Stross:

super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor’s program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely. The reason it’s unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology, and it only survived the filtering effect of evolution by enhancing human survival fitness in some way. Enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness are not much use to a machine, or to people who want to extract useful payback (in the shape of work) from a machine they spent lots of time and effort developing. We may want machines that can recognize and respond to our motivations and needs, but we’re likely to leave out the annoying bits, like needing to sleep for roughly 30% of the time, being lazy or emotionally unstable, and having motivations of its own.

“Human-equivalent AI is unlikely” is a ridiculous comment. Human level AI is extremely likely by 2060, if ever. (I’ll explain why in the next post.) Stross might not understand that the term “human-equivalent AI” always means AI of human-equivalent general intelligence, never “exactly like a human being in every way”.

If Stross’ objections turn out to be a problem in AI development, the “workaround” is to create generally intelligent AI that doesn’t depend on primate embodiment or adaptations.

Couldn’t the above argument also be used to argue that Deep Blue could never play human-level chess, or that Watson could never do human-level Jeopardy?

I don’t get the point of the last couple sentences. Why not just pursue general intelligence rather than “enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness”, then? The concept of having “motivations of its own” seems kind of hazy. If the AI is handing me my ass in Starcraft 2, does it matter if people debate whether it has “motivations of its own”? What does “motivations of its own” even mean? Does “motivations” secretly mean “motivations of human-level complexity”?

I do have to say, this is a novel argument that Stross is forwarding. Haven’t heard that one before. As far as I know, Stross must be one of the only non-religious thinkers who believes human-level AI is “unlikely”, presumably indefinitely “unlikely”. In a literature search I conducted in 2008 looking for academic arguments against human-level AI, I didn’t find much — mainly just Dreyfuss’ What Computers Can’t Do and the people who argued against Kurzweil in Are We Spiritual Machines? “Human level AI is unlikely” is one of those ideas that Romantics and non-materialists find appealing emotionally, but backing it up is another matter.

(This is all aside from the gigantic can of worms that is the ethical status of artificial intelligence; if we ascribe the value inherent in human existence to conscious intelligence, then before creating a conscious artificial intelligence we have to ask if we’re creating an entity deserving of rights. Is it murder to shut down a software process that is in some sense “conscious”? Is it genocide to use genetic algorithms to evolve software agents towards consciousness? These are huge show-stoppers — it’s possible that just as destructive research on human embryos is tightly regulated and restricted, we may find it socially desirable to restrict destructive research on borderline autonomous intelligences … lest we inadvertently open the door to inhumane uses of human beings as well.)

I don’t think these are “showstoppers” — there is no government on Earth that could search every computer for lines of code that are possibly AIs. We are willing to do whatever it takes, within reason, to get a positive Singularity. Governments are not going to stop us. If one country shuts us down, we go to another country.

We clearly want machines that perform human-like tasks. We want computers that recognize our language and motivations and can take hints, rather than requiring instructions enumerated in mind-numbingly tedious detail. But whether we want them to be conscious and volitional is another question entirely. I don’t want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today. I don’t want my robot housekeeper to spend all its time in front of the TV watching contact sports or music videos.

All it takes is for some people to build a “volitional” AI and there you have it. Even if 99% of AIs are tools, there are organizations — like the Singularity Institute — working towards AIs that are more than tools.

If the subject of consciousness is not intrinsically pinned to the conscious platform, but can be arbitrarily re-targeted, then we may want AIs that focus reflexively on the needs of the humans they are assigned to — in other words, their sense of self is focussed on us, rather than internally. They perceive our needs as being their needs, with no internal sense of self to compete with our requirements. While such an AI might accidentally jeopardize its human’s well-being, it’s no more likely to deliberately turn on it’s external “self” than you or I are to shoot ourselves in the head. And it’s no more likely to try to bootstrap itself to a higher level of intelligence that has different motivational parameters than your right hand is likely to grow a motorcycle and go zooming off to explore the world around it without you.

YOU want AI to be like this. WE want AIs that do “try to bootstrap [themselves]” to a “higher level”. Just because you don’t want it doesn’t mean that we won’t build it.