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Should we ask governments and corporations to temporarily halt the creation of AI?

1 points by RIPKingSteelo ↗ HN
Many of us have likely read various warnings from the likes of Hawking, Musk, Gates and countless others - should we heed these warnings in order to request a more coherent explanation from corporations and governments as to why they are seeking AI?

tl:dr - I am hoping for your thoughts, favorite essays, readings and lectures on the subject, and your concerns. I have a limited but sufficient notion of the potential benefits of AI - this said concerns are more desirable for my purposes.

I too am excited over the potential AI (either partial and perhaps even full) has to offer us as a global society. Specifically self-driving cars and improvements to services such as Siri entice me. I am an avid user of Siri, despite its short comings, for simple queries and tasks and I detest the time I spend driving, which could be spent reading, coding, or drawing.

AI has the potential to be a massive boon to our existence, this much is clear; however I am not naïve enough to assume that a passive posture from the public at large will produce an AI (or lesser adaptive intelligence) that will benefit the majority and help provide long term solutions to current issues we face as a species.

My current opinion is that if we passively accept what is given us and don't help to shape what the ideal implementation of this technology is - we will miss a great opportunity and likely more bad than good will come of it.

2 comments

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sapphireblue
1) It would be ridiculously unfair to people that would benefit from AI most: 6 billion of poor people living lives that are unimaginably unpleasant to a western person.

2) Hype about "superintelligent AI coming soon" is pretty much unfounded, current deep learning approaches have a lot of limits, hardware progress stalled as well (moore's law is officially dead). AI technology is like a fragile flower on a life support, it is so weak you can easily kill it with regulation and FUD. Instead of questioning if we suddenly achieve "real AI" one could wonder if the tech will ever reach any level of moderate general AI, considering the death of moore's law.

3) Nobody will listen to scaremongering, people will just continue doing their thing anyway.

RIPKingSteelo
Thanks for your response.

I realize my wording may have seemed a tad strong.

My hope was not that we use fear tactics, but rather begin a global conversation regarding: ideal off limit zones for implementation (ie military uses & surveillance), how we can implement said technology in order to address climate degradation and limit waste and how it could provide us with the capacity to reenvision our global economy.