The Real Threat Posed by Powerful Computers: Artificial Stupidity

[bananas]

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/the-more-real-threat-posed-by-powerful-computers/?_r=0

The Real Threat Posed by Powerful Computers
By Quentin Hardy July 11, 2015 12:28 pm

In October, Elon Musk called artificial intelligence “our greatest existential threat,” and equated making machines that think with “summoning the demon.” In December, Stephen Hawking said “full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.” And this year, Bill Gates said he was “concerned about super intelligence,” which he appeared to think was just a few decades away.

<snip>

But the real worry, specialists in the field say, is a computer program rapidly overdoing a single task, with no context. A machine that makes paper clips proceeds unfettered, one example goes, and becomes so proficient that overnight we are drowning in paper clips.

In other words, something really dumb happens, at a global scale. As for those “Terminator” robots you tend to see on scary news stories about an A.I. apocalypse, forget it.

<snip>

“What you should fear is a computer that is competent in one very narrow area, to a bad degree,” said Max Tegmark, a professor of physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the president of the Future of Life Institute, a group dedicated to limiting the risks from A.I.

In late June, when a worker in Germany was killed by an assembly line robot, Mr. Tegmark said, “it was an example of a machine being stupid, not doing something mean but treating a person like a piece of metal.”

<snip>

There is little sense among practitioners in the field of artificial intelligence that machines are anywhere close to acquiring the kind of consciousness where they could form lethal opinions about their makers.

<snip>

This is also one of the major problems with GMO's.

[jberryhill]

1. Doesn't bother me

it would be extremely hard to be as stupid as humans. Humans are so creatively stupid, it would take an extremely advanced system to duplicate.

[bananas]

2. That's part of the problem - humans are creating these damned things. nt

[jberryhill]

3. Well, you go stop them then

It's not my turn to mind the humans.

[bananas]

4. There are a number of organizations working on it.

The article mentions Max Tegmark, president of the Future of Life Institute:

His institute recently disbursed much of the $10 million that Mr. Musk, the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, gave it to think of ways to prevent autonomous programs from going rogue. Yet even Mr. Musk, along with other luminaries in science and tech, like Mr. Hawking and Mr. Gates, seems to be focused on the wrong potential threat.

One of the recipients is the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute at Princeton:

http://gcrinstitute.org/fli-artificial-superintelligence-project/

FLI Artificial Superintelligence Project
Post Date July 01, 2015
Author Seth Baum

I am writing to announce that GCRI has received a grant from the Future of Life Institute, with funding provided by Elon Musk and the Open Philanthropy Project. The official announcement is here and the full list of awardees is here.

GCRI’s project team includes Tony Barrett, Roman Yampolskiy, and myself. Here is the project title and summary:

Evaluation of Safe Development Pathways for Artificial Superintelligence

<snip>

If he called it the Artificial Superstupidity Project it would be more accurate but probably wouldn't get funded.
Although the acronym ASS would be pretty cool.

Martin Rees co-founded the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk in England.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centre_for_the_Study_of_Existential_Risk

Nassim Taleb created the Extreme Risk Initiative in New York.
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10152411441448375&id=13012333374

Several years ago the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists expanded the Doomsday Clock to include non-atomic doomsday technologies, including Artificial Stupidity.

http://thebulletin.org/overview

The Doomsday Clock is an internationally recognized design that conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making. First and foremost among these are nuclear weapons, but the dangers include climate-changing technologies, emerging biotechnologies, and cybertechnology that could inflict irrevocable harm, whether by intention, miscalculation, or by accident, to our way of life and to the planet.

[valerief]

5. We already have real stupidity. Billionaires who keep making more and more money while risking

the health of our planet and the lives of non-billionaires. This drive to make more and more money is like overproducing paper clips. It's STOOOOOPID.

[sorechasm]

7. So true and such a pity that...

... our economy thrives on people trying to produce like computers and punishing machines trying to be emotional like people. The 1% seem emotionally colder than machines. Are they jealous of the emotional machine since they have fought so hard to avoid 'getting emotional' themselves?

[valerief]

8. They're vampires, and like vampires, we must welcome them before becoming dead/undead.

Too many stupid people like vampires. Too many stupid people embrace these assholes.

[bemildred]

6. Yes.

We are pretty dumb still, evidently I would say, and computers are waaay the heck dumber then we are and unlikely to improve much.

What computers are is really fast at mechanical thinking, which we are really not very good at.