Here are some academic writings arguing AI (or “robots“, a word that I feel misses the point and creates an atmosphere of bad sci-fi) isn’t as big a threat as you might think:
I might try a serious rebuttal later. In the mean time I’ll say this.
Earth is a little village. Time after time, the villagers have looked into the forest of the future and cried “wolf”. Sometimes it was a hamster. Sometimes it was an old shoe. Sometimes it was a piece of celery. Sometimes it was even an actual wolf.
Now, on the horizon, we can see things that are to wolves what MechaGodzilla is to a 5cm lizard. And the villagers are crying, “Lol, free farming equipment”. It would be one of funny and tragic if it weren’t the other.
I don’t get why it’s “free farming equipment”, is it just an analogy to how people look to AGI to improve their standard of living? Or is it a cultural reference I’m missing?
You’re not missing a cultural reference; I just meant to say people see it as a safe, easily-controllable tool when it isn’t.
Maybe Singularitarians should just stop saying “AI” and replace it with “optimization process” to avoid silly philosophical confusions like in some of those documents.
Even if you use “AI” or “optimization process”, people still aren’t afraid. The reason is because of inborn tendency to model all other minds as human minds, and human minds can only be so smart…
The inanimate nature of the word “robot” surely helps make it less threatening, but I think the above is the fundamental problem.
Especially, strong self-improvement just isn’t plausible to most people, i.e., practically everyone. (Including most that attended the Singularity Summit, from what I heard.) Robot Cult, y’know?
The creation of a synthetic god mind is not the singularity.
The singularity is when ever larger clusters of significant change which come more frequently, grow closer until they merge into a single event.
The historical timeline goes horizontal and change reaches critical mass, resulting in a single expanding explosion of change.
The buzz phrase is that you cannot see past the event horizon. like a black hole. Only in this case you are coming out of the black hole.
So you see no one can predict what it will be to stand in the light of a day where change is astounding.
What we can be certain of is that what people fear is standing in the light.
and this isn’t luddite thinking?
think like this instead: everything, not just ‘AI’, is moving into an exponential phase. soon we will place nanowires along the axons in the brain. Next, these will move to real time interconnects to smart brain assistants, then to absorption with intelligence genes altered in a way that allows ‘AI’ to become part of us.
The bio revolution is on a faster track than AI, but certainly not as fast as robots. Anyway you cut, we are the last of the ‘real’ people.
in the short term, the free farming equipment will very possibly create some major disruption. when everyone in the food and service industry is replaced by a robot and every lawyer but senior partners replaced by a AI contract machine…well full unemployment will create some serious societal earthquakes
Since the villager’s politicians are quite capable of genocide even with machetes, it’s possible the AIs won’t be as harmful. At least we’ll be getting hacked up in some more futuristic fashion
Thanks for linking to my 1998 paper (Just Another Artifact: Ethics and the Empirical Experience of AI), but I think your argument is a gross oversimplification of my and Phil Kime’s point. Of course autonomous robot weapons can kill you, and are killing people now. But it isn’t because some AI has turned evil. AI is no more to blame than other artifacts of our culture, like our foreign policy. Rather than worrying about AI specifically, people should be worrying about government, culture and decision making in general. The threats (and promises) of AI are real, but not as unique as people think. I believe the “singularity” & “ethical robots” (e.g. Arkin) debates are a distraction from the real problem of designing and choosing appropriate governing techniques and assigning appropriate responsibility and blame for societal-level decisions that affect us all.
Thanks for commenting! All three of the papers I linked deserve much more serious discussion than I gave in this flippant post, and I’m sorry if I misrepresented your point in the process. I do disagree with your position on these issues; hopefully I’ll get around to writing something substantive soon.