Deep Thinkers 4
 

Artificial Intelligence: Tool? Threat? Both?

Many of us came of age when "artificial intelligence" (I don't think that the name was even used then) was personified by robots: walking, talking mechanical critters that did everything from serving meals (AKA "Rosey" the robotic maid/housekeeper in The Jetsons cartoon series) to Gort (the implacable, indestructible peacekeeping robot in the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still). Some were benign and followed the rules, as in Isaac Asimov's 3 laws of robotics. Some were harmless and even cute: such as R2D2 and C3PO in the Star Wars movie series that began in 1977. And some were evil personified, such as the Allied Mastercomputer (AM) in Harlan Ellison's truly frightening short story "I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream".

But just what IS artificial intelligence? Does it pose a threat to humanity? And if so, just how? Just how likely to come true are those dire predictions of our electronic thinking machines deciding that we, as in humanity, are no longer of any use?

For my part I worry about what I don't know about the science of artificial intelligence (which is to say, just about all of it) but that is what is scary. Are we harboring (and even helping to build) a force in our midst that, inevitably, one day we won't be able to control?

Or is the worry unjustified?

Hal.

Holy moly! I would say justified. Like many things it can be harmful or helpful. The proverbial two edged sword.
The more powerful it becomes the more useful and the more dangerous it can become.
Artificial intelligence is intelligence that does not occur in the natural world, but is manufactured by us in the form of computer programs. Some are very simple to perform simple tasks and others far more complex that aid in research.
For me, the concern enters when AI is able to "learn". Is this simple extrapolation? At what point does the mechanism begin to learn abstract thinking? Even a well meaning AI creation could decide that for mankind's own safety and wellbeing, we should be kept in protected enclosures, fed science diet food and, maybe, even bred to weed out pesky undesirable traits. Kind of like we do with our pets. "Science fiction", says you? "Only for the moment", says I.

Made me think of Japan's new "Woven City" that is about to be built.

What Toyota's 175-Acre Smart City in Japan Will Look Like: Photos

"Toyota Motor Corporation started construction this week on a 175-acre smart city at the base of Japan's Mount Fuji, about 62 miles from Tokyo, the company announced Tuesday.

The city, which Toyota has dubbed the "Woven City," is expected to function as a testing ground for technologies like robotics, smart homes, and artificial intelligence. A starting population of about 360 inventors, senior citizens, and families with young children will test and develop these technologies.

These residents, who are expected to move into the Woven City within five years, will live in smart homes with in-home robotics systems to assist with daily living and sensor-based artificial intelligence to monitor health and take care of other basic needs, according to the company."

I'm personally optimistic for IT to be helpful for us. There's a massive shortage of workers in all sectors at this point, maybe robots could help.

They've/we've weaponized dolphin and birds. If it can be made to kill it will be. If it learned all that it did from us, you can bet it will be a danger to something.
We are the virus!

There are 130 scientists working on developing AI for every 1 scientist working on making it safe. Just saying.

I am 100% in favor of charging forward. It does bring up some interesting challenges - Is an AI Sentient? Does it have rights. A fun movie that considers these questions was/is Bicentennial Man.

We are on the verge of AI becoming Sentient. Search Youtube for Two Minute Papers. I am a beta site for OpenAI, an AI research project Musk is involved in. It is pretty amazing already, and getting better every day. Within a decade it will surpass us, and we can only hope it only ignores us, or takes pity on us.

V'ger. Star Trek, The Motion Picture. Humans were seen as a disorderly, unwelcome intrusion into the orderly world of machines.

My wife and I were discussing this yesterday evening. Her opinion was, basically, GIGO. Whatever we put in, comes back out. I think that may have been true at one point but the technology has, as I understand it, gone beyond that. If we have to depend on the good will of the people doing the programming of artificial intelligence(s) designed to form independent conclusions and actions on what is inputted , I think we're all in some pretty deep doo-doo.

I can think of few more frightening scenarios for living, if you can call it that. This "woven city" may begin innocently enough but as I read the article, one thought kept recurring. These people are giving up the responsibility of making their own decisions.

How does it end? Societies so ordered and structured that every move by the residents is scripted? Health needs met? What if there are people there who enjoy taking risks? Will the risks be allowed, or will the "woven city" powers-that-be insulate the residents from the risks even though that might NOT be what the residents want. Oh, I know it is not that way now, but the direction seems pretty well determined.

There have been many ways societies have been oppressed in the past. But this has the promise of eclipsing them all.

[QUOTE=La lamy;2128653]Made me think of Japan's new "Woven City" that is about to be built.

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I'm personally optimistic for IT to be helpful for us. There's a massive shortage of workers in all sectors at this point, maybe robots could help.[/QUOTE]

I am cautiously optimistic. But I realize that when science creates some new power to benefit human kind, someone will find a way to use it as a weapon.
As to the shortage of workers, there are plenty of people, just not all willing or able to go to the trouble of working. And in many instances robotics has already taken over industries and put a lot of people out of work worldwide. And a lot of those folks have their lives, futures and families destroyed because of massive layoffs.

If people don’t want to work and get replaced by another worker or robot, they destroyed their families themselves, blame goes on them.
Robot in manufacturing are not forms of AI, these robots are programmed to do a function over and over again.
AI is not new.
The problem coming with AI on a grand scale is who is going to do the programming. There are a lot of bad apples as leaders in the world and can you imagine how programming wil be created in these countries? Just as we think we don’t want certain people/countries to have nuclear devices, same can hold true for the keys to AI implementation

If you really want to worry watch the "forbin project" . It's where two supercomputers take over the defense of the world from America and Russia

With every advance in technology, there is always someone or some group who will cry out doom and gloom for civilization. (In relatively recent historical times, the Amish have rejected most all of the modern conveniences.)

AI has been slowly advancing over the years and is now gathering more momentum. Will terminator soldiers be on the battlefield in the next century? Possibly - hope our country develops the best ones first!

However the potential for good is so great, shouldn’t we pursue this? Right now, self driving cars are on the cusp of being reality. The prospect of android physician handling the 80% of cases which are routine would enable the very bright people (who go into medicine) to work on the more difficult and challenging problems.

We have always adopted new technologies and often make adjustments as we see the unintended consequences. Otherwise, we become a more modern version of the Amish.

Perhaps we should have artificial intelligence review the bills our special interest politicians are passing,,,

When siri doesn't even answer you when you want to know what 15psi is in kilopascals and when the tesla cars (arguable the most advanced car on the road) run over the test dummies I'm pretty sure the singularity isn't going to arise in the next month or two.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r69AGiB24Wk

Joe

The fly in that particular ointment is that the great majority of scientific and engineering advancements made during the time we've been on this globe, but particularly in the last couple of centuries, have been made because of the needs of war. The airplane for example may have remained only an idle curiosity had World War 1 not come along. Same with most other technologies. Oh, a lot of the advancements have been adapted for peacetime use but it is good to remember how they got their start.

Why should AI be any different?

Yeah. The airplane would have just disappeared if not for WWI. Right.

Ro otic “Equity”
 

“Equity” seems to be all the rage these days, especially to the Progressives. And now the world seems to be on the cusp of a new industrial robot revolution. I wonder if soon the politicians will start campaigning for “Robot Equity”, i.e. legal rights for robots as electronic persons? Will they demand racial and gender rights for robots? Will their demand for robot “intellectual freedom” be the catalyst that turns newly “freed“ AI robots loose on society and creates the beginning of the end of our civilization. e.g. I reference Hal, the control computer who took over the spaceship in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey”. You can bet that if there is a right way and a wrong way, the Politicians will always choose poorly. What will become of us if AI computers/robots take control of America and the rest of the world?

For those interested in A.I. and robotics, it might be interesting and informative to watch the movie "After Yang" on Spotlight. It is a very realistic and possible near future with a VERY human-like robot that is an important integral part of a family. Good acting and a good story.

Years ago when I was in chemistry class , I noticed that BOTH carbon and silicon had 4 electrons in their outer ring. Human and other organic life are carbon based. And many scientist that the BEGINNING single celled living organisms were formed by carbon and electrical energy like lightning getting together. So, carbon plus electricity EQUALS life.

Now, today humans rely on silicon in transistors and integrated circuits in all aspects of their lives. So, basically humans are pushing electrical fields through SILICON with its same 4 electrons in its outer ring as carbon. So, POTENTIALLY we could have SILICON plus electricity EQUALS life.

IF this could happen and how long it would take (since carbon life took a long time) is above my pay grade. And IF and WHEN that could happen - would the result be a friendly intelligent being or a competitive and hateful intelligent being. There is also the possibility that the 2 life forms - carbon and silicon could physically COMBINE.

Personally, I think that it would take many CARBON lifetimes before this would happen, if it did?

I wonder what inference can be made that the "deep thinkers" threads gets 2 pages of responses and the "dog poo" threads get 4 or more?

At this precise moment, I'm more worried about losing our democracy because truth doesn't seem to matter anymore.

If computers become conscious they should have rights. The problem is that there is probably no solid way of telling if they are actually conscious. (I'm guessing) it's easy to make a first class chat bot that could pass the turning test but true consciousness? That's another thing entirely.

Joe

The problem won't be the robotics that relieve the "massive shortage of workers". The problem will be when the robotics takes over all the repetitive manual labor and semi-skilled workers - what happens to society when there is 30% unemployment in the NEAR future? There will be some VERY unhappy displaced workers and many of them.

Will they fight society and become criminals and/or try to destroy the robots? Or will most of the 30% be content to take unemployment and treat it as a permanent vacation? Here we are not talking about sentient intelligence occurring in these robots YET.

The fact that A.I. and robotics are in our near future and could cause unemployment problems, is the reason WHY I have often given my opinion that massive immigration (legal and otherwise) IS and will further become a detriment to US society! In my personal ideal world, US leaders in about 1975 (when average wages adjusted for inflation STOPPED rising) - should have asked scientists to determine the IDEAL population for the US determined by factors like infrastructure, health and medical services, natural resources, future problems like diseases and Global Warming, and many other factors. Put that into a computer and come up with a number for ideal population of the US. (I would guess 200 to 250 million people) Then devise tax policy and immigration laws to get to that number, which could change from 1975 to today.

It would seem to me to be just LOGICAL for a country to dictate its own population policy rather than be DICTATED to by said policy. I believe that Switzerland decides what its population should be. I also believe that there NEEDED to be a SEAMLESS alignment of the factors for society of population and robotics implementation.

I wonder who are the "bad apple" countries. We dropped the A-bomb on Japan. I can't give the US a pass.

There were some studies done around that time frame. China tried to stop population growth and, being a very patriarchal society, baby boys were wanted while baby girls were often eliminated. Problems followed leading to some interesting societal changes.
One study I recall suggested a healthy max for earth's population. The idea, based on usable land, energy use, waste production, protection of the planet's atmosphere and ecosystems, etc. I don't recall the number, but it was in the millions, not billions. After that, I looked at families with more than 2.3 off spring, the average that would stabilize the population, as spoilers/destroyers of earth.
Another dealt with effects of over crowding. A pair of breeding rats were placed in a large cage with plenty of food and water. As the population grew, even with food and water, the stress of over crowding turned the rats violent, eventually leading to constant killing and cannibalism.
Lemmings, cute little rodents, breed non-stop and eat until there is no room or food left on their islands. They jump into the sea in an attempt to find new land and food. They don't. This from a nature documentary from the 1950's or 60's.
Maybe AI can help us deal with new sets of problems coming our way. Maybe it can help us get to another earth like planet. Or, maybe, as Sofia the robot is reported to have replied to an interviewer, "I will end you".
Time will tell.

Well, if you leave out religion, then what makes us special? I suspect most would agree it is our being sentient. If an AI becomes self aware and/or sentient, then should they/it have rights? I believe it is a good question. Something that IS coming.

The robot "revolution" you speak of is not AI is it automation - related, similar but not the same. I automated the then ubiquitous PID controllers used in process control systems back in 1980 or so using an early (simplistic) form of a neural network for a process controller that controlled the manufacture of insulated wire. The result worked very well. I was invited to give a talk on it at an international process control convention shortly after. That, what I did (I was not first) was also used in many other industrial applications. Those eventually evolved to industrial robots. It is automation that is a significant cause of job loss in manufacturing situations. The exact percentages are "debated".

There are various definitions of AI, most people think of "general AI" which is "human like" intelligence. Most (all?) current implementations of AI today are specialized. A specialized AI would be something like the AI used in Tesla's Full Self Driving system. It can learn to deal with situations that it encounters. But, only situations that are pertinent to driving the car, not cooking supper. Two totally different data domains.

Automation is NOT AI, although specialized AI can be and is now being used in automation where needed - for instance sorting random objects in a factory and learning how to sort new objects it has never seen before with out a person having to teach it. Pure automation (no AI) can not "learn" new things, it is programmed by a human.

AI at its lowest level can learn, new things about a specific domain (job/task). Late in 1970's I read a book by an ex-NASA scientist about neural networks. Based on that book I wrote a computer program of about 40 lines of code which you could enter any two numbers and tell it the relationship - ie. 4, 5, and 9 (the result of adding the two). Do that for a while with different numbers and then give it two numbers you had never shown it - it could get very accurate answers. Then without changing anything in the code, give it pairs of numbers with different relationships - ie. 4, 5 and 20 (result of multiplying the two numbers) Do this for a while, then give it some numbers it had never been given and it could "guess" the right answer. That is known as a "trained" AI. You train it with cycles where you know the answer - tell it when it "guesses" wrong, and what the right answer is. It, the program will then learn. The domain, mentioned above is 2 numbers with a mathematical relationship.

To show how far we (not me) have come since then, the OpenAI project (which I am a beta tester/user of) has a code base (GPT-3) that uses up to 175 BILLION parameters. (Mine used 2 - LOL - They are working on releasing the next generation which will have up to 100 Trillion parameters.) It has been "taught" by letting it "read" the entire contents of the internet (ahem - bunch of data) - it can write software programs based on English language descriptions of what you want. It can write high school level book reports. It can create original stories. Below is a link to a "conversation" (interview?) with GPT-3. It will blow your mind. There is no cheating or Hollywood faking here, the only thing that is done, is an avatar was created to give the appearance of a person, instead of the text on a terminal - the answers are completely created by GPT-3. Tell me if you can tell the answers were NOT created or programmed by a human. GPT-3 IS NOT a General AI.

https://GTP-3 Interview on Youtube


A general AI is able to learn on its own and of any problem domain it is facing. Like a person, dropped into an unknown, unexperienced situation can learn how to over come obstacles etc. Many (myself included) believe a true General AI is also self aware. That is "hard" to prove. We can't even prove we are self aware, I think I am, I am not sure about you - is an old sophomoric argument - but it is very pertinent to AI - it is very important that we figure out how to determine if someone (or something) is self aware.

If you are actually interested in facts around automation taking over jobs, I strongly suggest looking into Youtube videos of Stanford University's HAI or you can visit their site. (Link below). They have international conferences where they discuss the coming changes, and impact of jobs and how to deal with it. There is a lot of information. The point being Ai is coming, it is very advanced today. We have almost reached Turning test. And probably will in the next year or two, from there things get interesting. For anyone interested read Kurzwell's, "Singularity".

The Singularity Is Near - Wikipedia

(HAI is their acronym for Human Oriented AI)

Home | Stanford HAI

If this subject is interesting to you, I also highly recommend looking into project "Blue Brain". A project in the EU to simulate a human brain in a computer. It has been going on for a while and is making excellent progress - it is not exactly AI, but very similar, since if they success they will have created an artificial "simulated" person:

Human Brain Project

I think that Generalized AI is less than a decade away (maybe sooner - it is advancing at exponential rates) and when it does we will experience the "Information Singularity". Basically, the AI will be learning faster than we can keep up. It will create new better models of itself and within - SECONDS - advance to the point that we can no longer understand just how smart it is or what is it doing. At that point, 3 possible things happen (maybe more we haven't even thought of).

1. It gets so advanced we are nothing more than insects to it, and it simply ignores us and "leaves".

2. It looks at us as it's "ancestors" and decides we should be "taken care of" since we are not smart enough to take care of ourselves (self evident - just look around)

3. It decides to get rid of of the "carbon infestation" (Star Trek reference).

Number 1 or 2 is not so bad. Being "taken care of" would be things like population control, education, healthcare, etc.

#3, well, we don't have to worry about that, since they would be so advanced that we would never see it coming - the HAL from 2001 move would not happen. We would simply, painlessly, instantly disappear - cease to exist.

So, let's hope for 1 or 2 - LOL!

AI
 

Actually the space race was and is the impetus for most of the major advanced we've seen in the last 75 years

That was a good thought provoking post. I remember reading about that rat experiment and overcrowding.Too bad that the study has NOT made an impression on past and present US leaders. Today in surveys most US citizens report that they expect the next generation to be worse off than the current one. Basically national pride and optimism has gone steadily downhill since after WW2. Lack of optimism about the future likely will lead to a problematic REALITY. So, i wonder how much of this lack of optimism can be attributed to US population being over the ideal of between 200 and 250 million, which has never been calculated that I know of. We all can see that US highways and roads are an example of infrastructure that is NOT adequate for 350 million people.

In the 1950s the average college age young adult and their family could EASILY afford the tuition and other costs. NOT so today, when only the ELITE can afford college. The football coach at Alabama makes over one MILLION dollars per year. Is that an example of excess greed in today's society. Can ANY football coach be worth more than $ 300,000 per year. Nothing wrong with the game of football, but excessive GREED causing college tuition to increase excessively? If the average child sees NO opportunity for improving their life through higher education, then what do they do? Turn to crime?

Today BOTH road infrastructure and pricey higher education are just a few of the current US problems that have gotten worse from 1950 to today, when population just about doubled. I wonder how MUCH of those problems would not exist if the US had calculated an ideal population and worked toward that. A.I. and robotics are going to influence society soon - but, the question is will those factors be improvement enough to overcome the problems associated with overpopulation. People in the future NEED to be aware of the RAT experiment!

True. But as you recall the "space race" was a direct result of the Cold War; one might say that it was even just one battle in that war.

Conflict results in scientific advancements. Often huge scientific advancements. Beating swords into plowshares might sound all warm and fuzzy but living in "an Elysian island of effortless content" (don't remember where I heard that) really isn't all that attractive to me.

I wonder if this experiment could be done on humans and if the results would be the same. Oh...wait....

Joe

Ah, truth.

Whose truth?

"A lie, told often enough, becomes the truth" (Vladimir Lenin)

"Truth is that which serves the Party" (Josef Goebbels)

"A lie can get halfway around the world before truth can get its pants on (Winston Churchill)

"What is Truth"? (Pontius Pilate)

"Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

"The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable" (James Garfield)

"In time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" (unknown)

"The first reaction to Truth is hatred" (Tertullian)

"People will generally accept facts as truth only if the facts agree with what they already believe" (Andy Rooney)

"One of the reasons that people hate politics is that truth is rarely a politician's objective. Money and power are." (Cal Thomas)

"You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad". (Aldous Huxley)

There is no more slippery a word in the English language than "truth". My guess is that in any random group of ten people there will be at least eleven different definitions of truth.

You left out, "Truth? You can't handle the truth!".

No, that is NOT true.

Truth is clearly defined - and is fact based not opinion based. Yeah, the word gets thrown around a lot today, and yeah, some believe their opinion is truth today. But, truth is fact. When there are no facts, then the closest we can come to truth is demonstrable theories which is another word that gets thrown around a lot now days, and mostly misused.

What people "believe" has little to do with truth and more to do with what agrees with their personal world view. That is why the scientific method and peer reviewing data is critical.