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Comment by skeledrew | Hacker News Reader

It would only harm us if we took steps to harm it (or it thinks so). Or it's designed to do harm. Otherwise it's illogical to cause harm, and machines are literally built on logic.

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This is also incorrect. It's often not ethical to cause harm, and it can be counter productive in the right circumstances, but there's absolutely nothing that makes "causing harm to others" always be against an intelligence's goals. Humans, for example, routinely cause harm to other species. Sometimes this is deliberate, but other times it's because we're barely even aware we're doing so. We want a new road, so we start paving, and may not even realize there was an ant hill in the way (and if we did, we almost certainly wouldn't care).

Not in this context. Keep in mind that we're talking about machines here. It has been an explicit expectation even before computers were invented that intelligent machines would have to be made to abide by particular rules to prevent harm, summed up in Asimov's Three Laws[0]. I can't see any scenario where a properly programmed intelligence would go against its programming (despite the plots of movies like iRobot, The Matrix, etc). For an AI to cause harm, the allowance would have to be specifically programmed in (such as for military use).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics

- Its goal: X

- (Logic) => its subgoal: Not be turned off because that's a prerequisite to be able to do X

- (Logic) => Eliminate humans with their opaque and somewhat unpredictable minds to reduce chance of harm to it from 0.01% to 0.001%

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