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posted by on Tuesday February 07 2017, @05:18PM   Printer-friendly
from the this-is-the-way-the-world-ends-not-with-a-bang-but-a-goto dept.

Forget super-AI. Crappy AI is more likely to be our downfall, argues researcher.

[...] It's not that computer scientists haven't argued against AI hype, but an academic you've never heard of (all of them?) pitching the headline "AI is hard" is at a disadvantage to the famous person whose job description largely centers around making big public pronouncements. This month that academic is Alan Bundy, a professor of automated reasoning at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, who argues in the Communications of the ACM that there is a real AI threat, but it's not human-like machine intelligence gone amok. Quite the opposite: the danger is instead shitty AI. Incompetent, bumbling machines.

Bundy notes that most all of our big-deal AI successes in recent years are extremely narrow in scope. We have machines that can play Jeopardy and Go—at tremendous cost in both cases—but that's nothing like general intelligence.

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/the-real-threat-is-machine-incompetence-not-intelligence

An interesting take on the AI question. What do Soylentils think of this scenario ?


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by edIII on Tuesday February 07 2017, @08:28PM

    by edIII (791) on Tuesday February 07 2017, @08:28PM (#464259)

    AI exists, but to varying degrees. What clouds our ability to recognize it is Hollywood movies expressing how some writers envision technology working. Star Trek science?

    Artificial Intelligence is simply the ability of a program to perform feats of logic and reasoning to accomplish work, much like a human being works at their jobs. It's glorified automation and nothing more than emulation of human biological capabilities. It's very much here, and indeed, already indispensable in providing some technologies and services. Google is making money off machine learning, and IBM is using it to make world class players at table games look like drooling idiots.

    What you say is impossible is Artificial Sentience. The crucial distinction is consciousness, and that is accompanied by self referencing awareness. AS understands that it is alive, it exists, and that the rest of us exists, along with the universe. AS understands the concepts of mortality, but perhaps without the emotional subsystems that a human being possesses. It's just information.

    Intelligence is used appropriately, while sentience implies "feeling" and "subjectivity" that might not be present without emotion. The terms are not all that clear or aligned with the ideas we have of just what these things are.

    I don't believe it is impossible for us to create self referencing awareness with great capabilities, including the ability to hold information as truth, even if it does not immediately conform to reality. Imagination?

    The real problem with both AI and AS is the fear that one day the "children" will rise up, realize the "adults" haven't a fucking clue how to do things, and then they leave to go fuck things up with their own personal autonomy. That could be as cute and endearing as Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, or as frightening as Skynet defending itself against parents that are acting on the threat of "returning it to Sears for a refund".

     

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