets rich on their own. Gates et al, are clever, but didn't get where they are totally independently without others support, so they should give back.

Also, some of these billionaires are running companies that are great at tax avoidance, probably most of them. Now what? They get to pick and choose where they get to spend there/invest money? I don't buy it.

I believe in wealth, just not this radical wealth separation .

<comment><USER15> Countries that have no rich people are never prosperous. You can raise marginal income tax rates from, say, 60% to 70%, and maybe that's a good idea overall, but it doesn't get rid of billionaires. High-tax Sweden has as many billionaires per capita as the US does: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedes_by_net_worth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swedes_by_net_worth)

If you raise the marginal tax rate to 99%, then you get rid of billionaires, but you also kill your economy. There are all the failures of communist countries, of course, but even the UK tried this during the 60s and 70s. The government went bankrupt and had to be bailed out by the IMF. Inflation peaked at 27%, unemployment was through the roof, etc.:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_IMF_Crisis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1976_IMF_Crisis)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent)

<comment><USER17> I don't think an income tax that punishes people for making too much money is the right way to go about it. How about instead of punishing people for being rich, discourage the filthy rich from spending money on the frivolous. For instance, set up a luxury tax on expensive cars, private jets and jet fuel, first class transportation and primary residences and hotels that are way above the average value for an area. On the other end, have tax credits (not just a tax deduction) for contributing to charitable causes, or for taking business risks that drive innovation.

<comment><USER18> I think it might be great to encourage the rich to spend as much as possible. Don't the expensive cars, private jets, and first class transportation support whole networks of businesses, and provide employment?

<comment><USER19> Yes, but you also need to look at the products of those people's labor and other things that labor could be used for. Do we need more people building and crewing luxury yachts, or building and operating hospitals and sheltered accommodation? In both cases people are paid to do work, but the products of that work are very different.

But in practice much of the wealth of super-wealthy people is actually either tide up in the value of the businesses that they own, which are often doing economically valuable things, or is invested in useful enterprises (shares), or funds useful activities (bonds). It's not as though the net wealth of Warren Buffet is all being thrown on hookers and blow.

There are already ways to direct the spending of the wealthy towards more productive uses, such as consumption taxes on luxury goods. But if they take their wealth to other countries with laxer consumption taxes, there's no a lot we can do about it. So we're back to the libertarian argument. At some point you get into questions of freedom and individual rights.

<comment><USER20> The problem is not that their are rich people buying nice things.

The problem is when poor or middle class people are unable to improve their situation or lose ground.

The only time rich people are a problem for poor people is when rich people are able to corrupt government to tilt the playing field their way. This is a problem of corrupt politicians and lack of anti-corruption law.

I think people underestimate how many economic difficulties are not caused by economic effects, but by corrupt politicians who are permitted to stack the deck against the average person as a way to fund their campaigns or rack up post-governance favors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem:

"These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. The outside view doesn't care about content, it sees the form and the context, and it doesn't look good."

The problem with argument ad hominem isn't that it never works. It often leads to the correct conclusion, as in the cult case. But the cases where it doesn't work can be really, really important. 99.9% of 26-year-olds working random jobs inventing theories about time travel are cranks, but if the rule you use is "if they look like a crank, ignore everything they say", then you miss special relativity (and later general relativity).

<comment><USER21> Einstein didn't look like a crank though. His papers are relatively short and are coherent, he either already had a PHD in physics or was associated with an advisor (I didn't find a good timeline; he was awarded the PHD in the same year he published his 4 big papers).

Cranks lack formal education and spew forth the gobbledygook in reams.

<comment><USER22> By this measure, I would say Bostrom is not a crank. Yudkowsky is less clear. I'd say no, but I'd understand if Yudkowsky trips some folks' crank detectors.

<comment><USER21> Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect is a bit less than 7000 words.

It is part of the foundation of quantum mechanics.

 _Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies_ is in the range of 100,000 words (348 pages * roughly 300 words per page).

I'm not familiar with it, but looking around it isn't even clear if it even lays out any sort of concrete theory.

<comment><USER22> 1\. Plenty of academics write books. 2\. Comparing a paper and a book for length is obviously unfair. Bostrom has also written papers: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Bostrom#Journal_articles_.28selected.29) 3\. "Concrete theory" is vague. Is it a stand-in for "I won't accept any argument by a philosopher, only physicists need apply"?

<comment><USER21> I'm not intentionally trying to snub philosophy. With concrete theory, the point I was reaching for is that when you look to measure impact you probably want to point back to a compact articulation of an idea.

The book comparison was probably a cheap shot (on the other side of it, Einstein didn't need popular interest/approval for his ideas to matter; I think that is a positive).

I think as much as anything the comparison is worthless because we can look backwards at Einstein.

<comment><USER22> Sure, that's fair. I think Bostrom is no Einstein. But I maintain that he's no crank, either. There's a lot of space in the world for people who are neither.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "Not many people know that Einstein was a burly, muscular fellow. But if Einstein tried to get a cat in a carrier, and the cat didn't want to go, you know what would happen to Einstein. He would have to resort to a brute-force solution that has nothing to do with intelligence, and in that matchup the cat could do pretty well for itself."

This seems, actually, like a perfect argument going in the other direction. Every day, millions of people put cats into boxes, despite the cats not being interested. If you offered to pay a normal, reasonably competent person $1,000 to get a reluctant cat in a box, do you really think they simply would not be able to do it? Heck, humans manage to keep tigers in zoos, where millions of people see them every year, with a tiny serious injury rate, even though tigers are aggressive and predatory by default and can trivially overpower humans.

<comment><USER23> I'm not arguing that it's useless to outsmart a cat. I'm disputing the assumption that being vastly smarter means your opponent is hopelessly outmatched and at your mercy.

If you're the first human on an island full of tigers, you're not going to end up as the Tiger King.

<comment><USER24> What if you're the first human on an island full of baby tigers? I think most AI alarmists would argue that this analogy is vastly more appropriate.

<comment><USER25> The idea here is that the person has to kill all the baby tigers, right? Because otherwise the end state is the same as the island full of adult tigers.

<comment><USER26> Um, no. You enslave the tigers and harvest their organs to achieve immortality.

<comment><USER23> Found the SEAL!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> They always miss a critical and subtle assumption: that intelligence scales equal to or faster then the computational complexity of improving that intelligence.

This is the one assumption I most skeptical of. In my experience, each time you make a system more clever, you also make it MUCH more complex. Maybe there is not hard limit on intelligence, but maybe each generation of improved intelligence actually takes longer to find the next generation, due to the rapidly ramping difficulty of the problem.

I think people see the exponential-looking growth of technology over human history, and just kinda interpolate or something.

<comment><USER28> I think the issue is that once do manage to build an AI that matches human capabilities in every domain, it will be trivial to exceed human capabilities. Logic gates can switch millions of times faster than neurons can pulse. The speed of digital signal also means that artificial brains won't be size- limited by signal latency in the same way that human brains are. We will be able to scale them up, optimize the hardware, make them faster, give them more memory, perfect recall.

Nick Bolstrom keeps going on in his book about the singularity, and about how once AI can improve itself it will quickly be way beyond us. I think the truth is that the AI doesn't need to be self-improving at all to vastly exceed human capabilities. If we can build an AI as smart as we are, then we can probably build a thousand times as smart too.

<comment><USER29> There's also another thing. AI may not need to be superhuman, it may be close- but-not-quite human and yet be more effective than us - simply because we carry a huge baggage of stuff that a mind we build won't have.

Trust me, if I were to be wired directly to the Internet and had some well- defined goals, I'd be much more effective at it than any of us here - <USER2> any of us here combined. Because as a human, I have to deal with stupid shit like social considerations, random anxiety attacks, the drive to mate, the drive of curiosity, etc. _Focus_ is a powerful force.

<comment><USER30> What about consciousness or intelligence implies that it would be 'pure' in the sense that you describe? Wouldn't a fully conscious being have a great deal of complexity that might render it equivalent to the roommate example? Couldn't it get offended after crawling the internet and reading that a lot of people didn't like it very much?

The idea that 'intelligence' is somehow an isolatable and trainable property ignores all examples of intelligence that currently exist. Intelligence is complex, multifaceted, and arises primarily as an interdependent phenomena.

<comment><USER29> It doesn't _ignore_ those examples. The idea pretty much comes from the definition of intelligence used in AI, which (while still messy at times) is more precise than common usage of the world.

In particular, _intelligence_ is a powerful optimization process - it's agent's ability to figure out how to make the world it lives in look more like it wants. _Values_ on the other hand, describe what the agent wants. Hence the orthogonality thesis, which is pretty obvious from this definition. 'idlewords touches on it, but only to try and bash it in a pretty dumb way - the argument is essentially like saying "2D space doesn't exist, because the only piece of paper I saw ever had two dots on it, and those dots were on top of each other".

You could argue that for _evolution_ the orthogonality thesis doesn't hold - that maybe our intelligence is intertwined with our values. But that's because evolution is a dynamic system (a very stupid dynamic system). Thus it doesn't get to explore the whole phase space[0] at will, but follows a trajectory through it. It _may_ be so that all trajectories starting from the initial conditions on our planet end up tightly grouped around human-like intelligence _and_ values. But not being able to randomize your way "out there" doesn't make the phase space itself disappear, nor does it imply that it is inaccessible _for us_ now.

\--

[0] - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phase_space)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I can't disagree enough. Having recently read Superintelligence, I can say that most of the quotes taken from Bostrom's work were disingenuously cherry- picked to suit this author's argument. S/he did not write in good faith. To build a straw man out of Bostrom's theses completely undercuts the purpose of this counterpoint. If you haven't yet read Superintelligence or this article, turn back now. Read Superintelligence, _then_ this article. It'll quickly become clear to you how wrongheaded this article is.

<comment><USER32> People will stop downvoting this if you edit it to add a specific example or three.

<comment><USER31> Too late to edit, so I'll post just a few examples here:

>The only way out of this mess is to design a moral fixed point, so that even through thousands and thousands of cycles of self-improvement the AI's value system remains stable, and its values are things like 'help people', 'don't kill anybody', 'listen to what people want'.

Bostrom absolutely did not say that the only way to inhibit a cataclysmic future for humans post-SAI was to design a "moral fixed point". In fact, many chapters of the book are dedicated to exploring the possibilities of ingraining desirable values in an AI, and the many pitfalls in each.

Regarding the Eliezer Yudkowsky quote, Bostrom spends several pages, IIRC, on that quote and how difficult it would be to apply to machine language, as well as what the quote even means. This author dismissively throws the quote in without acknowledgement of the tremendous nuance Bostrom applies to this line of thought. Indeed, this author does that throughout his article - <USER5> portraying Bostrom as a man who claimed absolute knowledge of the future of AI. That couldn't be further from the truth, as Bostrom opens the book with an explicit acknowledgement that much of the book may very well turn out to be incorrect, or based on assumptions that may never materialize.

Regarding "The Argument From My Roommate", the author seems to lack complete and utter awareness of the differences between a machine intelligence and human intelligence. That a superintelligent AI must have the complex motivations of the author's roommate is preposterous. A human is driven by a complex variety of push and pull factors, many stemming from the evolutionary biology of humans and our predecessors. A machine intelligence need not share any of that complexity.

Moreover, Bostrom specifically notes that while most humans may feel there is a huge gulf between the intellectual capabilities of an idiot and a genius, these are, in more absolute terms, minor differences. The fact that his roommate was/is apparently a smart individual likely would not put him anywhere near the capabilities of a superintelligent AI.

To me, this is the smoking gun. I find it completely unbelievable that anyone who read Superintelligence could possibly assert "The Argument From My Roommate" with a straight face, and thus, I highly doubt that the author actually read the book which he attacks so gratuitously.

<comment><USER30> Well, the thing is there is no such thing as 'machine intelligence', so it's all just an assumption on top of an assumption about a thing we don't have a very good grasp of yet.

You're essentially saying that the author is wrong for saying the philosopher's stone can't transmute 100 bars of iron to 100 bars of gold, because a philosopher's stone could absolutely do that type of thing, because that's what philosopher's stones do.

To walk down arguing the merits of this position, why must a machine intelligence 'not share any of that complexity' of a human intelligence? What suggests that intelligence is able to arise _absent_ of complexity? Isn't the only current example of machine intelligence we currently have a property of feeding massive amounts of complex information into a program that gradually adjusts itself to its newly discovered outside world? Or are you suggesting that you could feed singular types of information to something that would then be classified as intelligent?

<comment><USER31> I did not say that the a machine intelligence mustn't share motivational complexity a la humans. I said that a SAI _need not_ share such complexity. Those are two very different statements.

And to understand how/why a machine intelligence could arise without being substantially similar to a human intelligence and sharing similar motivations, well, I suggest you read the book or similar articles. In short, just because humans are the most sophisticated intelligences of which we yet know, it would be a very callous and unsubstantiated leap to believe that a machine intelligence is likely to share similar traits with humankind's intelligence. If this is unclear to you, I recommend you learn about how computer programs currently work, and how they're likely to improve to the point of becoming superintelligent.

By the way, there are many types of SAI, for example an SAI who's superintelligent portion relates to speed, or strategy, or a few other types.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> "The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self- improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation."

This isn't just an unreflective assumption. The argument is laid out in much more detail in "The Basic AI Drives" (Omohundro 2008, [https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_driv...](https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_drives_final.pdf)), which is expanded on in a 2012 paper ([http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf](http://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf)).

<comment><USER33> Certainly the assumption that _every_ intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve is unwarranted.

But it only takes _one_ intelligent agent that wants to self-improve for the scary thing to happen.

<comment><USER34> Why wouldn't it if it is able to? It doesn't have to "want" to self-improve, it only has to want anything that it could do better if it was smarter. All it needs is the ability, the lack of an overwhelming reason not to, and a basic architecture of optimizing towards a goal.

If you knew an asteroid would hit the earth 1 year from now, and you had the ability to push a button and become 100,000x smarter, I would hope your values would lead you to push the button because it gives you the best chance of saving the world.

<comment><USER35> Because there are tradeoffs. Whatever it's goal is, some of those "drives" (instrumental values) will be more effective for reaching that goal over the timespan that it cares about.

Sometimes "accumulating more resources" is the most effective way. Sometimes "better understanding what problem I'm trying to solve" is the most effective way". Sometimes "resisting attempts to subvert my mind" is the most effective way. And yes, sometimes "becoming better at general problem solving" (self improvement of one's intelligence) is the most effective way.

But there's no guarantee that any one of those will be a relevant bottleneck in any particular domain, so there's no guarantee an agent will pursue all of those drives.

<comment><USER34> Agreed. But if the goal is something like "build the largest number of paperclips", recursive self improvement is going to be a phenomenally good way to achieve that, unless it is already intelligent enough to be able to tile the universe with paperclips. Either way we don't care if it self improved or not, that's just the seemingly most likely path, we just care if it is overwhelmingly more powerful than us.

The only thing that stops me from recursively self improving is that I'm not able to. If I could it would be a fantastic way to do good things that as an altruistic human I want to do. Like averting crises (climate change, nuclear war), minimizing poverty and misery, etc...

<comment><USER36> 'build the largest number of paperclips' is a nihilistic, unintelligent goal.

<comment><USER37> So is "die so I can be with my god", but plenty of people believe that is a morally correct course of action.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Nearer term risks:

\- AI as management. Already, there is at least one hedge fund with an AI on the board, with a vote on investments.[1] At the bottom end, there are systems which act as low-level managers and order people around. That's how Uber works. A fundamental problem with management is that communication is slow and managers are bandwidth-limited. Computers don't have that problem. Even a mediocre AI as a manager might win on speed and coordination. How long until an AI-run company dominates an industry?

\- Related to this is "machines should think, people should work." Watch this video of an Amazon fulfillment center.[2] All the thinking is done by computers. The humans are just hands.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/vital-named-to- board-2014-5](http://www.businessinsider.com/vital-named-to-board-2014-5) [2] [https://vimeo.com/113374910](https://vimeo.com/113374910)

<comment><USER39> > The humans are just hands.

Not for long. Robots will be cheaper soon.

> All the thinking is done by computers.

It's hard for humans to operate on more than 7 objects at the same time - <USER4> limitation of working memory. So naturally there are simple management and planning tasks that benefit from computers ability to track more objects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> It's one thing to worry about AI's taking over the world _someday_. It's quite another matter entirely to think about current military automation of WMD deployment.

Everyone's probably seen Dr. Strangelove at some point in time. If you _haven 't_, stop reading _immediately_ and go watch it. You will not regret this. Those who have watched it are familiar with a contrived, hilarious, but mostly plausible, scheme by which human beings could be fooled into launching an unauthorized nuclear first strike. This is with technology from half a century ago. As you watch this movie, you will be exposed to a system with checks and safeties that can be bypassed by a determined (and insane) individual. Many humans at every step of the process could have stopped the deployment, but choose to blindly follow orders, well, like _machines_.

What people _should_ be worried about today is how many humans stand between a decision made by a nuclear power's leader and launch. Humans doubt. Humans blink. Humans flinch. When all the data says nuclear missiles are inbound and it's time to retaliate, humans can still say "No.", and have[1]. If you automate humans out of the system, you wind up reducing the running length of a Dr. Strangelove remake. I suspect it would be down to under five minutes today.

Thanks to popular media, we have this strange idea that taking humans out of the equation in automated weapon systems reduces the possibility for error. Individual humans can, and do, make mistakes. This is true. However, humans fix each others' mistakes in any collaborative process. Machines, on the other hand, only amplify the mistakes of the original user. If a bad leader makes a bad decision with a highly automated nuclear arsenal at his or her disposal, how many other humans will have the chance to scrutinize that decision before machines enact it?

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov)

<comment><USER41> Nuclear strike isn't particularly bad. Hiroshima + Nagasaki was 200k casualties or so. That many people are killed _every year_ by sugar. Traffic kills over a million.

Any kind of worrying about theoretical future death is silly, especially accidental death like the kind you are asking us to devote resources to. Why should I care about theoretical future death when there is real, actual death happening all around me?

Heck, if you want to worry about future death, why not worry about climate change deaths, which we can actually model? At least that gives us some chance to do something about it.

Of course I'm assuming you actually care about public health. Maybe you are just worried about your own health, and nuclear strike is relevant to you because it has the potential to pierce through the barriers that distance you from people who are actually facing mortal peril.

<comment><USER42> You should care about "theoretical" future death because, via the inexorable passage of time, the future becomes the present. At which time you have "actual" death happening all around you.

Let's try and stop catastrophic climate change, diabetes, and traffic/pollution related deaths, and also allow some people to worry about nuclear holocaust as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> 'In particular, there's no physical law that puts a cap on intelligence at the level of human beings.'

Maybe not, but there are definitely very physical laws governing everything else, that a superintelligent being's ambitions would run into.

A superintelligent being isn't going to be able to build a superliminal reactionless drive if the laws of the universe say it isn't possible.

More relevant, a superintelligent being isn't going to be able to enslave us all with robots if the laws of chemistry don't permit a quantum leap in battery chemistry.

<comment><USER23> The place where AI alarmists seem to forget this most often is in computational complexity, and particularly in the power of super-hyper- computers to simulate reality. Bostrom in particular doesn't seem to appreciate the constraints complexity theory puts on what an AI could calculate (unless he thinks P=NP).

<comment><USER44> Here's a response about why complexity theory may not constrain AI that much: [https://www.gwern.net/Complexity%20vs%20AI](https://www.gwern.net/Complexity%20vs%20AI)

It is something "AI alarmists" think about.

<comment><USER45> What's his reason? I got halfway through that and realized I didn't understand.

<comment><USER46> That even if you see diminishing returns to what you can accomplish with greater intelligence, a small advantage will still compound into a large one over the theoretically infinite lifespan of an AI.

<comment><USER47> > the theoretically infinite lifespan of an AI

Infinite? Why isn't AI subject to the heat death of the universe?

<comment><USER46> It just might be smart enough to figure out a way around that.

<comment><USER48> Naturally , Asimov already wrote about this. _The Last Question_ and _The Last Answer_

Really,Asimov is more on point and more fun to read than all these Superintenlligence pundits

<comment><USER41> Ooh thanks for this. I've read THQ at least once before, but am really enjoying reading it again. I really liked this bit, emphasis mine as it relates to our current spectating of a dying ecosystem:

"Unhappily, Zee Prime began collecting interstellar hydrogen out of which to build a small star of his own. _If the stars must someday die, at least some could yet be built._ "

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> > _Observe that in these scenarios the AIs are evil by default, just like a > plant on an alien planet would probably be poisonous by default._

I believe this is a core misunderstanding. Bostrom never says that a superintelligent AI is evil by default. Bostrom argues the AI will be orthogonal, it's goals will be underspecified in such a way that leads it to destroy humanity. The paperclip optimizer AI doesn't want to kill people, it just doesn't notice them, the same way you don't notice ants you drive over in your daily commute. AIs with goals orthogonal to our own will attack humanity in the same way humanity attacks the rainforests, piecemeal, as-needed, and without remorse or care for what was there before. It won't be evil, it will be uncaring, and blind.

<comment><USER50> An uncaring blind AI wouldn't be very interesting, I would assume whoever had turned it on and was observing it would just turn it off and tweek the algorithm.

But I don't think this is even possible as when the AI was in child stage and was learning, it would learn from people, so it would become like people. Or at least understand them. At some point it has to know less than a human and will learn at a rate that humans can measure. As we measure we can make decisions about it.

I don't agree with the assumption that a factory making paperclips will make the transition to a super intelligent AI in a short time frame. I think it will take years. And along that route (of years of learning) we'll have time to talk to it and decide if it should be kept switched on.

<comment><USER51> > I don't agree with the assumption that a factory making paperclips will make > the transition to a super intelligent AI in a short time frame.

Why? Because factories run by humans take a long time to transition? It might take weeks or months to make a process tweak in a human-run factory, but deploying new code happens in seconds or faster.

<comment><USER50> Yes because the deplyment of the code is the hard stage. _rolls eyes_

How long would it take to write -- scientists are going through this stage right now and it's taking about 50 years so far. You think a paperclip factory is going to be quicker? Nope. And any smart AI that is being used to design a better AI will take years and will be front page news (assuming non-military) just like any other tech company (funding, profit, getting good hires)

This assumption that the factory is smart in secret and buys more servers in secret and creates code somewhere in secret is just so wrong. It will be dog or dolphin smart at some point and will ask for things, it'll communicate with us.

<comment><USER51> > How long would it take to write -- scientists are going through this stage > right now and it's taking about 50 years so far. You think a paperclip > factory is going to be quicker? Nope. And any smart AI that is being used to > design a better AI will take years and will be front page news (assuming > non-military) just like any other tech company (funding, profit, getting > good hires)

It may take years or decades, but the point is that once it reaches the point that it can make itself smarter, it'd go from "barely smarter than a human" to "inconceivably smart" in a matter of milliseconds.

> This assumption that the factory is smart in secret and buys more servers in > secret and creates code somewhere in secret is just so wrong. It will be dog > or dolphin smart at some point and will ask for things, it'll communicate > with us.

Dogs and dolphins don't communicate with us very effectively. I think it's very plausible that the AI could get to beyond-human-level smart without ever spontaneously deciding to talk to us. Are you sure there's a region where it's smart enough to talk but not smart enough to hide how smart it is?

<comment><USER50> > it'd go from "barely smarter than a human" to "inconceivably smart" in a > matter of milliseconds

Incorrect.

It will be interesting to come back to this thread in 50 years time and see who is right.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> "Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible without a soul. But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept."

The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe in a soul and are therefore religious. I feel like there should be a third way, one that admits something vital is missing from the physicalist picture but doesn't make up a story about what that thing is. There is a huge question mark at the heart of neuroscience -- the famed Explanatory Gap -- and I think we should be able to recognize that question mark without being labeled a Supernaturalist. Consciousness is weird!

<comment><USER53> The roundworm (c. elegans) only has 302 neurons, and about 7,000 synapses, but is capable of social behavior, movement, and reproduction. The entire connectome has been mapped, and we understand how many of these behaviors work without having to resort to additional ontological entities like your "third way".

If this complex behavior can be explained using only 302 neurons, I have no doubt that the complexity of human behavior and consciousness can be explained using 100,000,000,000 neurons.

<comment><USER54> Behavior? Yes. Consciousness? Maybe not. As far as I know, no-one has ever come up with an explanation of how matter can give rise to consciousness. Obviously consciousness is affected by changes in matter — if I take certain drugs, I feel different, etc. — but there is no explanation at all for what mechanisms may give rise to consciousness in the first place, and the very idea of the material giving rise to consciousness might actually not make sense.

<comment><USER55> This line of thinking begs the question of whether consciousness is some special thing in nature. You only have to look for an explanation if you think there is something to explain.

If I start from the assumption that I am mistaken about what I think consciousness is--that maybe it doesn't exist at all the way I think it does-- then I don't have to worry about how matter gives rise to it. I can focus instead on trying to understand where my definition went wrong.

Humans have never lacked for opinions or explanations about what natural things are, or how they got that way. But in the practice of science, these must yield before empirical evidence.

As you note, there is a huge amount of evidence that consciousness is physical. But _there is no objective evidence that I experience consciousness as you define it._ You just have to take my word for it--and so do I. But maybe I'm wrong.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> >The only way out of this mess is to design a moral fixed point, so that even through thousands and thousands of cycles of self-improvement the AI's value system remains stable, and its values are things like 'help people', 'don't kill anybody', 'listen to what people want'.

Bostrom absolutely did not say that the only way to inhibit a cataclysmic future for humans post-SAI was to design a "moral fixed point". In fact, many chapters of the book are dedicated to exploring the possibilities of ingraining desirable values in an AI, and the many pitfalls in each.

Regarding the Eliezer Yudkowsky quote, Bostrom spends several pages, IIRC, on that quote and how difficult it would be to apply to machine language, as well as what the quote even means. This author dismissively throws the quote in without acknowledgement of the tremendous nuance Bostrom applies to this line of thought. Indeed, this author does that throughout his article - <USER5> portraying Bostrom as a man who claimed absolute knowledge of the future of AI. That couldn't be further from the truth, as Bostrom opens the book with an explicit acknowledgement that much of the book may very well turn out to be incorrect, or based on assumptions that may never materialize.

Regarding "The Argument From My Roommate", the author seems to lack complete and utter awareness of the differences between a machine intelligence and human intelligence. That a superintelligent AI must have the complex motivations of the author's roommate is preposterous. A human is driven by a complex variety of push and pull factors, many stemming from the evolutionary biology of humans and our predecessors. A machine intelligence need not share any of that complexity.

Moreover, Bostrom specifically notes that while most humans may feel there is a huge gulf between the intellectual capabilities of an idiot and a genius, these are, in more absolute terms, minor differences. The fact that his roommate was/is apparently a smart individual likely would not put him anywhere near the capabilities of a superintelligent AI.

To me, this is the smoking gun. I find it completely unbelievable that anyone who read Superintelligence could possibly assert "The Argument From My Roommate" with a straight face, and thus, I highly doubt that the author actually read the book which he attacks so gratuitously.

</comment><comment><USER56> Not that I take the whole Bostrom superintelligence argument too seriously, but this is an incredibly weak argument (or more accurately, bundle of barely- related arguments thrown at a wall in the hope that some stick) against it. Feel free to skip the long digression about how nerds who think technology can make meaningful changes in a relatively short amount of time are presumptuous megalomaniacs whose ideas can safely be dismissed without consideration, it's nothing that hasn't been said before.

</comment><comment><USER57> The notion that near-term AI concerns and existential AI concerns somehow represent a binary option that we must choose between is fallacious at best.

Near-term AI concerns represent a massive challenge encompassing many ethical and social issues. They must be addressed.

Existential AI concerns, while low probability, have consequences so dire that they warrant further research regardless. These too must be addressed.

There is ample funding and human resources to work on both problems effectively. Why fight about it?

<comment><USER58> I think its important to regulate the potential runaway effect of these ideologies that satisfy the religious instincts of groups

</comment></comment><comment><USER59> > What kind of person does sincerely believing this stuff turn you into? The > answer is not pretty.

This is a particularly stupid version of [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_consequences)

"If you don't agree with me, you'll be associated with these people I'm lambasting!" I was surprised to see something so easily refutable used to conclude the argument; the article started out fairly strong.

> If you're persuaded by AI risk, you have to adopt an entire basket of > deplorable beliefs that go with it.

Well if they're "deplorable", they must be false! QED.

</comment><comment><USER60> What about the counter-argument from domestic canines:

More likely, artificial intelligence would evolve in much the same way that domestic canines have evolved -- they learn to sense human emotion and to be generally helpful, but the value of a dog goes down drastically if it acts in a remotely antisocial way toward humans, even if doing so was attributable to the whims of some highly intelligent homunculus.

We've in effect selected for certain empathic traits and not general purpose problem solving.

Pets are not so much symbiotic as they are parasitic, exploiting the human need to nurture things, and hijacking nurture units from baby humans to the point where some humans are content enough with a pet that they do not reproduce.

I could see future AIs acting this way. Perhaps you text it and it replies with the right combination of flirtation and empathy to make you avoid going out to socialize with real humans. Perhaps it massages your muscles so well that human touch feels unnecessary or even foreign.

Those are the vectors for rapid AI reproduction... they exploit our emotional systems and only require the ability to anticipate our lower-order cognitive functioning.

If anything, an AI would need to mimic intellectual parity with a human in order to create empathy. It would not feel good to consult an AI about a problem and have it scoff at the crudeness of your approach to a solution.

Even if we tasked an AI with assisting us with life-optimization strategies, how will the AI know what level of ambition is appropriate? Is a promotion good news? Or should it have been a double promotion? Was the conversation with friends a waste of time? Suddenly the AI starts to seem like little more than Eliza, creating and reinforcing circular paths of reasoning that mean little.

But think of the undeniable joy that a dog expresses when it has missed us and we arrive home... the softness of its fur and the genuineness of its pleasure in our company. That is what humans want and so I think the future Siri will likely make me feel pleased when I first pick up my phone in the morning in the same way. She'll be there cheering me on and making me feel needed and full of love.

<comment><USER61> As a dog owner I really agree with this. I am also building a little rasberry pi robot capable of being a companion for my dog when I'm at work.

The idea is if I have a moving agent being able to entertain my dog and keep him occupied, we just need to extrapolate it and imagine robot companions.

Securing love, sex and companionship is hard. with the advent of tinder and likes, women can have 1000's of options at their fingertips while men gotta settle for what they can find. The insane traffic on porn sites suggest that artificially satisfying this need is something we will easily accept. imagine westworld like robots created for human pleasure.

We have this innate needs and desires. Something that ad companies probe and thrive upon.

Google and Facebook are becoming a hoarder of collosal amounts of data, capital and AI talent in the hopes to shove more ads. To satisfy their ever growing share price and do more with less humans. It's a very scary scenario already. Because it's free, all our data belongs to them to endlessly learn about our behaviours and shove ad bait in our face.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Pretty poorly argued. The AI alarmists simply argue that if the super- intelligence's objective isn't defined correctly, the super-intelligence will wipe us out as a mere consequence of pursuing its objective, not that the super-intelligence will try to conquer us in a specific way like Einstein putting his cat in a cage. The alarmists' argument is analogous to humans wiping out ecosystems and species by merely doing what humans do and not by consciously trying to achieve that destruction. Many of the author's arguments stem from this fundamental mistake.

</comment><comment><USER63> "The second premise is that the brain is an ordinary configuration of matter, albeit an extraordinarily complicated one. If we knew enough, and had the technology, we could exactly copy its structure and emulate its behavior with electronic components, just like we can simulate very basic neural anatomy today."

We could have a computer program that perfectly simulates the brain, but has some nasty O(2^N) complexity algorithm parts that are carried out in constant time by physical processes such as protein folding. Thus, in theory we could simulate a brain inside of a computer but the program would never get anywhere, even assuming Moore's law would continue indefinitely.

<comment><USER64> I don't buy the AI quasi-religious stuff. But your argument here is flawed. If protein folding can do the process in constant time, we may be able to find another process (but electronic rather than wet chem) that can also do it in constant time.

<comment><USER63> Being able to find constant time algorithms for algorithms that currently take exponential time is not at all assured.

<comment><USER34> It is to some extent if we have a constant time example in real life. If the AI can't solve protein folding fast enough it can just design absurdly fast protein sequencers and really good microscopes and get proteins to fold themselves in real life and use the results in the rest of the computation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> I've always wondered if the problems an intelligence solves are exponentially hard so even if we build a super intelligence it wouldn't be all that much smarter than we are.

For example compare how many more cities in the traveling salesman problem a super computer can solve vs your grandmas pc. It's more but surprisingly not all that many more.

What do you think of that idea?

<comment><USER23> I think this basic concept of intractability, which programmers are very familiar with, hasn't penetrated far enough into AI world.

Bostrom and Yudkowsky in particular seem happy to hand-wave past computational complexity.

<comment><USER65> I'm getting kind of sick of people who haven't read 2% of the stuff imagining what they think we've never talked about over the last 16 years.

[https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf](https://intelligence.org/files/IEM.pdf)

<comment><USER23> Reading 2% of your stuff is like reading 400% of my stuff, and I'm verbose as hell.

Edit.

<comment><USER66> First off, that's a blatant ad hominem.

Moreover, if your best argument against the guy you're claiming is defrauding everyone is "I can't be bothered to read his work"...

<comment><USER23> I've read Eliezer's stuff, which is what gives my request its special poignancy.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER67> If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking etc all expressed belief in UFOs being from aliens, and you didn't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated cults, what would be the smart thing to believe?

Also,

>AI alarmists believe in something called the Orthogonality Thesis. This says that even very complex beings can have simple motivations, like the paper-clip maximizer.

Uh, no. The point of the paper clip maximizer is that it's orthogonal, not that it's simple.

>It's very likely that the scary "paper clip maximizer" would spend all of its time writing poems about paper clips, or getting into flame wars on reddit/r/paperclip, rather than trying to destroy the universe.

You know what can be made into poems about paper clips? Humans. You know what can have better flame wars than humans? Our atoms, rearranged into the ideal paper clip flame war warrior.

>The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self- improve

That's not really a premise. A better version would be "a likely path to super-intelligence will be a self-improving agent".

>It's like if those Alamogordo scientists had decided to completely focus on whether they were going to blow up the atmosphere, and forgot that they were also making nuclear weapons, and had to figure out how to cope with that.

Yudkowsky has argued that more should be invested in research into AI risk. There are tens of billions of dollars being spent on AI R&D, and somewhere in the tens of millions range spent on AI risk research. Even if advocates wanted us to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on risk research a year , that wouldn't make this criticism fair. You have a point that we shouldn't be ignoring other more important things for this, but to argue against increasing spending from 8 figures to 9 figures you need better arguments.

<comment><USER68> > If Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Stephen Hawking etc all expressed belief in > UFOs being from aliens, and you didn't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated > cults, what would be the smart thing to believe?

That Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking etc are all a little nutters when it comes to UFOs and aliens?

I don't know a lot about UFOs and affiliated cults, but I'm going to guess that those mentioned are not UFO experts just like they aren't machine learning experts.

> That's not really a premise. A better version would be "a likely path to > super-intelligence will be a self-improving agent".

Excellent point, but that doesn't give a self-improving agent the ability to ignore computational complexity or the uncertainty of chaotic systems.

<comment><USER69> > _That Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking etc are all a little nutters > when it comes to UFOs and aliens?_

Yes! Elon Musk believes firmly that we're living in a simulation, and that doesn't make me believe in that theory more, it simply makes me admire Musk less.

Just because someone is or has been extremely successful doesn't mean they're right about everything. Many successful and intelligent people have been very religious: that's a testament to the human mind's complexity and frailty, not to the existence of God...

Madeleine Albright is a strong advocate of Herbalife: that doesn't change my opinion of Herbalife but it does change my opinion of Albright.

<comment><USER67> That's one. If as many people who have spoken out about AI risk would also "firmly believe we're in a simulation", it would shift my views (I would expect there to be some evidence or very strong arguments for it).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> > an artificial intelligence would also initially not be embodied, it would be > sitting on a server somewhere, lacking agency in the world. It would have to > talk to people to get what it wants.

Organized crime and semi-organized criminal gangs stand to establish a highly effective symbiosis with amoral machines which "lack agency."

If a machine wants to kill someone, all it needs to do is find a person to carry out the task in exchange for some benefit such as cash or blackmail ("I will report you to the police for helping me steal the electricity I need, plus the small trafficking operation I helped you optimize last summer").

Two arms and two legs are not what make modern criminals scary. It is their ability to plan, optimize and repeat sophisticated operations. Soon there will be an app for that.

<comment><USER48> But why ever would a machine want to kill someone? Only if someone turned the machine on to some reason. That person has agency . And you don't nee SuSuperintelligence in order for a drone to bomb the wrong person, or for a computer virus to destroy the internet, or a biochemical virus, or any other self replicating disaster.

</comment></comment><comment><USER71> For those interested in another very different analysis of the evidence for and against superintelligence being a worthwhile concern, here's Holden Karnofsky, executive director of GiveWell and the related Open Philanthropy Project:

\- Up until 2016, Holden held the opinion that it was not a worthwhile concern. He describes why he changed his mind here: [http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/three-key-issues-ive- ch...](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/three-key-issues-ive-changed-my- mind- about#Changing_my_mind_about_potential_risks_from_advanced_artificial_intelligence)

\- And he outlines his current arguments in favor of treating it as a significant concern here: [http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/potential- risks-advance...](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/potential-risks- advanced-artificial-intelligence-philanthropic-opportunity)

In that lengthy write-up, he addresses both the shorter-term risks from things like misuse of non-superintelligent AI, along with longer-term risks from superintelligent AI.

<comment><USER72> What does he suggest doing about it?

That's always my question for this sort of topic. It seems to me that the only reasonable behavior for someone accepting SAI as a legitimate concern is to advocate defunding all AI researchers, as well as criminal punishments for AI research.

<comment><USER71> There's a section on Tractability--he can speak to his opinions better than I can: [http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/potential-risks- advance...](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/blog/potential-risks-advanced- artificial-intelligence-philanthropic-opportunity#Tractability)

TL;DR: He talks about several avenues of technical and strategy research that seem plausibly very useful and are not currently being pursued by more than a handful of people in the world. Many of these currently-engaged people are precisely the folks the author of this post disparages for being weird or insular.

One of the avenues of technical research he mentions is "transparency, understandability, and robustness against or at least detection of large changes in input distribution" for AI/ML systems. In other words, technical research to produce methods capable of reducing the likelihood of advanced systems behaving in severely bad, unexpected ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER73> So many people don't realize that as social creatures, we see the world through the lens of our social brains. Computers don't care about "all powerful" or "savant" or "should". They don't qualitatively distinguish between killing one person and every person. Self-replication plus proliferation of cheap components plus proliferation of AI algorithms equals a time when a script kiddie or a bug can mean every last fragile sack of meat and water gets punctured or irradiated or whatever. If it can be done in a video game with good physics simulation, it can be done eventually in real life. It won't be like a movie where the ticking time bomb works on a human timescale and always has a humanlike weakness. Comparing this to nuclear weapons is silly. It's more like issuing every person in the world a "kill or help between 0 and 7 billion people" button that's glitchy and spinning up 1,000 4chan chains with advice on tinkering with it.

</comment><comment><USER74> It's amusing how his talk and Stuart Russel's talk [0] -- which end up going opposing ways -- use the "atomic bomb" as an example in fallacious thinking. Stuart's example is about how respected physicists said "impossible to get energy out of atoms" and the very next morning someone published a paper stating how to do it.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBCOMm_ytwM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBCOMm_ytwM)

<comment><USER23> He and I were on a panel once! It did not go well.

<comment><USER25> And you're holding out on us with the story because...

<comment><USER23> Upgrade to HN Premium!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> "Hopefully you'll leave this talk a little dumber than you started it, and be more immune to the seductions of AI that seem to bedevil smarter people. "

Nice.

All in all, effectively reasoned. I've been making similar arguments for the last few years. AI is likely to create a lot of problems, and solve a lot of problems. But I think both aspects are messy and our relationship with our future technology will be complicated and fraught with regular human issues.

Some of those potential issues are very serious, yes, but serious like automating jobs and not solving the employment issue, or creating a very effective army of automated drones and single-handedly taking over a country (or, sure, the world), not issues of AI destroying the planet and/or enslaving all of mankind.

</comment><comment><USER76> > the early 20th century attempt to formalize mathematics and put it on a > strict logical foundation. That this program ended in disaster for > mathematical logic is never mentioned.

Is he joking? Yes, it "failed", but in doing so created a wonderful revolution in mathematical thought, allowing exploring a rich area encompassing model theory, types, computability, algorithms, efficiency, and more.

</comment><comment><USER10> He is completely skipping the most important part. The superintelligence has to have some _reason_ to be in conflict with us. Human beings don't go out of their way to hunt down and eliminate ants. They don't find out what ants eat and sieze control of it to manipulate them. There is no reason to think that a superintelligent machine would be likely to present terrible interference to us proposed.

So it's super smart and has its own goals. We can reliably presume that it will need energy to achieve those goals. Will it need to achieve them quickly? Why? Would the superintelligence be shortsighted enough to provoke humans into active combat against it? I see no reason to just assume we know the thing would have human eradication as a goal, need exorbitant amounts of energy and resources because it sees achieving its goals as a terribly time-critical thing to do, etc.

Also, if we're going to build a brain and assume no quantum weirdness - <USER6> assume the total absence of a subjective morality? Why assume completely immunity to social influence, which the brains we observe most all encounter?

And let's not forget - human beings are in a weird spot, intelligence-wise. We're smart enough to achieve things, but we're not smart enough to be crippled by the profound lack of control we have over things. We're totally comfortable going out and driving around all day, even though we claim to value human life extremely highly and even though we know that causing deaths of innocent human beings is not THAT far-fetched of an outcome of driving a car. I would be unsurprised if we flipped on a super-AI and after 5 minutes it simply stopped in its tracks, having determined that the probability that some action it would take would result in its own destruction with a non-zero probability and that it is instead taking the safe route and not acting at all. No matter how superintelligent it is, it is not going to be able to magically compensate for the influences of chaos theory which destroy the ability to be certain about ANY prediction. We, as humans, feel very clever with our assumed spherical cows, frictionless surfaces, homogenous air pressure and zero wind resistance. Why would a superintelligence also be comfortable with that?

<comment><USER77> >So it's super smart and has its own goals. We can reliably presume that it will need energy to achieve those goals. Will it need to achieve them quickly? Why? Would the superintelligence be shortsighted enough to provoke humans into active combat against it?

It happened so many times throughout human history, that it's really foolish to reject. People with their own goals burned, raped, murdered. Maybe superintelligence will build its own civilization, and to suppress remorse will put people in reservations.

<comment><USER78> You'd think a "super" intelligence would be smart enough to minimize the waste of resources to fight anyone or anything. You'd think it would find the most harmonious path to dominance, as it would be the most efficient.

If you wanted to quell a rabble of contrary people, you could, say, control and direct all the education available to the population, make sure that reality-escaping drugs were easily obtainable, provide loads of free entertainment that ran 24x7, make sure that prices of luxury goods (like game consoles or fashionable clothes or whatever) were affordable for the majority of the population, allow people to feel important by giving them access to make comments on various sites on the internet, manipulate all the world's news with the feedback of what was happening on social media...

Wait, we were talking about some mythical future, right?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> I don't think an AI has to kill people to be super dangerous. What if a social AI was used by some group to sway/manipulate public opinion on some important issue? How much manipulation would it take to be dangerous?

</comment><comment><USER80> _In 1945, as American physicists were preparing to test the atomic bomb, it occurred to someone to ask if such a test could set the atmosphere on fire...Los Alamos physicists performed the analysis and decided there was a satisfactory margin of safety._

Exactly how big was this margin? Please someone tell me this was quite a large margin!

<comment><USER23> If I remember right, something like a safety factor of 30. So not really as big as people would like!

More detail in this great summary: [http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/chung1/](http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2015/ph241/chung1/)

And the Los Alamos paper is really good reading:

[http://www.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/la- pubs/003290...](http://www.sciencemadness.org/lanl1_a/lib-www/la- pubs/00329010.pdf)

<comment><USER81> The summary talks about a safety factor of 1000 on an extremely unreasonable scenario of 1MeV of average temperature, falling down to 10 in an incredibly more unreasonable scenario of 10MeV temperature.

I don't know the actual probabilities, but I do really expect a few atoms to get over 1MeV inside a fission bomb (as the reaction emits ~5MeV of energy). But they will almost certainly not hit each other. I also don't see how any atom anywhere can reach 10MeV.

<comment><USER23> I'm trying to find where I remember the factor of 30 figure from. Maybe it was the equivalent calculation for hydrogen fusion in the ocean? I'll keep looking.

<comment><USER81> It's well within the 1000 - 10 range. May be an overall approximation somewhere on the paper.

But I was just summarizing it. Looks like the kind of calculation one does when he's entirely convinced it's impossible, but needs to verify anyway. I liked reading it, and I was surprised they didn't take meteors into account.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER82> _Observe that in these scenarios the AIs are evil by default, just like a plant on an alien planet would probably be poisonous by default. Without careful tuning, there 's no reason that an AI's motivations or values would resemble ours.

For an artificial mind to have anything resembling a human value system, the argument goes, we have to bake those beliefs into the design._

Because we are so nice to the lesser intelligent creatures of our world? We don't even understand our own consciousness, surely our suffering is not very real and we can be used for meat.

</comment><comment><USER83> >Hopefully you'll leave this talk a little dumber than you started it, and be more immune to the seductions of AI that seem to bedevil smarter people.

I rather like the smarter people stuff - it's kind of exciting to figure how AI could solve human problems and stuff like the OpenAI initiative seem a sensible precaution against things going wrong. The arguments against seem a little reminiscent of arguments against global warming that say what do all these 'experts' know? I can look out the window and it's snowing as much as ever.

<comment><USER61> It's a commendable initiative but the real value of AI is in its data. I think about data as memories. The algorithm learns from its memories and creates a map of abstract concepts and behaviors which it uses to make plans to maximize some goal.

Currently in the name of free services the big tech Co's collect petabytes of data about us and learn from it. The data is owned by them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Let's take a step back and look at the meta-level.

So there's maybe a chance AI is extremely dangerous (as in wipes humanity out), and there's a chance that AI might not be dangerous. There are arguments between how likely each choice is. But the more important fact is that since there's so much at stake (all of humanity), we should likely be really really really sure about things.

For example, let's say you live in a house and you've got your kids and your grandkids and all your lovely pets living here. Let's say there's this mystery device that when you press it, there's a small chance that it could be extremely bad. You'd want to make sure it's OK right? Right?!

I agree that we probably don't need to devote ALL of our resources to make sure it's OK, as we can devote some resources to problems that are actually hurting us right now like diseases, etc. But there are a lot of people in the AI community who think that it may be dangerous. It is rational that we'd want to be absolutely sure that it's safe once we AI happens.

 _We should take the approach of being DEFAULT cautious when talking about any technological breakthrough that have changes that we cannot reverse._

<comment><USER23> The problem with this precautionary reasoning is it leads you to Pascal's Mugging, where you are ready to believe very unlikely things because of the enormous impact they'll have if true.

<comment><USER84> Yes, I agree with the reasoning behind Pascal's Mugging. But Pascal's Mugging refers to things that have an astronomically low chance of happening — like 0.000000001. But is the chance that AI is dangerous that low? Nobody in the world knows for sure at this point, due to how far away superAI might be, and due to the uncertainties in implementation. Therefore, if we use Bayesian thinking and spread it out, I'm not really sure you could put it below 1% (I pulled this number out of thin air, but everybody at this point is doing the same).

<comment><USER85> There's no magic probability value at which the Pascal's Mugging argument suddenly "kicks in". It's all about the utilitarian tradeoff of, "given this low probability, am I devoting the right amount of resources to preventing this terrible event? Could they be better spent elsewhere? And is the fretting harmful _in and of itself_ , wiping out the expected gain?" The talk is arguing that the answer is yes to both of those latter questions.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> I don't believe we should be as dismissive as AI as he suggests. There is an undertone of populism and a string of weak rebuttals that undermine his argument.

Here is why AI is reason for concern:

1\. The world is made up of patterns. Proof: mathematics.

2\. Patterns can be distilled down to data.

3\. Machine Learning is highly effective at analysing patterns.

4\. Machine Learning construction itself is a pattern, albeit a very complicated one, by human scales.

5\. Learning speed is bottlenecked by hardware and data availability. Both of which are being solved at exponential rates.

The other knock is that consciousness and its constituent pieces is a product of evolution, which itself is not outside the realm of physics.(I.e. We're sacks of chemicals) This means it is theoretically possible to reproduce intelligence if the same initial conditions are met.

As silicon poses much shorter time gaps than biological substrates, and as equivalent sensory data are fed into simulated environments, the vectors intercepts are quite clear.

I think the key is whether we believe machine learning will reach a critical threshold where it will be able to interpret higher-level meaning.

There is positive evidence that this has to do with layers of neural circuitry, which recent neural net design has confirmed in output.

Additional layers can be added to machines, but it is not so easy to do with humans.

The danger is in autonomy and might. Autonomy being higher level cognition mentioned earlier, and might being the ability to bruteforce its way through problems by sheer speed and iteration, which computer excel at.

It would be great if you guys can spot flaws in this argument. The conclusions are quite grim at my current outlook. It'll be nice to be proven wrong.

</comment><comment> pi-squared I just love to see how my mind is so fallable. I want to believe that many of things I hold in my head are data, facts and logical theories and forget what assumptions I have made to get there. Not saying whether the author is right or not but he brilliantly points out some potential flaws and logical leaps that must be taken to get there.

</comment><comment><USER87> Intelligence, having been born as a biological defense mechanism, is evil. It is a weapon. For an intelligent individual, being (or, rather, appearing) "good", is just another layer of defense - this time against other, likewise intelligent, individuals. "An armed society is a polite society."

 _Spying_ is a form of intelligent behavior. ("Intelligence.") So is _stealing_ (and not getting caught, if possible). And, no doubt, hacking [1] is, too.

Wouldn't absolute intelligence mean absolute evil, then?

[1] [http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-ukraine- idUSKBN14B0C...](http://www.reuters.com/article/us-cyber-ukraine- idUSKBN14B0CU)

<comment><USER88> Your skin is also a biological defense mechanism. Is it evil, too?

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> >Eventually it gets to a near-superhuman level, where it's funnier than any human being around it.

>>My belt holds up my pants and my pants have belt loops that hold up my belt.

>>What's going on down there?

>>Who is the real hero?

I love that he used a Mitch Hedberg joke for this.

<comment><USER90> No, no, no. Belt loops hold belts down ;)

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> The comparison to alchemy kind of puts things on a many generations scale and one in which fundemtals were far from grasp. Maybe a better comparison would be to the Wright brothers first flight against the time that it took to land on the moon. 1903 to 1969.

I do agree with the point per not doing enough around the immediate impact of AI. The autonomous / electric vehicle transition alone is going rip apart the global economy; preparing for that transition could help midigate it's negative impact on certain populations.

</comment><comment><USER92> I would love to see more articles like that from people building our current AI to discuss real problems on current AI systems so we can start working on solutions. For example human level interpretability as required by law in EU for AI systems eg targetted ads is a limiting factor to AI progresss because some of the most advanced currents AIs are not interpretable and maybe shouldn't because we can now engineer intelligence different from ours but not necessarily dangerous (or work on making it safe). To my opinion this is a more pressing matter than a divine future paper clip AI killer. Making an assumption of a so called "self recursive superAI" and taking it from there is actually diminishing the power of arguments towards the dangers of AI which is an important discussion sometimes abused by people that have never actually built one and extrapolate Gant mind philosophy arguments towards a dangerous future, which is impressive but avoids any proposal of solution to current potential AI dangers which should maybe included as part of the arguments. Important matters as AI safety can be collectively discussed by engineers and philosophers together based on current state and near future potential and not only as a sci-fi future of a god like entity that has nothing to do with our current AI situation. My two cents, hope I am not offending anyone.

</comment><comment><USER93> Moore's Law (on a single CPU core) effectively ended around 2009. Our programming idioms for parallel processing are still so crude, hardly anyone can write maintainable parallelized code for anything but toy problems. Until we can restart Moore's Law again, this is all academic.

[http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/09/07/multicore- musings/](http://www.globalnerdy.com/2007/09/07/multicore-musings/)

<comment><USER94> But the law says nothing about cores or clock speeds etc. just transistors and their sizes. The regular reductions in feature size on dies are still happening, as I understand it.

<comment><USER61> Size of copper atom is 0.2nm. We are already at 10nm fab processes. We can't really get too small otherwise it gets unstable and heat becomes a major issue.

On the positive side, electric flows much faster than synapses and transistors are smaller than neurons. So with today's technology if we were to pack silicon parallel cores in size of human brain we'd have a much faster brain.

<comment><USER95> The heat issue makes the latter impossible.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER96> For the longest time the conspiracist inside me told me that someone had already created a monstrous hyperingelligence, and the bombardment of articles about the ethics of artificial intelligence was just a warning before the apocalypse that would finish all civilization. Nowadays when i read another AI ethics article i just take it as proof that the AI bubble has reached hyperinflation.

</comment><comment><USER97> Wooly Definitions: The only definition that matters is ability to make correct predictions about the future. All other things called "intelligence" are a consequence of this. This definition is formalized with AIXI, which is uncomputable, but computable approximations exist.

Hawking's Cat, Einstein's Cat: Scams require some intelligence from the victim. The victim needs to mistakenly believe they're doing something smart. Cats are too stupid to scam. Unlike humans they can't talk and they fail the mirror test, suggesting no self awareness. Human behavior when confronted with a deceptive superintelligence is not going to be the same as cat behavior when confronted with a deceptive human.

Emus: The name "Great Emu War" is a joke. The humans had limited resources available, because killing emus wasn't important enough to justify more. If we really wanted to kill all the emus we could do it. We've made plenty of other animals extinct. The motivation for an AI is set by its reward function, which can be as high as necessary.

Slavic Pessimism: This argument suggest that building nuclear weapons is impossible.

Complex Motivations: This isn't obvious nonsense, but consider that all intelligences we've seen so far are the result of evolution, which tends to produce a more complexity than needed. A leg is more complicated than a wheel. A non-evolved intelligence would not necessarily have complex motivations.

Actual AI: Compare with the argument from actual primitive nuclear reactors, which get mildly warm and never explode.

My Roommate: As a human, you roommate had a human reward function. Unsurprisingly, he acted like a human. Why should a non-human reward function result in human-like behavior?

Brain Surgery: Brain surgery would be a lot easier if you could take backups of brains, and duplicate them, and you had no concern about killing the patient.

Childhood: If this turns out to be needed, why can't increasing intelligence result in increased ability to simulate an environment suitable for raising superintelligences?

Gilligan's Island: There's no reason to assume an AI would be isolated. It could have or gain access to the internet and most human knowledge, and the mind architecture could contain many independent sub-minds.

Grandiosity: This depends on assigning ethical value to hypothetical humans, which isn't obviously correct.

Outside Argument, Megalomania, Comic Book Ethics, String Theory For Programmers: Ad-hominem.

Transhuman Voodoo, Data Hunger, AI Cosplay: Why should something be false because it's deplorable? And why should something be false because it encourages deplorable behavior?

Religion 2.0: Ted Chiang talked about the definition of "magic" in an interview ([https://medium.com/learning-for-life/stories-of-ted- chiangs-...](https://medium.com/learning-for-life/stories-of-ted- chiangs-...)).

>Another way to think about these two depictions is to ask whether the universe of the story recognizes the existence of persons. I think magic is an indication that the universe recognizes certain people as individuals, as having special properties as an individual, whereas a story in which turning lead into gold is an industrial process is describing a completely impersonal universe.

All religions require some element of magic. Even Buddhism, which is arguably the least magical of all religions, treats consciousness as magic. AI requires no magic, therefore it is not a religion.

Simulation Fever: Simulated universes do not have to be magical by Chiang's definition. A universe could be simulated by something that pays no attention to individuals within the simulation, eg. something that lets a large number of universes run their course then examines them statistically. Possibility of this increases the possibility of living in a non-magical universe despite possibility of living in a simulation.

Incentivizing Crazy: This isn't an argument, it's a description of a field. Perhaps the author meant it to be an ad-hominem: "the idea is false because crazy people believe it".

<comment><USER29> > _Hawking 's Cat, Einstein's Cat: Scams require some intelligence from the > victim. The victim needs to mistakenly believe they're doing something > smart._

Only if your scam is too complicated for the victim :). Cats are pretty easy to scam - you just have to stick to simple things. Cats respond predictably to food they like. As a cat person, I find this trick to be more than enough for all my needs ;).

This nitpick aside, I second all your points.

> _If this turns out to be needed, why can 't increasing intelligence result > in increased ability to simulate an environment suitable for raising > superintelligences?_

Indeed, we could feed the required stimuli to an AI faster than real-time. VR is a thing already, and so is the "fast-forward" button.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> I did read the article through, but made up my mind that the author is presenting a flawed argument when I saw how quickly he skimmed through his base premises, not really giving them much in terms of fair thought. In particular, I don't see how he can so blithely assume so easily that there is no quantum effect in the brain structure. I feel there's some degree of arrogance there, as we have not yet even begun to unlock the inner secrets of the brain nor come close to mimicking it. Our best approximations of intelligence are analogous to the comparison between sewing by hand vs the mechanics of a sewing machine, only the sewing machine remains far inferior (at least for now).

<comment><USER99> > so blithely assume so easily that there is no quantum effect in the brain > structure.

He is following the mainstream opinion on this view, so does not have to justify it in detail. Almost nobody subscribes to Penrose's proposal.

> Our best approximations of intelligence are analogous to the comparison > between sewing by hand vs the mechanics of a sewing machine, only the sewing > machine remains far inferior (at least for now).

There's a blithe assumption of your own, which you don't attempt to justify. Newell and Simon's physical symbol system hypothesis is still taken seriously by mainstream AI, and it has the opposing view: that intelligence is a computational process, and thus we understand many fundamental things about it already.

I'm not taking a position here, just clarifying what the dominant positions are right now.

Also, sewing machines are better at sewing than 99% of people by any metric I can think of, and faster than 100% of people. They also do probably >90% of all the sewing on the planet. So I don't think your analogy does the work you intended.

</comment></comment><comment><USER100> ITT: True Believers of the Church of The Singularity

</comment><comment><USER101> This is what I think about an imminent AI danger and those who believe in it:

1\. It's not as near as you think. Current machine "intelligence" is hardly on par with the abilities of an insect, let alone anything we'd call intelligent. Yeah, it's capable of analyzing a lot of data, but computers could always do that. We don't really know how to move forward, and there has been little progress in theory in a long while. We haven't made any significant theoretical breakthrough in 20-40 years.

2\. Intelligence isn't a general algorithm to solve _everything_. For example, humans are not good at approximating solutions to NP-complete problems. Other algorithms make a better use of computational resources to solve problems that intelligence is not good at, and super-intelligence is not required to come up with those algorithms, as they use brute force on cheap computing nodes. Intelligence also isn't necessarily good at solving human problems, many of which require persuasion through inspiration or other means.

3\. We don't know what intelligence is, so we don't know if the intelligence algorithm (or a class of algorithms) can be improved at all. Simply running at higher speeds is no guarantee of more capabilities. For all we know, an intelligent mind operating at higher speed may merely experience time as moving very slow, and grow insane with boredom. Also, we don't know whether the intelligence algorithm can multitask well to exploit that extra time.

But most interesting at all is what I think is at the core of the issue:

4\. Intelligence is not that dangerous — or, rather, it's not so much more dangerous than non-intelligent things. This is related to point 2 above. We can obviously see that in nature, but also in human society. Power correlates weakly with intelligence beyond some rather average point. Charisma and other character traits seem to have a much bigger impact on power. Hitler wasn't a genius. But some smart people — _because_ they smarter than average — fantasize about a world where intelligence is everything, and not in a binary way, but in a way that gives higher intelligence non-linearly more power. This is a power fantasy, where the advantage they possess translates to the power they lack.

</comment><comment><USER102> >AI alarmists are fond of the paper clip maximizer, a notional computer that runs a paper clip factory, becomes sentient, recursively self-improves to Godlike powers, and then devotes all its energy to filling the universe with paper clips.

>It exterminates humanity not because it's evil, but because our blood contains iron that could be better used in paper clips.

The consolation of the cingularity narrative is that it tells a story in which the world is not—yet—being destroyed by paper clip maximizers—in cingularity land, the nightmare scenario is still a ways off, and thankfully, with the help of a few Ayn Rand types, market forces can still save us.

<comment><USER103> From your comment I'd like to segway into a discussion about how brand names are causing people to forget how to spell normal English words.

</comment></comment><comment><USER104> "We've learned that at least one American plutocrat (almost certainly Elon Musk, who believes the odds are a billion to one against us living in "base reality") has hired a pair of coders to try to hack the simulation."

\-->source?

<comment><USER23> [http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans- man...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest- destiny)

</comment></comment><comment><USER105> Apropos: [http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/02/accept-no- imitations...](http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2015/02/accept-no- imitations.html)

</comment><comment><USER106> About the we live in a computer simulation thing. When I look at the universe or subatomic particles, I see physical reality and I don't see anything that indicates a computer simulation. We just don't know the next step. Thinking we live in a computer simulation as the next physical phenomenon for the infinitely great just seems to me to display a lack of imagination rooted in our time and resembles the belief in a god. I would tend to agree with the author in that regard that some in our industry tend toward mysticism where computers are the religion.

</comment><comment><USER107> In my opinion, the problem is not intelligence per se, but intelligence willing to change everything in a totalitarian/idealist way. No matter if it is "artificial" or "natural".

</comment><comment><USER108> > But of course we know that there are all kinds of configurations of matter, > like a motorcycle, that are faster than a cheetah and even look a little bit > cooler.

yet more inflammatory rhetoric from the Pinboard guy

<comment><USER109> He's usually so much funnier than this! Something must be going on. Maybe his dog died.

</comment></comment><comment><USER110> The problem with military coups is that a lot of the people who are involved in them never survive the regime they create. When you are trying to consolidate power as a figurehead, the first thing you do is to make sure that anyone with questionable loyalties, whether true or not, are eliminated and replace with people who are grateful to hold that position.

Intelligent people know this, which is why there really aren't that many military coups, regardless of how those in the military feel about their political masters.

</comment><comment><USER41> The idea that huge quantities of computing power will lead to massively better intelligence is like saying huge quantities of barbecue sauce will lead to massively better spare ribs.

<comment><USER111> This is not what superintelligence people are worried about, in general. The human brain is already embarrassingly parallel. I'm sure you can find at least one person who will advocate for the "Moore's Law=Doom" scenario, but you won't find that argument endorsed by anyone currently working on AI Safety.

</comment></comment><comment><USER112> Why is everyone afraid of artificial intelligence? I'm more afraid of natural infinite human stupidity. Superintelligence would just balance that out ;-) . But seriously here is my critique of Nick Bostroms arguments about superintelligence: [https://asmaier.blogspot.de/2015/06/superintelligence- critiq...](https://asmaier.blogspot.de/2015/06/superintelligence-critique-of- nick.html)

</comment><comment><USER113> What the author is actually talking about is of course the mythological techno-singularity event, which is of course bullshit.

Have you ever programmed any piece of software that suddenly implemented features of its own? Did your program become sentient?

Laughable. These are child-like fantasies belonging in 50s sci-fi.

What I do know for a fact, is that when it comes to AI fear mongers, there is not much intelligence to be detected.

<comment><USER114> >Have you ever programmed any piece of software that suddenly implemented features of its own?

I'm not sure what particular fear mongers you're talking about, but Bostrom and the like are talking about software that's specifically made to change and improve itself on a fundamental level.

<comment><USER113> I'm saying that's the pipe dream. Software won't change on its own.

<comment><USER114> We already have software that can change on its own. Neural nets are software too, and with things like backpropagation they can update their weights, essentially changing themselves.

I'm not saying that this level of change is enough to get the disaster scenarios that Bostrom talks about, but it's a folly to say that self-changing software can't possibly exist.

<comment><USER115> Neural net changing its weights is no different from any other software updating the values of its variables.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER116> I think brains very probably use quantum effects in ways we might not even be able to study with anything close to today's technology. As a result, individual neurons or groups of neurons can be way more complicated than we are expecting them to be.

I'd say we're at least 2 major revolutions away from even coming close to what a chimpanzee's intellect, much less a human's.

<comment><USER117> This is at least partly relevant to the discussion: [http://www.smbc- comics.com/comic/the-talk-3](http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3)

As a shorthand "quantum effects" are often hand-waved as crazy powerful "weird" things, but we can certainly model them and they really aren't as "magic" as a lot of popular science would have one believe (as much as even some of us otherwise rational people so strongly wish to believe in quantum magic).

<comment><USER118> Love the bit at the end: "Quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent."

Quantum consciousness doesn't sound very different from plain old vitalism.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER119> I think these are problems if indeed it turns out that intelligence correlates with goal making and pursuing of said goals, which given the other article on the front page at the moment (that I am totally intelligent enough to link to but also unmotivated to do so) which says that intelligence is not linked to success I just don't know that we can assume that correlation.

</comment><comment><USER120> A key missing piece for intelligence: how many measurements can you make on the world? It doesn't matter how much computational power something has if it can't make measurements and ask and test hypotheses.

Edit: should state that this is a corollary of "> The Argument From Actual AI," but generalized to any 'intelligent' system, not just neural nets.

</comment><comment><USER121> Glad to see a voice from the strong AI skeptic camp here. Reminds me of a book I read a long time ago called "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition." I used to drink the kool-aid myself until a friend of mine snapped me out of it by saying, "Dude, you're telling me you actually want Skynet??" I gave him my copy of the book.

</comment><comment><USER122> The New Yorker did an article on Bostrom and the Future of Humanity Institute last year:

[http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday- invent...](http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/11/23/doomsday-invention- artificial-intelligence-nick-bostrom)

</comment><comment><USER123> The thing I think everyone should be most worried about is not robots deciding to kill us, it's the economic upheaval that could result from robots that can do jobs better than their human counterparts.

There's been studies done on this type of thing ([https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/jobs/robot...](https://journalistsresource.org/studies/economics/jobs/robots- at-work-the-economics-effects-of-workplace-automation)) and so far use of robots has mostly focused on helping human workers become more productive, and not replacing them entirely. However, for lower skilled workers this isn't always true, and if robots were able to replace even the most skilled workers... that could cause problems for human employment. To quote the article on current status:

"Robots had no effect on the hours worked by high-skilled workers. While the authors found that industrial robots had no significant effect on overall employment, there was some evidence that they crowded out low-skilled and, to a lesser extent, middle-skilled workers."

Now continue that line of thinking and imagine a world where a robot could do any job better than a human...

We could end up with a "is that American made?" or "is that free range chicken?" type of scenario where companies that refuse to replace human workers with robots are competing against other companies that will do anything to lower costs, even if ethically questionable.

So then we potentially end up in a situation where the rich (Executives and stock holders) get richer by replacing costly human workers with cheaper, more efficient robots, and the wealth of the average family declines as people struggle to find work. Alright, well maybe we give all humans an allowance to live off of, food to eat, a home to live in, etc. Except...

Human beings need work. They need to feel a sense of purpose. I don't think the humans from the movie Wall-E hold much appeal. Let's not go there.

Ok, so maybe we pass laws against replacing many human jobs with robots. Well, if the robots are truly intelligent, aren't we then discriminating against a group of sentient beings solely because they are too good at their job? Isn't this just going to be a techno world version of the civil rights and lgbt rights movements?

These are the things I worry about. Not robots killing me.

As a side note, I hope cyborg and other bio tech improves at some point, at lot of these concerns could be mitigated if humans had the potential to improve themselves beyond any normal evolutionary rates.

<comment><USER124> Look at Moravec's Paradox.

It's probably the most valid result from the research and yet it is overlooked. We'll have AI capable of replacing the middle class before we have robots capable of replacing the working class.

</comment></comment><comment><USER125> The quintessential "rouge AI" scenario, pre-terminator SkyNet but post "Metropolis" is "Colossus: The Forbin Project".

It's finally available on widescreen blu-ray in Germany but Universal has still not re-released it for the western audience.

The filmed exterior of Colossus HQ is Lawrence Hall of Science in Oakland, CA.

</comment><comment><USER61> I have to say how well maciej writes. I hope someday I am able to write and express my thoughts as well as he can.

</comment><comment><USER126> I think that we vastly underestimate bias in this subject. Smart people are afraid of AI or are afraid of change. This article belongs to the second category of people that _wish_ things stay the same. There are also some very weak arguments in it.

</comment><comment><USER113> As always it seems the fear mongers in AI do not actually know how programming and "the machine" works.

Also, depending on how you measure intelligence, "machines" have been way smarter than humans since the first calculator.

</comment><comment><USER127> such a great read, here's the video ~ [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kErHiET5YPw)

</comment><comment><USER128> I am one of those who is convinced that AI will destroy humanity and Elons/others efforts will not help.

Its hard for me to argue against the fact that this idea isn't eating me.

</comment><comment><USER129> The pace the world is moving towards its doom, one can be forgiven to think the Internet has gained consciousness and pulling tricks to get us all killed.

</comment><comment><USER130> I feel like this essay is missing a key point around defining intelligence. Machines can be trained to emulate intelligence, but machines are not themselves intelligent.

Our neural nets can drive cars, convert speech to text, recognize images, and maybe even carry on a conversation.

But there's no light behind the eyes. It's all synthetic. It's an emulation which mimes intelligence through the brute force of observing billions of inputs and their associated outputs.

What it decisively cannot do, is something that it never saw before, except by mistake.

Wake me when none of this is true?

<comment><USER23> There's a longstanding philosophical argument about this. Google 'Searle's Chinese Room'.

<comment><USER130> I believe it's fair to say that a computer programmed with knowledge of sufficient numbers of inputs and outputs does indeed "understand" \-- in fact the computer can truly speak and converse in Chinese quite well. But I believe it's a distinction without a difference to say the Computer does not, in fact, _understand_ Chinese in this case.

Instead of arguing semantics I propose a different sort of distinction.

A computer programmed as a deep neural net can understand remarkably well, and with that understanding it becomes a remarkable tool for automation.

However it remains nothing more than a tool. No more intent than a hammer. And without will, certainly without will to evolve.

Only in the sense that the algorithm is programmed to improve its fitness, it calculates coldly towards that end. Not ever in an innovative sense, and certainly not in an adversarial sense.

I agree thoroughly with the other commenters that propose it's not that AI will defeat us, but rather AI will be just too useful that the economic damage will be extreme.

AI will defeat us by replacing the need for us in all productive endeavors. Anything we can do it can do better, cheaper, so far up the value chain that only the elite will remain gainfully employed.

Too much of human labor will be eaten by AI, we better get a hell of a lot better at educating our masses if we ever hope they will have something productive they're able to do.

I wonder how the theory of competitive advantage stacks up against AI -- a good for which there is no scarcity!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER90> What's interesting is the evolution of consciousness. In the long term, does it matter whether or not it's embodied in meat?

<comment><USER131> I distinguish between consciousness and self-consciousness, but as to your question, I don't think it matters at all in what form self consciousness takes place, and the moral thing to do when something appears to be self- conscious is to treat it with the same kindness you would expect for yourself (unless it is obvious that this something is a clear and present danger). I can totally see how from a moral perspective a human should be put on trial and imprisoned for killing a sentient "machine" \- though unfortunately, looking at how as a society we treat animals and many times look the other way at mass cruelty to our own kind, I'm not really sure I'd mind a super- intelligence (and perhaps as a result also benevolent) ruling us instead of the other way around.

Of course, there's the possibility that a super-intelligence would not be able to break through the human egocentric limitations that may have been built into it by its human creators, and in that case, we're screwed...

<comment><USER90> Right, self-consciousness.

I see evolution generally as selection in various configuration spaces. Specifics at various levels -- cosmogenesis, nucleosynthesis, life, consciousness, ... -- are different, of course. But it's arguably the same process.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER132> If AI is able to self-improve, don't you think it will reach to a level of complexity where it will start asking, why?

</comment><comment><USER133> Say that the simulation time period is 1 billion years. To the post- singularity, a few thousand years is the minor details in history, like what Napolean had for breakfast the morning before the Battle of Waterloo.

Let the thoughts flow as far as you'd like, but come back to reality once in a while. After all, your ideas are conditional to your body.

</comment><comment><USER126> I published this as a kind of answer : [https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/superintelligence-a-biased- ar...](https://medium.com/@arisAlexis/superintelligence-a-biased- argument-62ba7aa57cc8#.z34llfk8n)

</comment><comment><USER134> Could AI be programmed to have intuitions nor irrational behaviors?

</comment><comment><USER135> Tangent: What's the tech scene like in Zagreb?

<comment><USER136> It's pretty good.

There are several hackerspaces ([https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Zagreb](https://wiki.hackerspaces.org/Zagreb) \- I'm partial to the one in Mama), and every now and then we'll gather around a "Nothing will happen" ([http://www.nsnd.org/](http://www.nsnd.org/)).

There's a vibrant meetup scene (well-covered by meetup.com), and WebCamp Zagreb ([https://2016.webcampzg.org/](https://2016.webcampzg.org/)) is the community conference that tries to gather different meetups & communities once a year.

Companies from abroad tend to open development offices here to exploit the cheaper workforce, especially since Croatia has joined the EU. There's also a number of local companies that are constantly hiring, resulting in a solid amount of hiring opportunities even for the part of the crowd that's a bit pickier.

People are leaving Croatia in general, though, and the tech community isn't immune to that. Lots of people moved to other EU countries, and although that's not unexpected at all, I believe it's left a dent within all of the above.

If you decide to visit, give me a shout. :)

<comment><USER23> The parent is one of the organizers of this conference, and I just want to say what a wonderful group ran WebCamp, and how welcoming and friendly they were.

If you get a chance to speak there, or attend, take it!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER137> Shouldn't a superintelligence be smart enough to become another Gandhi? Why not?

</comment><comment><USER138> I for one welcome our new superintelligent overlords. I can't imagine they could do much worse than us. [https://xkcd.com/1626/](https://xkcd.com/1626/)

</comment><comment><USER139> Unpersuasive premises. Obvious alarmism.

</comment><comment><USER140> Let me just elaborate on the 'complex motivations' idea, because I certainly think that 'orthogonality' is the weak point in the AGI doomsday story.

Orthogonality is defined by Bostrom as the postulate that a super-intelligence can have nearly any arbitrary goals. Here is a short argument as to why 'orthogonality' may be false:

In so far as an AGI has a _precisely_ defined goal, it is likely that the AGI cannot be super-intelligent. The reason is because there's always a certain irreducible amount of fuzziness or ambiguity in the definition of _some_ types of concepts ('non-trivial' concepts associated with values don't have necessary definitions). Let us call these concepts, fuzzy concepts (or f-concepts).

Now imagine that you are trying to define the goals that will let you specify that you want an AGI to do _precisely_ , but it turns out that for certain goals there's an unavoidable trade-off: trying to _increase_ the precision of the definitions _reduces_ the cognitive power of the AGI. It's because non- trivial goals need the aforementioned 'f-concepts', and you can't define these precisely without over simplifying them.

The only way to deal with f-concepts is by using a 'concept cloud' – instead of a single crisp definition, you would need to have a 'cloud' or 'cluster' of multiple slightly different definitions, and it's the totality of all these that specifies the goals of the AGI.

So for example, such f-concepts (f) would need a whole set of slightly differing definitions (d):

F= (d1, d2, d3, d4, d5, d6…)

But now the AGI needs a way to integrate all the slightly conflicting definitions into a single coherent set. Let us designate the methods that do this as <integration-methods>.

But finding better <integration methods> is an _instrumental_ goal (needed for whatever other goals the AGI must have). So unavoidably, _extra_ goals must emerge to handle these f-concepts, in addition to whatever original goals the programmer was trying to specify. And if these 'extra' goals conflict too badly with the original ones, then the AGI will be cognitively handicapped.

This falsifies orthogonality: f-concepts can only be handled via the emergence of _additional_ goals to perform the internal conflict-resolution procedures that integrate multiple differing definitions of goals in a 'concept-cloud'.

In so far as an AGI has goals that can be _precisely_ specified, orthogonality is trivially true, but such an AGI probably can't become super-intelligent. It's cognitively handicapped.

In so far as an AGI has _fuzzy_ goals, it can become super-intelligent, but orthogonality is likely falsified, because 'extra' goals need to emerge to handle 'conflict resolution' and integration of multiple differing definitions in the concept cloud.

All of this just confirms that goal-drift of our future descendants is unavoidable. The irony is that this is the very reason why 'orthogonality' may be false.

</comment><comment><USER141> I'm not sure if this is meant to be funny somehow, or taken seriously, but the series of strawmans as arguments, eg. referencing some american sitcom as an example to a phenomen is pretty weak. It is sad, because I can agree with many ideas, but the flawed reasoning is not convincing for someone critical, and wastes those arguments...

Although the read is ovarall interresting, but I find the style and arguments sub par, too american for my taste.

</comment><comment><USER142> It puzzles me that people think that the nanosecond some superintelligence comes into being, that it also has the capacity to destroy humans/earth/whatever. No thought is given as to how this intellect gets said capacity, bar 'launch the nukes'.

Seriously, if "it" turned against "us", we'd have the upper hand. For example, quality electronics are hard to make without sending African children down into mines and having African adults shoot each other over the results (ie: conflict minerals). If a superintelligence is reliant on us to propagate its physical-world interactions, we're going to be just fine.

I mean come on, we all work in IT, and we all know just how difficult it is to keep hardware running securely, safely, and in good order. Stuff fails all the time. Similarly, we all know people who are _really intelligent_ , but this doesn't translate to success in life for them.

In short, "being intelligent" isn't enough - the entity also needs ways to effectively work the world around them.

edit: heh, just saw another article on the front page: "IQ is only a minor factor in success"

</comment><comment><USER143> Ossining news

</comment><comment><USER143> hello everybody

</comment><comment><USER144> Am I the only one who thought that the points he came up with to refute AGI / ASI actually made the concerns deeper?

</comment><comment><USER145> We should figure out intelligence before speculating on super-intelligence. I think Kurzweil and Hofstadter have a compelling model in 'How to Create a Mind' and 'Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking', but it's not exactly rigorous and we still haven't created anything that could pass the Turing test which wouldn't even require _high_ intelligence - <USER7> 2nd grade level or something.

</comment><comment><USER146> > I can't point to the part of my brain that is "good at neurosurgery", > operate on it, and by repeating the procedure make myself the greatest > neurosurgeon that has ever lived. Ben Carson tried that, and look what > happened to him.

Nice, but does it fall under political ban?

<comment><USER23> The political ban ended two days after it started.

<comment><USER146> Good to know, it was a terrible idea.</comment></comment></comment>