Artificial intelligence won't destroy the human race anytime soon

boing
33

  1. Very few people outside Nick Bostrom, MIRI, and the like are consistent about whether “AI” is referring to general intelligence or domain-specific competence. This leads to lots of people talking past each other and confusing their audiences.

  2. The fact that we don’t know how to build AGI is part of the timescale problem, but also not very comforting. Maybe all the pieces already exist, waiting to be stitched together and given more processing power. Maybe it’ll be a hundred years or more to even get close. But if it is more like the former, and if there is a possibility of hard-takeoff recursive self-improvement, then not getting it absolutely right the first time is likely to approach a global extinction level event. Not because of malice, but because of indifference. Paperclip maximizers not terminators.

  3. Narrow AI can also be dangerous when used in many parts of complex networks, as described in a number of comments above. Also, really hard to identify/correct once in place.

  4. Writing ethical guardian software as the OP describes is at minimum equivalent to being able to produce artificial general intelligence in terms of difficulty (interpreting laws, understanding the complexity of human goals expressed in imprecise and informal language, etc.). In practice, for an AGI to act as a reliable guardian it also needs to be an expert in all human knowledge areas, more noble than Gandhi, and able to predict the long term impacts of decisions as they ripple through many layers of the AI and human and natural systems it is supposed to oversee or interact with. It is most likely equivalent to writing an artificial general friendly superintelligence.

  5. Define soon. I’m going to be around most likely another 60 years, and if I’m lucky and medical science figures out aging quickly enough I may last centuries or millennia. My newborn niece will very likely still be alive and kicking in the 22nd century. Am I not supposed to care about her and her potential children’s well being? The norms we set out now in terms of how we think about AI can absolutely impact the tone of future debate, regulation, and research for generations.

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