Ask HN: Is AI threat overblown?

No. Imagine a group of beings that are smarter than us, never die (so they don't have to start with zero knowledge every generation), and have completely alien goals and motivation.

Also remember that the future is infinite, and power seems to snowball.

Now look at what humans have done to the following less intelligent beings: Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, the dodo bird, rats, galapogos tortoise, the American buffalo, and many others.

Also look at what humanity has done to the neanderthals, perhaps the closest type of being in terms of intelligence that we are aware of.

There is very little positive outcome of ai to outweigh the potential negatives to the human race given the reality of the timeline we are looking at.

I think it would be worse than whatever you've imagined or it can be good as well , depends on which direction we are headed and who is leading us.AI will change the dimensions for sure.

I think it's helpful to break this down:

1) Is AGI possible?

2) If it's possible and it occurs, could it be a serious threat?

3) When will AGI occur?

In my view, I think the answer to 1 and 2 are an obvious yes. As to 3, that's inherently unknowable, but that's were I think the experts like Ng are correct that the threat today (and for the foreseeable future) is overblown. But that's sort of what everyone said about NK's nuclear ambitions 30 years ago, which is why it's important to consider the implications early before it's too late to change course.

Near-term: yes. Long-term: no.

Most of the controversy consists of people who look at the near term talking past people who look at the long term, and vice versa.

The AGI threat? I believe so. The AI as in a drone with ability to profile an enemy and shoot them without human intervention? Yes. Why? We don't have AGI and so far we are not getting significantly closer to it in spite of the hype. But an autonomous tank, drone or even watchtowers are technologically possible for quite a while. An army of drones who can shoot without calling home is the imminent threat. Not SkyNet. IMHO.

Fear-mongering earns you popularity, clicks, votes, money, and whatnot. People like being frightened or grossed out. IDK why, but just look at YouTube tredings.

There is an AI threat but it's not the tirannical apocalyptic global robotic oligarchy, it is what Facebook and Google are up to, taking away your right and means to privacy, a basic pillar of human dignity. The circlejerk of the trade of accidental or forced clicks and weird uncanny statistics and invented metrics where lots of money are stuck producing no value. And the way to get over this threat is to find a way to let survive the media, i.e. the news websites and tv channels amd other stuff, so that ads revert to their original purposes and surveillance and statistics necromancy is no longer necessary. Things like patreon, micropayments, crowdsourcing, and other stuff not yet invented. Because honestly without the current industry of annoying and irrelevant ads little part of the current digital companies could survive. We need more non-profits and decentralisation providing basic infrastructure (first of all search, and communications), and then a means to feed who feed our brains, whatever diverse foodstuffs may the thinking soup need.

Andrew Ng has a good quote:

"Fearing a rise of killer robots is like worrying about overpopulation on Mars"

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/19/andrew_ng_baidu_ai/

But he might be wrong...

(And he'd admit it)

The practical AI field is obviously growing today, more money is put into it every year. It's only a question when you want to start your safety research and how much resources to allocate to it. You don't need to allocate billions of dollars of friendly-AI research this year or the next year because anything approaching AGI is at least decades away (and might be a "fusion is only 30 years away" situation).

You could also compare this to climate change. The effect and eventual risk of greenhouse gases has been known for more than half a century. But initially it was mostly a theoretical concern and later even when it was realized to be a real problem the effects still seemed far away in the future. But people still did basic research, even decades ago. Nobody poured billions of dollars into sustainable businesses, but not doing business is not the same as not doing research.

All current use cases of AI are still very narrow and very expensive to create. There is still very long way to go between "godlike pattern recognition" to "abstract logical reasoning". All current impressive use cases of AI simply brute-forced all possibilities beforehand, reducing search space by pattern recognition. Unless we start to see some early signs of "abstract logical reasoning" there is no point in fear-mongering. No one knows whether we will get there in 5 years of 50 years.

Reason for throwaway: I heard an opinion that Elon missed the boat on current form of narrow AI, and by fear-mongering he tries to curb other players down (e.g. Waymo) before his companies have time to catch up. I don't have any evidence to back it up, but it makes a lot of sense when I think about it.

Yes, in my opinion. Consider the amount of destruction caused by machined metal and chemicals in the 20th century. Now consider how much more destruction (or progress) is possible just by adding "naive" computer technology to those things.

In our experience, technology only reaches its constructive and/or destructive potential when humans use it. There's no rule saying this must always be the case, but when we ignore our experience it's easy to get caught up in fantasy, and right now the hand-wringing about "what happens when the computers wake up" is a silly distraction. There are plenty of threats posed by computer technology already, often from its integration with hardware, but also from information processing on its own. I don't mean to be pessimistic or spin another variety of doomsday story, but I am suggesting that we talk about present reality more often than all of this Terminator nonsense!

> Why are these leaders frightening people with claims that AI can cause WW-III or ruin the world?

Probably because they run companies that benefit from this idea being shared.

Yes. None of these fantasies bears any resemblance whatsoever to anything in real AI research. What's going on is that the predisposition of the human brain to believe in shadowy figures and apocalyptic futures is as pronounced as it ever was, but belief in Fenrir, Fair Folk and flying saucers is unfashionable among today's intellectuals, so they look for something else to glom onto.

There was a time when I'd never have thought I'd say this, but I actually think it would be better if people just went back to openly letting their demons be of the admittedly supernatural variety, because that sort of belief is relatively harmless. When people start projecting their demons onto real-world phenomena, they start making policy decisions on that basis, and that could very well turn out to be the final step in the Great Filter. Technological progress is slowing. The peak is approaching. The easily accessed fossil fuel deposits are gone. There will be no second industrial revolution. If we fail to make adequate progress before we hit this peak, it will be the all-time one.

There's lots of potential bad outcomes short of AI taking over the planet.

It could, for example, enable a very deeply intrusive "thought police" establishment. At the moment the signal-to-noise ratio at least somewhat limits that. And it doesn't require full on "strong ai" to fix that.

I feel like the main danger isn't AI doing something unintended, but AI working as it's designed to.

Imagine law enforcement with strong AI. Maybe it's OK in the US, but how about China? Or North Korea?

How about military applications?

AI is an extremely powerful tool, and it's one that can be deliberately misused.

In my humble opinion, NO ONE knows if the threat is imminent, far-fetched, or imaginary.

NO ONE. Not Musk, Not Zuckerberg, not Putin. (Putin!!??)

What we DO know is that we don't have artificial general intelligence (AGI) today, and that achieving it will likely require new insights and breakthroughs -- that is, it will require knowledge that we don't possess today.

By definition, new insights and breakthroughs are unpredictable and don't necessarily yield to anyone's predictions, timelines, or budgets. Maybe it will happen in your lifetime; maybe not.

That said, it should be evident to everyone here that AI/ML software is going to expand to control more and more of the world over the coming years and decades; and THEREFORE, it makes a lot of sense to start worrying about the maybe-real-maybe-not AI threat -- and prepare for it -- now instead of down the road.

I don't see AI itself is a threat necessarily but AI and its input data concentrated in the hands of a few will be dangerous. Soon companies like Google and Facebook will pretty much know at any time what a large part of the world population is doing and thinking. There is a lot of potential for abuse there.

I think the threat is absolutely real. But not in a Skynet-like scenario.

Except we're all gonna become jobless. This has started a few decades ago but with the ML advancements its gonna reach new heights.

Universal Basic Income, Tax Robot, etc has been thrown around. Let's see if they get anywhere.

There's an AI researcher named Robert Miles [1] whose videos I really enjoy. He brought up a good point about this issue in one of his videos a little while back. To use it here, Elon Musk, Putin, and Mark Zuckerberg all have something in common: none of them are AI specialists or researchers. Another way to think of it is this: don't ask your dentist about your heart disease.

Miles does point out very real issues/questions in AI safety – that's what most of his content is focused on. His point, which is a good one to make, is that the sort of fear mongering spread by non-AI specialists draws attention away from these very real issues that need to be addressed.

[1] His channel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLB7AzTwc6VFZrBsO2ucBMg He's also done a few videos for Computerphile.

I own a Tesla Model X. I am not trying to be imflammatory, but my grandmother drives better than this car, and my grandmother is dead. Going down a street with a row of bushes, the car will slow down at every bush, and then speed up again. Musk is worried about AI, but his cars cannot even process bushes better than my dead grandmother.

I think the threat is not AI, is what computer program is telling us. Even as simple as writing a test, how many times have we found ourselves writing a test that is giving false positive? That's not AI, but we arenmisled because we trust what the program said ("it didn't crash!"). Now apply that to GPS. How many times have we heard someone ended up in a lake or some swamp? I dislike Waze because the path it recommends is often worse than Google Map's. If I know how to get to my destination I don't need GPS. We believe GPS always knows the best optimized route because some smart engineers spent entire life working on map technology, but in reality that may not always be the case.

I am more afraid we are accustomed to trusting technology. So many just go on the computer and look for answers on the Internet. Students go on Wolframalpha and trust the output. We have forgotten we need our brain to function. Fake news? Bombarded by ads? This is pre-AGI and we are already sufferring.

In the case of Putin, are you seriously asking "Why are these leaders frightening people..."?

But seriously, people whom we might call "visionaries" like Musk, Zuckerberg, and let's throw Ray Kurzweil in there, often get their ideas by extrapolating the current state of technology into its logical next phase. (They also like to be grossly aggressive on deadlines, to motivate their employees to be innovative and efficient.)

Unfortunately a simple extrapolation doesn't always produce an idea that is attainable in practice. We will not have human-level AI anytime soon. We're still many years away from driverless cars. An AI that cares about the politics of nation-states (to which we can confidently hand over the nuclear codes) is much farther away than that. But none of that actually matters, because a single tweet from these leaders can cause a flurry of activity and interest that can lead to an unexpected product idea. So, while it's ethically dubious, I see this as being a mostly positive thing.

Practical state of AI is image classification, so if you tie that to a weapon and program it to fire at 'its will', yes. Though it'd still not call that intelligence, so in that point of view no. And even in the first case, its how they say? guns dont kill people, people kill people with guns? So i'd say that goes for AI too.

The danger with AI is that it grows in power exponentially, especially since highly advanced AI can start improving on themselves without human intervention. When people think exponential curves, they think rapid progress, but that's only half the story. Any exponential curve starts off with looking like a flat line, before suddenly taking off like a rocket ship.

Without the benefit of hindsight, we can't tell how far away we are from that rocket-ship liftoff. We've had decades of minor progress in the past, but that's normal for any exponential curve. Are we going to have many more decades/centuries to go before we get to the breakout moment? Or is it just 10-20 years away? We have no idea. All we know is that once we get to that point, AI-IQ is going to grow exponentially faster than natural human IQ.

That said, I really don't think that censoring AI research is going to work. Pandora's box has been opened, and if we don't do it, someone else will. All this talk about hard coding Asimov's laws into AIs is idiotic as well. We have no clue how to build AGI right now, and until we do, discussing specific tactics like the above is utterly pointless. They also presuppose human ability to shackle and mold super-intelligent beings, without making any mistakes or overlooking unintended consequences, which is nothing more than a pipe dream.

Realistically, there's only one thing we can do. Embrace bioengineering. Embrace GATTACA style genetic selection. Embrace cybernetic augmentation. Do everything we can to grow our IQ beyond its natural limits. If our minds don't keep up with technological progress, we will inevitably find ourselves left behind.

I do not think the threat is overblown, but like many tech estimates, we're overestimating the short term and underestimating the long term.

The more present threat is "AI-lite": we're hacking ourselves collectively, more and more, with not entirely positive consequences.

We're increasingly addicted to our devices and our system rewards those that further the addiction (er, "engagement"). We've provided ways for small groups of people (down to individuals) to influence and manipulate tastes, preferences, moods, feelings, choices, actions, and beliefs, overtly or subtly, at great scale. Case in point: should Mark Z want to quietly influence a US election...he could do it.

This isn't "AI" in the self-aware/AGI sense, but there's an incredible amount of leverage looming over the human population, and that leverage is growing. And when machines start manipulating things instead of humans, how will we know?

If AI is more intelligent than humans, how is it bad?

Previous (and still existing) threats to humanity (for example, the atomic bomb) threaten to destroy humanity, or indeed the whole world, and replace it with nothing. That's bad.

But if AI is anything its opponents claim, it will eventually be better at thinking than we are, with, probably, a much lighter ecological footprint, and less impulses like fighting wars, meaning it will be able to last longer.

Should we not encourage that, even if it means we can suffer from it? What is the point of humanity anyway, if not the pursuit of knowledge?

I'm surprised no one has mentioned Nick Bostrom's book, "Superintelligence", which directly covers this topic. The thinkers you cite: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, (and possibly, Putin) have derived much of their current fears/hopes about AI from Bostrom's seminal work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence:_Paths,_Dang...