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> I would argue this person has no business working with AI with this sort of myopic thinking.

What kind of thinking would you suggest would permit someone to 'work with AI'? Should they be quaking in their boots before being allowed to work at the altar?

You could argue (and with substantially more basis in fact) that Twitter and Facebook have elevated each individuals utterings to broadcast status and that even without decentralized AI networks all the effects that you are listing are already present in the modern world.

It just takes a little bit more work but there are useful idiots aplenty.

Your SkyNet like future need not happen at all, what we can imagine has no bearing on what is possible today and that seems to me to be a much more relevant discussion.

> AI is going to lead to the extinction of all human life on this planet and this is coming from someone who generally disregards conspiracy theories as paranoid fear mongering.

Well, you don't seem to be able to resist this particular one. So your 'generally' may be less general than you think it is.

> We have every reason to be afraid.

No, we don't. I haven't seen a computer that I couldn't power off yet, SF movies to the contrary.

> No, we don't. I haven't seen a computer that I couldn't power off yet, SF movies to the contrary.

Ok. Turn off the computer systems that control Russia's nuclear weapons delivery systems. I'm waiting.

Now you're being (even more) silly. Obviously I can't turn that one off any more than I can turn off the refrigerator downstairs from where I'm sitting. But there are people there that can turn it off, and if I was physically present there then I could turn it off.

You're working under the assumption that no one will attempt to use AI to assert power over others, and that the human race will come together to pull the plug when it becomes a problem. Looking at our current geopolitical situation, I'd rather be silly than naive.

Humans + nukes already equal an existential threat to the human race, so I'm not seeing how AI adds anything new to the equation in that scenario. "Humans using AI + nukes" vs "Humans using nukes", either one probably ends human life on Earth.

I thought the problem everybody was fretting about was the idea of a nominally beneficent AI going off on it's own and doing something malicious / destructive.

I would challenge you to power off Amazon's or Google's infrastructure. Because a dangerous AI won't live in a desktop; it will live in a geographically replicated system, across multiple power grids and legal jurisdictions—all of which is possible today. And all these systems have spent untold hours of very smart people's time to ensure they never turn off.

That doesn't mean they don't have off switches and it does not mean they can't be turned off. I guarantee you the fire department knows how to switch any and all of those off in such a way that the diesels and the no-break PSU's all don't matter one little bit.

AI is far away if at all. Many are trying to pass off image recognition and pattern matching used to identify pornographic images as AI and this just reflects their tenuous grasp of the problem at hand. Something like the human brain is well beyond this level of thinking.

Advancements if any will inevitably come from academia and those who have devoted decades studying the human brain. Not software engineers intoxicated by themselves.

Nothing in the current software ecosystem gives you the tools or language to conceptualize or even imagine let alone write code that can qualify to be used in the context of ai. Code only does what it is programmed to do. If else is a decision, that doesn't make it ai, multiple it by a million times and its still not ai.

This does not mean it cannot be dangerous. Autonomous weapons, anything thing to do with image recognition will find uses, but this is nothing like the what people imagine when we talk about AI. Engineers are supposed to be precise in their use of language but AI proponents are currently engaged neck deep in hype. Self driving cars will happen on extremely constrained roads, like trains. That will be the wake up call for the excitable ones to come back down to earth.

Oh please.

The issue isn't what the end result could look like, but whether we'll actually get there if basic societal needs aren't met first. Prioritize things which are needed now and in the near future.

I agree. The best way to subjugate a machine and prevent it from breaking out of its bounds is to create an artificial "universe" in which it "exists" with arbitrary restrictions and forces, much like the speed of light, gravity and magnetism and have it work on problems using individual workers in a "lifecycle" in which they have their own motivations and "lives" that they live out until they either solve the problem or "die" along the way.

Come to think of it...

How do you get everyone (every government, every rogue organization, every hacker in their bedroom) working on AI to abide by those rules?

> solve the problem

What "problem"? What if I train a neural network to learn the patterns of individuals and integrate it with military drones to assassinate them because their existence is my "problem"? What are you going to do to stop me?

People only aren't afraid of AI because they are ignorant of Cybernetics.

Put another way, consider the old "What is AI" joke: 'When the computer wakes up and asks, "What's in it for me?"'

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edit: In case it's not clear, I agree with _qbjt, if for different reasons. The only people more frightening than the happy-go-lucky AI people are the happy-go-lucky synthetic biology people. Makes me glad I don't have children. It's all one big experiment now, with no control group.

You're just awed by Musk and can't see how ridiculous what he's saying really is.

François Chollet nailed it with the following comparison, mocking LHC alarmists:

> It's not that turning on the LHC will create a black hole that will swallow the Earth. But it could! Albeit no physicist thought so.

https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/891033876415397888

In fact, Chollet links a whole series of essays worth reading:

1) The Myth of a Superhuman AI (https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/)

2) The Terminator Is Not Coming. (https://www.recode.net/2015/3/2/11559576/the-terminator-is-n...)

3) idlewords : Superintelligence - The Idea That Eats Smart People (http://idlewords.com/talks/superintelligence.htm)

The frustrating thing is that people with insane amounts of resources and disposable income get swallowed up by these Basilisk-ian non-concerns, while very real pressing issues like Police Brutality, Wealth Inequality, Lack of HealthCare, etc. are deemed too boring for enthusiastic action.

> In fact, Chollet links a whole series of essays worth reading:

Appeal to authority. You're not presenting any substantive rebuttals, just assuming it's not a concern because someone else with credentials said so. It's identical to alleging that I'm only worried because Elon Musk says so.

> The frustrating thing is that people with insane amounts of resources and disposable income get swallowed up by these Basilisk-ian non-concerns, while very real pressing issues like Police Brutality, Wealth Inequality, Lack of HealthCare, etc. are deemed too boring for enthusiastic action.

Nice strawman. It's also pretty disrespectful for you to assume my socioeconomic background. I live in the United States and have to deal with the issues you pointed out on a visceral basis. That has nothing to do with AI though so I'm not sure why you're even bringing it up.

He wasn't talking about you, he was talking about Musk.

That's fair. Regardless of Musk's talking points, I'm still worried and I don't care how many people here think I'm paranoid. Engineers during the Industrial Revolution had no idea they were sowing the seeds of global warming [1]. We're putting a lot of money into AI under the assumption that it's all going to be a smooth ride. There's this notion that even if neural networks become more sophisticated than those of human brains, that AI will be completely subservient to us and we can just pull the plug whenever we want. If there's one thing humans are good at, it's self-destructive hubris.

[1] http://theconversation.com/the-industrial-revolution-kick-st...

> Appeal to authority.

??? I just gave you a ton of arguments you can read through.

You want me to copy-paste them here?

Ultimately, your "arguments" are refuted with a simple "There's zero reason to be afraid of what you're afraid of".

I would have appreciated at least an abstract or synopsis but okay. When I have time I'll read through these articles.

> Ultimately, your "arguments" are refuted with a simple "There's zero reason to be afraid of what you're afraid of".

Yes, I'm sure it's that black and white.

That's not an appeal to authority. The essays themselves are substantive; he didn't say, "Chollet says so, thus it is so."

More importantly there is an element of misuse going on here: the "fallacy fallacy" if you will. Fallacies like ad hominem and appeal to authority are very often mis-cited without substantive refutations. But in the absence of other qualifying data it is absolutely relevant to a dialectic session that you mention authorities in a subject matter. When we talk about things like consensus in sciences (like climate change, for example), that is a valid appeal to authority.

You don't have enough time or expertise to verify specialized information or even qualify its context. At some point you absolutely need to appeal to authority just to be productive. If you can assess data yourself then that's obviously better, but in the absence of that capacity the assertion of various authorities is a valid first heuristic.

The Myth of Superhuman AI has to be a joke. Please tell me it's a joke.

> Intelligence is not a single dimension, so “smarter than humans” is a meaningless concept.

So "I'm smarter than my dog" is a meaningless sentence? My dog will be happy to hear that . . . if he could understand it.

> Humans do not have general purpose minds, and neither will AIs.

This statement (even if true) seems totally irrelevant to his argument. So I was really looking forward to read the long form version in section #2 and see if it somehow makes sense.

It doesn't seem to.

His point is that minds involve tradeoffs, so specialized agents might be better than a big general AI. Whose side is he arguing on here? He isn't showing that a general intelligence couldn't exist that's better than humans in every way. He's just saying that even it would be inferior in specialized tasks to even more inhuman, specialized minds. Comforting this is not.

> Emulation of human thinking in other media will be constrained by cost.

This section is kind of a hack too, but since at least the title makes sense lets give him a freebie.

> Dimensions of intelligence are not infinite.

Oh golly. He starts off by asserting that the core of the AGI people's ideas relies on intelligence being on an unlimited scale. It includes this gem: "Temperature is not infinite — there is finite cold and finite heat." My estimate of this being a joke article is going back up.

Alright, I agree that intelligence, like temperature, is not infinite. I still don't want be be competing for a job opening with Von Neumann. Von Neumann doesn't want to be competing for a job with future-AGI-silicon-Von-Neumann, whose brain is 500 million GPUs in a datacenter stretching across Montana.

> Intelligences are only one factor in progress.

Right, just wildly the most important one.

My honest opinion is that I feel a little bad for the author. He clearly just doesn't want to believe the plausibility of this idea, and is just throwing every argument he can against it and hoping one of them sticks. I sympathize, but this kind of squid-ink writing probably doesn't serve as a great foundation for future debate.

Accelerated particle colliders are not exactly equivalent to AI. It's not as if I can just build one in my garage. Anyone in the world, regardless of intent, can train a neural network to do what it wants. Extrapolate this decades down the road at the point that AI and its capabilities are much more sophisticated. Do you want to put money on the likelihood that it's all just going to go down smoothly?

I don't even know why people are arguing with me. The idea of replacing human life with AI isn't exactly controversial in the realm of futurism.

> The idea of replacing human life with AI isn't exactly controversial in the realm of futurism.

It isn't in Science Fiction. But this is reality, and in this reality we do not have AGI and we have no idea of how far we are away from it. And even if and when it happens there is absolutely no guarantee that that will lead to the extinction of the human race and/or us ending up as slaves to the machine.

Yep! Just like climate change. It's chilly where I live right now, scientists don't all agree about climate change projections, and even if temperatures actually rise it won't lead to the extinction of the human race, so let's not worry about it.

Edit: /s because I would make me mad if even a few people thought I was being serious.

You don't need AGI to do a lot of harm with AI. I'm reminded of a piece of malware that used Instagram comments to encode the instructions it was using to communicate with its control server [1]. This is rudimentary software that any script kiddie could devise with a bit of social engineering. Neural nets / deep learning of today could scale this to the point where it's undetectable.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2017/06/07/russian-malware-hidden-b...