- With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.
- In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation.
Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it might play out differently from in the movie: as Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a "singularity" and Johnny Depp's movie character calls "transcendence".
One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.
- So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. [...] Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future Life Institute. All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.
Så som The Independent presenterar artikeln framstår Stephen Hawking som dess frontfigur, men om jag blev ombedd att gissa vem av de fyra undertecknarna som tagit initiativ till artikeln och hållit i pennan så skulle jag satsa mina penar på Max Tegmark. Hans tidigare text på samma tema uppvisar stora likheter med den nya, såväl till innehåll som stil (om än inte lika bokstavligt som den jag länkar till i Fotnot 1).
SvaraRaderaNu finns även affischnamnet Hawking på Dagens Industri:
SvaraRaderahttp://www.di.se/artiklar/2014/5/5/geniet-varnar-for-farliga-robotar/
...liksom i The Onion, som jag tycker har en fräschare infallsvinkel än Dagens Industri då de presenterar ett representativt urval av hur vanligt folk ser på frågan.
RaderaEn mänsklighet förtryckt av sin egen uppfinningsrikedom. Går det att hitta ett bättre exempel på ödets ironi?
SvaraRadera