Comments on: Machines That Think

By: Brenda Cooper

Brenda Cooper — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 05:29:04 +0000

Hi Wollff,

Yes, I think we are way too afraid. We, after all, have the plug we can pull. In the short term, anyway. I think it is that we humans feel fragile.

We’re also used to the status quo – a world where we at least think we can out-think anything. And so smart AI’s are scary.

That said, working on friendly AI is not a bad idea. It’s kind of like getting off oil. Whether or not getting off oil will solve the global warming problems, there are problems it will solve.

And thinking about the friendly-AI problems the way Eliezer does may act like a frame for our thinking the way books like 1984 have framed our thinking about certain things.

By: Wollff

Wollff — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 20:14:34 +0000

I still haven’t really understood the deeply rooted fear of AIs.
Think about an AI running amok. At first sight it is a pretty scary thought.
Now imagine a brain in a vat, running amok. Less scary and quite a bit more ridiculous. One is immediately prone to exclaim: “It’s just a brain in a jar for god’s sake! What can a brain do?”
But isn’t the same true for an AI? Basically it also is just a brain in a jar.

Which brings me to the main point of this post: In many of the catastrophic visions of AI we aren’t really told about actuators. Actuators are the things that enable robots to act, as the name suggest. In a vat-like AI one might call them the output channels. They have to be defined and set strict limits to what an AI can or cannot do.
To take a human as an example: No matter how intelligent, we humans are limited to do the things that our bodies allow us to do. No matter how smart, we simply can’t suddenly start shooting laser beams from our eyeballs.
In my experience that is often what happens with fictional AIs. They, metaphorically, start shooting laserbeams from their eyeballs, only because they have become smart.

In some other catastrophic AI scenarios someone (usually “the government”) always has the idea to hook up the AI more or less directly to ICBM launch facilities or other doomsday machines. “Let our AI express itself by firing nuclear missiles” probably is not a smart idea, but that conclusion is relatively apparent to everyone (but “the government”).

So my main question would be this: Isn’t the whole friendly AI issue massively overblown? Are our fears of AIs maybe just fuelled by faulty preconceptions about what AIs can and cannot do?

By: Brenda Cooper

Brenda Cooper — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 12:43:56 +0000

Wow – I didn’t know George Dyson wrote fiction! Very cool. Thanks, Tom.
And yes, I agree with you and Anthony — biological change may be a big part. In fact, a lot of research on newer computing mediums suggests biological tools there, too. Maybe a parallel path where humans become more like machines and machines become more like humans? And no, I’m not implying they’d meet in the middle and fall in love….:)

By: Tom James

Tom James — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 23:10:05 +0000

An excellent essay: although I’ve always been enthusiastic about the possibility of a human-equivalent AGI I agree that if/when it does happen it will be as a result of many incremental and emergent developments of specialised machines, rather than a single, coherent, directed effort.

Also another point – we already have one kind of intelligence (human) – so why bother trying to reinvent the wheel? There is too much focus in the media on simply trying to recreate human minds in computers.

As Mark says above there is an anthropic bias in popular thinking about AI – that they will just be scarier, nastier versions of human beings – in truth the real value of AI is where they think in ways that are fundamentally different to how humans think.

In that spirit of nonhuman evolutionary emergence I direct thee to this
splendid story at Edge.

By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 14:16:42 +0000

While I first fell in with the AI idea from Robert Heinlein’s books, including and especially _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, I am currently of the belief that the coming AI – are going to be us. Humans, with their minds expanded and upgraded via biological and technological means.