Elon Musk: artificial intelligence is our biggest existential threat

[remotemass]

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat

[TheLoser]

What are you talking about? You are somewhat artificial intelligence yourself.

You are your own threats!

[Vod]

What are you talking about? You are somewhat artificial intelligence yourself.

I think he means non bio-intelligence.

[notbatman]

She's got a bun in the oven!

http://www.research.ibm.com/articles/brain-chip.shtml

[antonioserrano72]

We must consult with the Oracle.

[S.Boxx]

Any arguments that "it's impossible to build such a device" are refuted by our very existence.

Today Bitcoin is "unaware" but everything is being put in place for the next step in the plan "Bitcoin 2.0" with Smart Contracts.

Bitcoin already has become an autonomous agent which utilizes humans to build itself and issues autonomous payments for improvement work done.

Read these two links. This is where the planning of Bitcoin AI started:

Tim May
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg00964.html

Nick Szabo
http://cypherpunks.venona.com/date/1995/09/msg01303.html

The next phase of enlightenment:

Smart contracts are contracts that are not just legal documents but actually active AI code. In the beginning smart contracts are just computer programs that facilitate, verify or enforce the performance of a contract. A simple example would be “digital repo”, where access to certain information or a machine would be granted or not depending on whether one party had paid the other. More advanced digital repo contracts can recognize if the seller went absent or bankrupt, and then allow access with no constraints. Over time the intelligence could increase, allowing contracts to actually gather information, check that they are obeyed and even take action.

http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/548/469

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=502359.0

When based on the same evidence, the predictions of "statistical prediction rules" are at least as reliable as, and are typically more reliable than, the predictions of human experts for problems of social prediction.

Disclaimer: (AI) does not always mean (Singularity).
http://unenumerated.blogspot.com/2011/01/singularity.html?m=1

[S.Boxx]

This may be a better explanation:

1) Bitcoin is only general AI for now.

2) Smart contracts are single-minded even for (AI)'s; while some may have very advanced pattern recognition or legal thinking modules the "only" thing they care about is performing their contractual function. They might know major secrets, but if they are written to be quiet about them they will remain quiet no matter what.

3) It can reach the point where your own pc, house, car or phone might be hired by a contract to check certain information. A high tech "wire tap" investigation of sorts built into the agreement of the contract. This would occur when the contract has started to think one of the parts is doing advanced cheating that it cannot detect online.

4) With respect to strong AI, Nick Szabo(as you can read in his blogs linked above) is very close to the problem, and that's the issue. Like any good engineer/scientist, he sees problems everywhere. Yes, there are many problems before we get to strong AI. That's not news. There were many problems to resolve before people could pay a small sum of money and let a giant metal tube take them through the air to a destination halfway round the world without killing them - but those problems got resolved, one by one. Many problems do not amount to an impossibility, only a damn hard problem (which we knew strong AI was anyway).

5) You do see a lot of it in books and movies, some very well thought. Referring back to Nicks blogs, his other assertion, that the concept of the singularity is a fantasy, Nick's main argument is that the singularity will only last "for a time", and that it will turn into a classic S-curve. He waves Feynman's name around as supporting evidence, but does not address the fact that intelligence (and artificial intelligence in particular) is not subject to the Malthusian laws which have caused other phenomena to follow S-curves. Yes, we only have access to so many particles, but the whole point of exponential AI is figuring out better ways to use the same number of particles. There may be a theoretical limit to how efficiently we can use those particles, but even so there are a lot of particles, and if we can manufacture even just human-equivalent computing matter in factories, that's already enough to achieve a singularity.

[S.Boxx]

Don't get me wrong, I understand Bitcoin with smart contracts would only be general AI, the "Chinese Room" type but it is still is the foundation for the beginning of strong AI.

The Singularity (Strong AI):

The human brain doesn't need to build a smarter brain. It just needs to build something of equivalent smartness (which should be theoretically possible, there's no reason to believe the human brain is the upper bound for all generalised reasoning ability) on a substrate like silicon which is subject to Moore's Law (and thus gets inherently faster with time) and which is immortal and duplicable.

Build 1 functioning brain in silicon, and:

- 18 months later you can build one that's twice as fast using the same principles

- duplicate this brain and get the power of multiple people thinking together (but with greater bandwidth between them than any human group)

- run this brain for 100 years and get an older intellectually functioning human than has ever existed before

- duplicate whatever learning this brain has accumulated over 100 years (which, say, brings to the level of an Einstein) as many times as you have physical resources for (so, clone Einstein)
All those are paths to super-human AI from the production of a human-intelligence brain in a non-biological form.

So, if a human brain can make a computer brain, which is a reasonable assumption, then a human brain can make a brain smarter than itself.

Building a human brain in a non-biological substrate is not a miracle. It would be a miracle in the same way that transistors and penicillin are, not in the way that Jesus' resurrection is. I.e., a fantastic, happy, unlikely but possible event that will change the world for the better.

We know that human brains can be built in some way: we have the evidence for that claim inside billions of skulls. The question is then not to push the theoretical boundaries of computational capability beyond some theoretical level - but merely to achieve it again artificially.

[quihry]

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/oct/27/elon-musk-artificial-intelligence-ai-biggest-existential-threat

I guess it's true an AI could pose an existential threat to humanity, not only because it might see us as a threat, but also because it might not even share human values at all. However, I don't know how he plans for those regulations to come about, or even be effectively implemented. I mean, I think we can all agree that if an AI can be created, someone is going to create it sooner or later. Probably the military is going to do it first, considering the benefits it could potentially bring to them, but the resources to do so will eventually be at the disposal of a lot more people as technology improves and access to it increases. Or, who knows, maybe it will be created accidentally like in ghost in the shell.

But I do agree with him on the rest: once someone creates it, there will likely be no way to control it.

[Lethn]

Oh please, all you need to do to defeat A.I is turn off the power, it's nuclear power plants that will be the biggest threat to mankind because there are morons who are convinced we need these nuclear bombs placed next to every major city in the world.

Also, if turning off the power fails, know your paradoxes!

[patt0]

^ turning off the power didn't go well in the Matrix! xD
The problem is it would be more intelligent than us, so it's hard to know what it would do. But I don't think it would be a threat to humans. Maybe just use us to reach its goals at most.

[(oYo)]

Nanotechnology has the potential to be quite dangerous too. (Self-replicating machines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo ) Combining them with AI could be like the perfect storm.