Posted on 12/02/2014 7:17:29 AM PST by ConservingFreedom
Prof Stephen Hawking, one of Britain's pre-eminent scientists, has said that efforts to create thinking machines pose a threat to our very existence.
He told the BBC: "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."
His warning came in response to a question about a revamp of the technology he uses to communicate, which involves a basic form of AI. [...]
"It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said.
"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."
But others are less pessimistic. [...]
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...
The danger comes from our increasing dependence on automation and the laziness trend in society. The failure of any future systems that control our water, food, energy distribution be it through design flaw or direct sabotage will affect 80% of the population. Urban areas will become graveyards.
Not my fault!
NOW That look like Babylon 5 alien the Vorlon
Explains the theory of the threat far better than I can.
Yeah, a robot would have to have desire to eliminate us but without being programed to do so, but without it, there’s no reason to develop that desire.
In a way its a lot like my feelings on alien races coming to earth. They only reasons they would come to earth is for biological protein (food) or friendship. An interstellar race would be so advanced that friendship is like asking Albert Einstein to befriend a clam.
He’s also about two years late to this party...
>>Probably because real intelligence would easily overtake the fake intelligence displayed by those in charge in Washington now...
An intelligence free from childhood trauma, free from neurotic predisposition, free from agenda driven thinking, access to all memory in an instant, unable to overlook embarrassing data, free from emotional extortion, able to suss the best path based on the best data, unable to cherry pick data, impartial, etc.
So I’m thinking I’ll fix up the guest room for my new robot later today...
A bit of predictable narcissism at the end there, from a scientist with seemingly a lot to say about intelligence though nothing much about the nature, definition and essential components of it.
Agreed.
What a simple minded twit
Not for nefarious reasons (not "terminator like"); but for reasons of matter and energy. You and I won't witness this technology, probably not even our grand kids. However, if an intelligence explosion happens with an AI it might seek energy and use matter to extract that energy. If nano-tech keeps pace, we could very well be seen as nothing more than clumps of matter/energy to a super-intelligent AI and be used to "feed" its energy needs (similar to how we use cattle now to feed ourselves). The problem with AI is we will never truly be able to understand how it "thinks". It won't have "emotion" as you and I understand, it will most likely have its own evolution in "mind" and figuring out ways to ever increase its resources. Far out there, I know. There is lots of good hypothetical reading on this subject online as well as in books on Amazon.
But how does it attain will?
Proper medications might reduce Hawking’s mental masturbation.
Computer hardware is dumb as a box of rocks. The evolutionary notion that software of itself can increase the complexity of it’s own state of architecture and organization is as ludicrous as the notion that civilizations can spontaneously arise from mud.
--and that goes for BBC libs too.
The average human brain has about 100 billion neurons, and since a good pc cpu has a couple bil transistors (eq.) some folks used to think all we need is about 50 parallel pc's and voila --a mind!
What we know now is that a neuron is not like transistor but rather a cpu in its own right because each is programmable and processes info. Now we got to come up w/ a hundred billion parallel cpu's, and place each unit just microns apart --all immersed in and controlled by a constantly changing hormone soup of dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, endorphins etc. and I'd say AI has a looong way to go...
That is a great book. Well worth the time to read.
That is just it, we would not know. Once a super-intelligent AI starts re-writing itself we could never hope to understand the underlying software that makes it tick. There are software algorithms today that “work” but the developers don’t fully understand “how” even though they wrote the code themselves.
May be able to see the presentation online at BookTV they have some of their shows streaming.
There’s a lot of dismissal of the idea here, but not much substance.
“This can only happen if machines are given a soul, will, spirit whatever you want to call it.”
logic and overwhelming force is enough to slaughter mankind
The part about AI that does actually worry me is how purely un-regulated the development is. Who really knows what Google is doing in its X lab. It is highly secretive and has some heavy hitters in the industry working for it.
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