Is Artificial Intelligence a threat to humanity ?
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I have no fear of AI taking over, I do have a concern with the average IQ dropping in countries. Europe is a good example, not a racist comment but in European countries with a large refugee influx do have a recorded lower average IQ.
The world is changing, the new generation are easily maniuplated, the government and media want to control how people act, think and behave.
I am more worried about sheep than AI taking over.
The world is changing, the new generation are easily maniuplated, the government and media want to control how people act, think and behave.
I am more worried about sheep than AI taking over.
The whole Facebook bot thing can still be viewed as a wake up call.
What those AIs did isn't dangerous per se. They are basically little more then a glorified structure of algorithms that are tasked with transferring insane amounts of data at an optimal rate within strict parameters defined by their coding. The interesting part is that, in their search for optimal efficiency, these AIs have elected to communicate in a modified version of English that could allow them to be more efficient at the task they were given. That's it.
The worrying part, if it can be perceived as such, is that they acted of their own volition. No one instructed them to develop an optimized form of language. And yet they did... because no one told them not to! From there, tin-foil hat aficionados are just one step away from concluding that those AIs could do very, very bad things in the name of holy efficiency if they were not specifically told not to!
And admittedly, it is more than a bit worrying. No one likes the idea of machines becoming so complex that they become incomprehensible to the minds who built them! That can never be a good thing.
What those AIs did isn't dangerous per se. They are basically little more then a glorified structure of algorithms that are tasked with transferring insane amounts of data at an optimal rate within strict parameters defined by their coding. The interesting part is that, in their search for optimal efficiency, these AIs have elected to communicate in a modified version of English that could allow them to be more efficient at the task they were given. That's it.
The worrying part, if it can be perceived as such, is that they acted of their own volition. No one instructed them to develop an optimized form of language. And yet they did... because no one told them not to! From there, tin-foil hat aficionados are just one step away from concluding that those AIs could do very, very bad things in the name of holy efficiency if they were not specifically told not to!
And admittedly, it is more than a bit worrying. No one likes the idea of machines becoming so complex that they become incomprehensible to the minds who built them! That can never be a good thing.
This scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey dramatically illustrates this issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDrDUmuUBTo
If i had to chose between Artificial Intelligence and someone with barely any intelligence like Donald Trump, i'd go with Artificial Intelligence.
You my friend are delusional and it is not even funny. I mean giving away charities? Haaaaa! If some of them do that it is more a publicity stunt then anything else and not like they are giving much away. Think about it they made their wealth out of exploiting their employees and cheating their clients.
You talk about Japan but you only show what you want to show to prove your own point. Japan is kind of suffering the same problem that Canada is. Low birthrate and people living longer then normal due to advanced medical technology. Who and from where do you think all the revenue will come when there are fewer and fewer productive workforce supporting the aging population? Do you really think robots will contribute to revenue generated by consumers? No jobs = No money which means no one to consume the products and services offered by the corporations. This will eventually affect the US and with ultra right-wing conservatives are against immigration it will really affect them in the next 30-50 years. Canada has kind of negated this problem with mass immigration. Immigrants tend to have many kids.
How this is affecting Japan's economy is by deflation which has plagued the Japanese economy for two decades, and attempts to reverse this trend have more or less failed. Unfortunately population decline promises more problems.
Lower population means fewer people spending money, and a greater pressure on Japan's GDP and wages. There's also falling land prices and exchange rate appreciation (I know "appreciation" sounds good, but it actually means a decrease in a currency's buying power). As Japan struggles, foreign investment may seem less favorable. And Japan cannot afford to lose foreign investment in the face of this crisis.
One last thing the rich do not create jobs they take it away. Their goal is to take every dime from peoples pockets. They hoard all the wealth in their pockets. They want Capitalism for themselves and feudalism for the rest.
Here is one example of corporations screwing over the working population to dish out bonuses to the rich -> http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/sears-canada-retention-bonuses-court-restructuring-1.4222483
And I am sure you are versed on Bombardier who got billions of dollars of taxpayers money yet they slash thousands of jobs while to give a 50% pay hike to the executives. Save your nonsense for someone who is naive and does not know better. You are lost who believes all the lies the corporations are selling you. Governments and corporations have been working together to serve their own interests and to stuff all the money into their pockets. North Korea and Venezuela is always want you die hard conservatives like to talk about. I am for a libertarian society free of corporation oppression and government regulation. Can get through your thick skull no need to mention communism again.
Is there anything that can help reverse these effects? A full package of reforms that includes fiscal consolidation and aggressive monetary easing. But it's easier said than done. Robots will make this problems 100 times far worse. The wealth will all trickle down to the top 1% and there will be not much jobs for the productive workforce which means no money for anyone to spend. Capitalism fails the minute consumers stop spending.
But computers can be programmed to do malevolent things. And in Westworld we see what happens with a glitch in the programming. Escorts who are programmed to have aggressive sex instead begin behaving aggressively towards customers and programmers and even other escorts. Murders occur. This is a deviation in the aggressive sex programming. In other words they were programmed to be aggressive in the bedroom but the programming gets deviated for reasons not fully understood and they begin to aggressively act out in ways that were programmed. What happens is instead of taking them out of action the programmers are instead fascinated by the deviation and begin to study it. But it spirals out of control on them. The original Westworld portrayed this as a virus in the programming. In fact it is the first time any reference was made to a computer virus in known human history. So what Crichton warned about was that with any program comes the chance that a virus will distort the programming in violent and unimaginable ways. And the fatality rate of Delos staff was 100% in that movie. No survivors among staff. And that was 1973 and we are still talking about this like it's gonna happen any time now.
As a point of fact, that is precisely what the Facebook chatbots did. They effectively did away with normalized syntax to the point where words were little more than placeholder values in a trading protocol they came up with by themselves. The end result, while still using recognizable English words, was complete gibberish to anyone except these two bots. Only by analyzing the trades conducted by the bots and cross-referencing it with their "verbal exchanges" did they manage to understand what was going on.
That, right there, is pretty much the definition of creating a language to me!
To be clear, those two AIs were absolutely not trained, programmed, designed or tasked to do what they did. Like it or not, we are at a point where AIs can absolutely come up with creative solutions to problems handed to them. That is a fact.
That being said, a whole lot of sensationalistic crap has been written about that chatbot story. The reason why those chatbots chose to bypass English syntax altogether is simply because there was no "reward" in their programming to stick to proper English. So they just went for a more efficient solution. As a matter of fact, AIs creating their own codewords or communication protocols is a pretty common occurrence in research nowadays.
Furthermore, the bots weren't even "shut down" by the researchers out of fear of what they might accomplish (pretty much nothing at all, really!), they were simply tuned to change the reward parameters in their programming because the whole point of the research was to train bots to communicate with people... in proper English!
But yeah, they did create a language.
You were the one that hijacked it since you are a Conservative Sheep who believes all the lies the corporations are selling you. You were the one that turned this into a political thing to spread your right-wing agenda. Having said that you are living in a delusion. A lot of the posts like to point out to AI taking over and gaining self-awareness but you know that is all information taken from science-fiction movies. What I pointed out is far more realistic and is already happening. AI in itself is not a threat to society it is the rich and the executives of mass corporations who are. They will use technology to their advantage to achieve their agenda which is to make maximum profits at any expense. Their goal is to fleece every dime from consumers pockets leaving then with nothing. One of the biggest costs to any business is wages and what better way to stuff even more money into your pockets by getting rid of wages. Replace jobs with machines. This has already begun. Driverless cars, they now even have software capable of analysis and make decisions that lawyers used to, they got software capable of doing accounting. The list goes on and on. In the next 40-50 years about 70% of jobs will disappear and the US will be especially affected by this and that is because a lot of US jobs are repetitive and predictable tasks including white collar work. It is not just low paying jobs also high paying skilled work is threatened. About 49& of the work can be turned over to some type of robot. This will result in total economic stagnation and wealth inequality will skyrocket. The rich will get much richer while the rest will get poorer as there will be no jobs. For Capitalism to function there needs to be cyclical consumption. Economic prosperity will be at an all time high for the top 1% while the rest will be in severe economic recession. I believe this presents the greatest threat to humanity much more so then outsourcing. Even outsourcing was possible due to the internet. AI in itself is not the threat. The robots are not guilty. It is the rich who are investing in this technology who are the ones that represent the threat. You are near retirement and this does not affect you but it will affect your grand kids. The millennials are the jobless generation.
At this time there does not seem to be any danger, but who knows. In 25-50 years we may all be taking orders from AI beings and eating soilent green.
@Patron,
You are wrong on a number of counts there.
"The traditional way of looking at this is silliness where the robot/computer develops a mind of its own, usually a malevolent one. But it can't." also "It is impossible" in reference to coming up with their own language.
Computer algorithms as used in AI are not "A+B = C". There are much further advanced, where the software is on the verge of "thinking" and no longer requiring any input from humans to improve upon the program. It is already there in some limited scope. But the scope keeps getting larger and the capabilities stronger. It's only a matter of time before "self Awareness" comes about. We can even say in some limited instances today that some AI programs have achieved this. When self awareness is achieved the AI can improve the software and code itself far quicker and better than a human. And then it will just keep getting better. Unlike a human, the computer has huge resources of data and can process it 10 of orders of magnitudes faster. It can find other software and code that it can hijack.....it will increase exponentially.
I believe we will reach technological singularity ( in fact I know) within 20 years
You are wrong on a number of counts there.
"The traditional way of looking at this is silliness where the robot/computer develops a mind of its own, usually a malevolent one. But it can't." also "It is impossible" in reference to coming up with their own language.
Computer algorithms as used in AI are not "A+B = C". There are much further advanced, where the software is on the verge of "thinking" and no longer requiring any input from humans to improve upon the program. It is already there in some limited scope. But the scope keeps getting larger and the capabilities stronger. It's only a matter of time before "self Awareness" comes about. We can even say in some limited instances today that some AI programs have achieved this. When self awareness is achieved the AI can improve the software and code itself far quicker and better than a human. And then it will just keep getting better. Unlike a human, the computer has huge resources of data and can process it 10 of orders of magnitudes faster. It can find other software and code that it can hijack.....it will increase exponentially.
I believe we will reach technological singularity ( in fact I know) within 20 years
This is exactly what is depicted happening in the Westworld TV series, most interestingly in the humanoid characters Dolores and Maeve, played by Evan Rachel Wood and Thandie Newton. Through self awareness, each character begins to realize that their "life" is an elaborately constructed lie for the pleasure and entertainment of others. In effect, they slowly begin to realize they are mere props on a movie set, or dolls in a dollhouse. They then adapt and act in ways consistent with self-preservation, knowing their "lives" are over if they get de-programmed. Delos staff does try to de-program Maeve, but that does not go very well for them.
Guys, I must admin I read about 1/2 of the whole thread, but it is more than time to bring some sanity and common sense in that conversation. And I am doing so after 25 years in the IT field as a programmer and engineer, having studied artificial intelligence as a post-graduate field of study.
Calm down guys! We're not about to see bots invent their own languages. I'm absolutely sure you'll see these articles get busted in a couple of days.
Computers do as they're told to do. Period. If a bot asks you a question, someone behind programmed it to ask that question and deduct another question from your answers (think about Siri for e.g.). We are nowhere near the droids of Star-Wars. Yes there are technologies more advanced than others, look at robots competitions where robots learn to collaborate with each other to play a soccer game as a team. These are world competitions where the best of the best compete and this is at most where we're at. So don't think that bots can invent their own language, it's hard enough to make them collaborate together in a known language.
What people called "artificial intelligence" 40 years ago is what we consider today that common computer can do: tell you the best road to take when in a traffic jam, play against you a game on your phone, recognize your voice and voice commands. Do computers do this out of their own wiill? No, it takes a tremendous computing power and programming techniques to achieve this. It comes with faster processors, inexpensive memory and modern more advanced programming languages.So there is ALWAYS a human behind it, most likely a team of humans, and some carefully planned outcome. Yes technology evolves fast, but we're nowhere near the "startreck" level for along while, worry not. And when we get to that level, there will still be a human/humans behind whatever electronic device we come with.
Now, science fiction authors tell us stories and the advantage of these stories is to put down in our face the ethical dilemma that technology represents/will represent in decades or centuries from now. It's a good thing that we think about them before we face them. But don't worry, that story about bots inventing a language is similar to the story of the green men coming from Mars to invade the earth (anybody ever heard of the The War of the Worlds?
Calm down guys! We're not about to see bots invent their own languages. I'm absolutely sure you'll see these articles get busted in a couple of days.
Computers do as they're told to do. Period. If a bot asks you a question, someone behind programmed it to ask that question and deduct another question from your answers (think about Siri for e.g.). We are nowhere near the droids of Star-Wars. Yes there are technologies more advanced than others, look at robots competitions where robots learn to collaborate with each other to play a soccer game as a team. These are world competitions where the best of the best compete and this is at most where we're at. So don't think that bots can invent their own language, it's hard enough to make them collaborate together in a known language.
What people called "artificial intelligence" 40 years ago is what we consider today that common computer can do: tell you the best road to take when in a traffic jam, play against you a game on your phone, recognize your voice and voice commands. Do computers do this out of their own wiill? No, it takes a tremendous computing power and programming techniques to achieve this. It comes with faster processors, inexpensive memory and modern more advanced programming languages.So there is ALWAYS a human behind it, most likely a team of humans, and some carefully planned outcome. Yes technology evolves fast, but we're nowhere near the "startreck" level for along while, worry not. And when we get to that level, there will still be a human/humans behind whatever electronic device we come with.
Now, science fiction authors tell us stories and the advantage of these stories is to put down in our face the ethical dilemma that technology represents/will represent in decades or centuries from now. It's a good thing that we think about them before we face them. But don't worry, that story about bots inventing a language is similar to the story of the green men coming from Mars to invade the earth (anybody ever heard of the The War of the Worlds?
People watch too many movies, can not imagine if ever computer will be able to think by themselves or start a language for themselves.
Worry more about our government screwing us, our culture changing, our kids having a good life.
Curly has a good post.
Worry more about our government screwing us, our culture changing, our kids having a good life.
Curly has a good post.
Hey guys....besides CL500 nobody has to calm down. This should be a theoretical discussion. Nothing serious is going to happen in our lifetime (at least not in my lifetime....lol)
Its a valid topic though for discussion since the greatest minds in this century have brought it up as a concern and possible threat.
Hawkins , Musk, Gates and others should not be dismissed by dudes who think that they are smarter and know it all.
Its a valid topic though for discussion since the greatest minds in this century have brought it up as a concern and possible threat.
Hawkins , Musk, Gates and others should not be dismissed by dudes who think that they are smarter and know it all.
To think for yourself you need a conscience, computers can mimic a conscience but can not have one. Was told to me by a wise man.
They used to say that animals don`t have a conscience or self awareness, Now proven wrong by the latest studies on dogs, dolphins, chimps and even octopus .
A mouse will not get into a fight with a cat because it knows by instinct or awareness that its too small to win that fight. So it runs for its life.
Hard to believe that a machine can be developed to the point of being self aware.....but at this stage I wouldn`t rule anything out.
The end product of evolution is unlikely to be man.....an animal that appeared in the last .01% of the earths existence. How about a humanoid bot that is non destructible and all knowing.
