It's important to remember that this is an accomplishment of humanity, not a defeat. By constructing this AI, we are simply creating another tool for advancing our state of being.
(or something like that)
(or something like that)
It feels like computers have taken one aspect of humanness: logic. Computers could do arithmetic, do algebra, play chess, and now they can play go.
It hurts because logic is usually thought to be one of the highest of human characteristics. Yes computers might never be able to replicate emotion, but even dogs have that.
There's still some aspects we have left to call our own. Computers perform poorly at language-based tasks. They can't write books, write math papers, compose symphonies. I hope it stays that way.
Edit: iopq, pretending to be a dumb human (or one with a language barrier) is cheating for a headline. A real Turing test would require a computer imitate a human for longer than 5 minutes (although currently that is plenty of time) and without any caveats or limitations on the computer's skill.
I'm sure there's always someone that can write books or maths papers or symphonies better than you. I don't think this robs you of purpose, unless your purpose is to be the absolute best at something.
Anyway, I find it curious that you would say logic is a quintessentially human trait, because humans are naturally quite bad at logic.
So a more apt analogy would be if there was someone inside every cellphone who could write books, papers, or symphonies better than you. That day is coming.
People have been doing his for decades, but as far as I'm aware, no-one has tried it with thousands of distributed servers and millions of songs.
AlphaGo needed a training set of perhaps a billion games to be as good as it is. The dataset of master Go games is perhaps a million games. So AlphaGo played at tons of games against a half-trained version of itself to reach the billion game mark.
This doesn't work for songs, because there's no one to tell AlphaBach whether any of the billion symphonies it makes are any good. AlphaGo can just look at the rules and see if its move lead to a win, but there's no automatic evaluation function for music.
Perhaps the Matrix wasn't using the humans for power, but rather the computers wanted to get good at writing music, so they gave each human in it slightly different music and watched their emotional responses.
This is possibly my favorite comment of the whole thread.
It's a super interesting idea and could make for some fascinating science fiction. Poorly programmed AI might not wipe out humanity, because it still needs humans to evaluate its fitness function.
don't you think that a team trying to build this could provide a free offering where users get free algo-generated music in return for 1-10 voting on a song-by-song basis. given enough time and votes, i suspect that the algo could get remarkably good at delivering satisfaction.
On emotions, that's a characteristic of life. With the consciousness we possess, without emotions we would quickly realize that life isn't worth living. I doubt that a "true AI", one with consciousness, will want to live without emotions. And about dogs, we haven't built anything as sophisticated yet ;-)
On AlphaGo, personally I'm not impressed. It's still raw search over the space of all possible moves, combined with neural networks and these techniques do not have the potential to yield human-level intelligence.
On logic, we have enough as to be able to build AlphaGo (also aided by computers and software that we've built, in a man-machine combination, get it?). Can a computer do anything resembling that yet? Of course not, because for now computers are just glorified automatons.
It doesn't 'always'. Advanced chess is already dead, and judging from the pro commentaries, they currently are worse than useless in an 'Advanced go' setting. That may change, but given how much faster computer Go is reaching superhuman levels than computer chess, the 'Advanced go' window may have already closed.
There is only selection.
Meat is just a phase.
Don't worry about the machine. Even in Star Trek TNG, Data can outperform everyone in every task, but was never truly happy!
Use the computers to engineer ourselves to "superhuman" capabilities.
You think we have one now?
"Naches" from our Machines https://www.edge.org/response-detail/26117
>Naches is a Yiddish term that means joy and pride, and it's often used in the context of vicarious pride, taken from others' accomplishments. You have naches, or as is said in Yiddish, you shep naches, when your children graduate college or get married, or any other instance of vicarious pride. These aren't your own accomplishments, but you can still have a great deal of pride and joy in them.
>And the same thing is true with our machines. We might not understand their thoughts or discoveries or technological advances. But they are our machines and we can have naches from them.
AI is more likely to evolve into a tool to be used by the few to control the many.
But, then also consider that many of us are working (i.e. as in 'working for the man') many more hours than our parents did in fields that require significantly more focus, concentration, and mental energy. Even the article notes that people have been facing increasing stress and feelings of being rushed since 1900 and 1965.
Maybe you're in a cushy field. But, most people that I know only have time for 'zoning out' and recovery, rather than in pursuit of true leisure.
Politicians fool countries delivering empty promises about better health, education and security. A supraintelligent AI could promise making humans rich, healthy and powerful, to then break its promise and dominate the world.
Basically, why would an AI want to dominate the world? Humans would have to both very stupidly give the AI values that encourage it to dominate the world and very luckily (or unluckily) give it values that actually converge to a horrible outcome against human intentions by random chance (since the AI designers certainly won't be tuning the value set for that outcome).
Humans are going to program their AI's to try to make as much money as possible. Many corporations are already mindless and reckless amoral machines that relentlessly try to optimize profits despite any externalities. Try to imagine Exxon, Wal-Mart, and Amazon run by an intelligence beyond human understanding or accountability.
Ha, if that were true we wouldn't be constantly extending the law and putting people in jail because they keep breaking the law for profit.
>ivilisation can't work because humans will want to make as much money as possible
And yet we keep running into issues with long term pollution and environmental degradation because of the growth of civilization.
>whether they feel they already have sufficient money for their own needs,
Does greed have bounds?
The problem is when you have multiple AIs. Then same evolutionary principles apply. Paranoid and self-sustaining AIs survive, and the circle goes on...
World domination is a similar situation. For any goal you give an AGI, one of the big risks that may prevent that goal from being accomplished will be the risk that humans intervene. Humans are a big source of uncertainty that will need to be managed and/or eliminated.
Of course, a cat is not conscious. But compared to an AI, we might also be considered pretty low consciousness beings, or at least beings in front of which you don't justify yourself.
How do you know?
If you take the view that consciousness somehow arises from the brain and neural connections (which is intuitively plausible, but I personally am skeptical), it stands to reason that other species with complex brains are conscious as well. Perhaps "less conscious" (if that means anything) in proportion to how much less complex their brains are.
Now experts can discuss details or semantics, but do you truly suggest cats might be conscious?
In particular, we all know that we're conscious, but can't really explain what that means.
Arguing they are not conscious in the sense of a more obscure definition is a bit pointless unless you specify your definition.
Why do you believe this? I don't like cats, but I wouldn't argue that they're not conscious.
Instead of debating the suitcase word "conscious", let me ask: 1) Do you believe that toddlers are conscious? 2) Is there a more precise way to state your belief that doesn't use the word "conscious"?
If some unforeseen event occurred and I had to abandon my cat, thereby breaking my promise that I would take care of her, I would definitely feel guilty about it.
Of course, a cat is not conscious.
Either this is a nonstandard definition of "conscious", or you haven't met many cats.
Or it could devote its entire power to making human lives the best and most comfortable they can be because humanity is some super-precious resource in the universe and it feels it's unimportant because it's just a bunch of silicon and electrons.
Supraintelligent AI being evil is FUD imho because we can't reason about supraintelligent AI.
There is a difference between being evil and incomprehensible intelligence. You are not being evil when you accidentally step on an ant or dig up an ant-hill to build your shed. The ants won't be able to understand what you're doing, or why.
Maybe there's a second AI on the same level as the first and thinks the first AI is evil. We're still dumb as rocks compared to them, but something certainly has that opinion.
That's why e.g. the Future of Life Institute's open AI letter is so important: http://futureoflife.org/ai-open-letter/ We need to be thinking in advance about how to solve the "value loading" problem for future AIs, and how to architect them so they can be deployed to solve big problems without being undermined by subtle but catastrophic bugs.