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Comment by mariusz79 | Hacker News Reader

I'm tired of this fear mongering. There are hundreds of viruses that could end the human race. There are millions of rocks in space that could end the human race. There are people that could end the human race with push of a button. Human race could be history by the time I stop writing this rant.

AI has a great potential and could help us prevent most of our existential threats. AI is not a god. It will not suddenly become self-aware, self-improving, and evil.

Enough with that fear porn, please.

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Fear mongering? This isn't Sarah Palin and her death panels. I'm sure Hawking and Musk are smarter and more knowledgeable on the subject than either of us, so maybe it's worth listening to them rather than dismissing out of hand. I don't see what they would have to personally gain by raising the alarm here.

Read Superintelligence by Bostrom to help see where they're coming from. It doesn't think AI will be evil either (unless perhaps those who develop it and determine its goals are...). But AI could run out of our control, or have us fall victim of unintended consequences.

I'm sure Hawking and Musk are smarter and more knowledgeable on the subject than either of us...

That is not a reasonable argument. They have demonstrated nothing but a fear and postulation and we cannot accept authority as evidence. Thus is the nature of science.

Fear is a demonstration of non competency? So there can never be harmful technologies?

If someone more knowledgeable than me on a subject fears it, well I think it's worth at least listening to him. Not dismissing his concerns arrogantly.

And when those person are one of the greatest scientist and one of the greatest entrepreneur of our time, both with some kind of expertise in AI, well...

The topic of AI and its implications is unavoidably speculative, because we are likely still many decades away from it being a risk and we don't yet know what path science will take to reach that point. So for now, we're mostly limited to thought experiments.

I never said we should defer to their 'authority' either. But it is a conversation worth having, and the sooner the better.

> But AI could run out of our control, or have us fall victim of unintended consequences.

A lot of people didn't understand this about 2001: Hal was actually doing the logical thing, he was doing his job. The human was unreliable and was indeed endangering the mission. Hal was a tool of mankind, just like the bone that the ape uses to kill in the first scene.

In the same way when we talk about the dangers of AI we tend to personify them and expect them to be either intelligently nefarious (skynet, matrix) or out of control (bug, malfunction).

What we don't imagine is that we might end up being on the wrong end of a perfectly rational decision, or that we don't realize the consequences of the process that we set them to do.

Nice reasoning. We could die from many other ways, so why should we care about another one? Why should we care about global warming, I mean, it won't stop asteroids from smashing earth. Why should we care about nuclear war head proliferation if we might still die because of a virus? So let's just not give a fuck about anything!

He's saying that regardless of the hypothesized danger, until there is measurable, non sci-fi proof, it's all just fear mongering. Not that we shouldn't "give a fuck about anything."

You cannot have non sci-fi proof of future events, it will always be unmeasurable theories.

So you can choose to wait and see, and maybe it will be too late or to hard to act when you have sufficient proof.

Or you can choose to start thinking about it now, and see what we can do to to set up safeguards. And perhaps those safeguards will be useless, perhaps not. That's called prevention.

You are not making a cohesive argument. First you were arguing that OP was essentially saying we shouldn't "give a fuck about anything." Now you're arguing that we should "start thinking about it now." Those are two completely different points.

You can do research and testing without fear mongering.

Thinking about something (more than during a HN argument), to me, is the opposite of not giving a fuck, so I am being very cohesive, thank you.

> It will not suddenly become self-aware, self-improving, and evil.

While I agree that worrying about it would be silly, the only thing I know about strong AI is that I don't know what the implications of having strong AI would be.

This isn't fear mongering, it's simply a question of due diligence. AI is a big unknown (unlike viruses, comets, nuclear weapons, incidentally, all of which we have at least some grasp of -- ever seen an AI?)

AI is also, at present (and in the foreseeable future) science fiction.

It seems irrational to make such a prediction about systems which we don’t understand at all.

It’s not clear how sophisticated a neural network needs to be in order to yield AGI. It could be very simple (then you would be wrong with high probability), or it could extremely complex (then you would be right with high probability).

We have barely scraped the surface of AI..I am not worried..I won't be alive when it happens anyway.

What's really irritating is that supposedly smart folks (Hawking, Musk) are really vocal about this doomsday crap and their fear CLEARLY comes from a place of ignorance as opposed to insight.

On what basis do you say their fear comes CLEARLY from ignorance? Maybe it is your assurance that comes from ignorance and their fear from insight?

In other news an anonymous internet user claims hawkings and musk are ignorant based on speculation on a mostly theoretical subject

It can't be that clear because I don't see how their views are ignorant. Care to enlighten us?

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