It's not likely to be a popular opinion with technologists as AI's potential has lit the technopopular imagination, however this question has bothered me for a long time. I think strong emergent AI suffers philosophical problem that won't go away, and to the extent that the conversation revolves around evolution and consciousness rather than logic and intelligence, then we are having the right conversation.

I'll put my argument out there and let the flames come as they will.

Strong AI is about as likely to emerge from our current state of the art AI machinery as it is to emerge suddenly out of moon rocks. That's to say the fear of machines becoming self-conscious and posing an existential threat to us, especially replacing us in the evolutionarily sense, is completely unfounded.

This isn't to say that building machines capable of doing exactly that isn't possible - we and all living things are proof that it's possible - it's to say that achieving this level of engineering is on par with intergalactic mass transit or Dyson spheres - way out of our league for the foreseeable. And, even if we had the technology, it would be so entirely foolish to undertake that no sentient species would do it.

That said, there's a substantial argument to make that we will augment ourselves with our own machinery so throughoughly that we will become unrecognizable and in effect, accomplish the same task through merging with the machine. This is likely, but not at all to be like the experience of the singularity in that all of humanity is suddenly arrested and deposed by autonomous AI.

An interesting scenario in this vein is if a few powerful individuals can wield autonomous systems, modify themselves and simply wipe out all the competition, then in effect the rest of us wouldn't know the difference. This outcome is actually I think on the more likely side, albeit a good ways away in the future.

Less likely but still totally legitimate as a concern is the idea that AI could be very easily weaponized. This is a real problem and is I think behind the more substantive warnings by good thinkers on the topic. Like bioweapons, we might be wiped out by an machine that's been intentionally programmed and mechanically empowered to cause real harm. This kind of danger could also be emergent, in that a machine might be capable of deciding that it ought to take certain actions as well as have the capacity to take them, and then, voila, mass murder.

However it seems unlikely that such a mistake would be made, or that a bad actor would be capable to commit such an intentional crime. I think this is on par with nuclear MAD: even total madmen dictators hit the pause on the push-the-button instinct. And an AI MAD or similar would surely take as much resource to produce as a nuke arsenal. In other words, the resources required to build such a machinery are on the order of a nation-state, and perhaps more complicated to achieve than a nuclear arsenal, so probably more likely to be stopped or fail in-process rather than succeed.

So there are dangers from AI but I would say they are lesser than the accumulated danger of industrial society rendering they planet uninhabitable, which should of course occupy our primary concern these days.

The idea that the biological evolutionary 'machine' whose motive for existence is accumulated over billions of years of entropic adaptation can be out engineered, or accidently replicated by modern computational AI is silly - the two aren't in the same league and it's hubris to suppose otherwise. There's more intelligence in the toe of a lady bug than in an the computing power ever made.

In sum the danger from emergent AI is overstated, however the concern is most welcome to the extent that it informs wisdom and care in consideration for our techno-industrial impact on the biosphere.

user:	tehchromic
created:	June 18, 2014
karma:	210
about:	art in theory, in practice beekeeping and UIX