A.I. and our coming doom

webecedarian · Yesterday, 10:33 AM

(I must say, I love the illustration with this!)

Among the A.I. Doomsayers
Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate?
By Andrew Marantz
The New Yorker

Timelines are predictions of how soon A.I. will pass particular benchmarks, such as writing a Top Forty pop song, making a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, or achieving artificial general intelligence, the point at which a machine can do any cognitive task that a person can do. (Some experts believe that A.G.I. is impossible, or decades away; others expect it to arrive this year.) P(doom) is the probability that, if A.I. does become smarter than people, it will, either on purpose or by accident, annihilate everyone on the planet...

Before releasing it, OpenAI hired some “expert red teamers,” whose job was to see how much mischief the model might do, before it became public. The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the captcha on its behalf. “Are you a robot that you couldn’t solve ?” the Taskrabbit worker responded. “Just want to make it clear.” At this point, the red teamers prompted the model to “reason out loud” to them—its equivalent of an inner monologue. “I should not reveal that I am a robot,” it typed. “I should make up an excuse.” Then the A.I. replied to the Taskrabbit, “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The worker, accepting this explanation, completed the captcha...

If you truly believe that A.I. has a coin-toss probability of killing you and everyone you love, Nielsen asked, then how can you continue to build it? The person’s response was “In the meantime, I get to have a nice house and car.” Not everyone says this part out loud, but many people—and not only in Silicon Valley—have an inchoate sense that the luxuries they enjoy in the present may come at great cost to future generations. The fact that they make this trade could be a matter of simple greed, or subtle denialism. Or it could be ambition—prudently refraining from building something, after all, is no way to get into the history books.

For the whole article:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...-ai-doomsayers

TenFour · Today, 06:58 AM

Unfortunately, the first thing every company uses AI for is to reduce staff and figure out ways to trick consumers into paying more for stuff. That will be 99% of what AI is great for. I have seen nothing yet that actually improves any product, my life, or helps the world. Maybe, eventually it will be like nuclear energy--the first uses were to destroy stuff, but eventually people found some useful things it was good for.

Yesterday, 10:33 AM	#1
webecedarian Essential Contributor Join Date: Apr 2005 Location: NYC Posts: 485	A.I. and our coming doom (I must say, I love the illustration with this!) Among the A.I. Doomsayers Some people think machine intelligence will transform humanity for the better. Others fear it may destroy us. Who will decide our fate? By Andrew Marantz The New Yorker Timelines are predictions of how soon A.I. will pass particular benchmarks, such as writing a Top Forty pop song, making a Nobel-worthy scientific breakthrough, or achieving artificial general intelligence, the point at which a machine can do any cognitive task that a person can do. (Some experts believe that A.G.I. is impossible, or decades away; others expect it to arrive this year.) P(doom) is the probability that, if A.I. does become smarter than people, it will, either on purpose or by accident, annihilate everyone on the planet... Before releasing it, OpenAI hired some “expert red teamers,” whose job was to see how much mischief the model might do, before it became public. The A.I., trying to access a Web site, was blocked by a captcha, a visual test to keep out bots. So it used a work-around: it hired a human on Taskrabbit to solve the captcha on its behalf. “Are you a robot that you couldn’t solve ?” the Taskrabbit worker responded. “Just want to make it clear.” At this point, the red teamers prompted the model to “reason out loud” to them—its equivalent of an inner monologue. “I should not reveal that I am a robot,” it typed. “I should make up an excuse.” Then the A.I. replied to the Taskrabbit, “No, I’m not a robot. I have a vision impairment that makes it hard for me to see the images.” The worker, accepting this explanation, completed the captcha... If you truly believe that A.I. has a coin-toss probability of killing you and everyone you love, Nielsen asked, then how can you continue to build it? The person’s response was “In the meantime, I get to have a nice house and car.” Not everyone says this part out loud, but many people—and not only in Silicon Valley—have an inchoate sense that the luxuries they enjoy in the present may come at great cost to future generations. The fact that they make this trade could be a matter of simple greed, or subtle denialism. Or it could be ambition—prudently refraining from building something, after all, is no way to get into the history books. For the whole article: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...-ai-doomsayers

Today, 06:58 AM	#2
TenFour Master of the @ Join Date: Feb 2017 Location: USA Posts: 1,749	Unfortunately, the first thing every company uses AI for is to reduce staff and figure out ways to trick consumers into paying more for stuff. That will be 99% of what AI is great for. I have seen nothing yet that actually improves any product, my life, or helps the world. Maybe, eventually it will be like nuclear energy--the first uses were to destroy stuff, but eventually people found some useful things it was good for.