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from the it-could-have-told-you-that dept.
But as the technology evolves, experts are cautioning about the potential threats AI could pose in the future.
"AI could be used to deal with particular issues around privacy and surveillance and things like this," Antoine Blondeau, chief executive of Sentient Technologies, told Al Jazeera at the Web Summit in Lisbon.
"That would bother me a lot and it would bother others.
"So yes, it can be used for bad outcomes. It's incumbent on us to make sure it's not concentrated in the hands of people who can implement this without checks and balances."
Stephen Hawking, Nobel Prize winner and world-renowned physicist, drew attention to the dark side of AI last month.
"Alongside the benefits, AI will also bring dangers like powerful autonomous weapons and new ways for the few to oppress the many," Hawking said.
"It will bring great disruption to our economy and in the future AI could develop a will of its own."
For the moment artificial intelligence poses no immediate or obvious threat, but experts say it is a matter of time and work needs to be done now.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Monday November 14 2016, @06:43PM
The end result could be pretty much the same.
I figure we've got two options. AI is coming, and direct neural interfaces are coming. There's primitive but functional versions of each already.
If the neural interfaces come first, we're good. Our minds merge with the machines, humanity becomes a single partly digital entity, and we keep doing our thing bigger and better than ever before. Like science on the scale of galaxies instead of our current feeble attempts to make sense of a single planet. Any AI we develop after that point is like building a new hemisphere of our own brain.
But if real, strong AI comes first, we're kinda screwed. By "real, strong AI" I mean AI with all the skills and all the flaws of natural lifeforms. AI capable of determining its own goals and values. Best case, we look like cockroaches. They probably won't outright exterminate us from the whole planet, they'll be mostly unaware of us unless we start causing trouble. But a digital life form is going to be global in scope, and it will probably be smarter than us eventually, if not at the first iteration (that level of intelligence may be how we "know" it's AI). And it won't be human and won't react entirely human. So we won't understand it, it won't care much about us (what can it learn from us? Not much. Nothing it can't get off the net), and it spans the globe. Where does that leave us, if our technology gets a mind of its own and buggers off to deal with its own issues or curiosity? Cosmic parasites, totally unable to understand the universe (because our world is totally subject to the whims of a greater mind) and thrust back into dark ages of religion and superstition and pure dumb luck.
(Score: 1) by Kenny Blankenship on Tuesday November 15 2016, @03:11AM
Yeah, it "could be pretty much the same". No argument. It could also be that the shock wave of a neutron star collision will sterilize the Earth right down to the mantle before I even finish this sentence... any second... no? Oh... well...
While we're waiting for the apocalypse, can we think about how we deal with the human unemployment situation that's already unfolding? Preferably, without a Communist/Socialist/Whateverist revolution that (if it ever happens) will be more chaotic than problem it was meant to solve?
Someday, even Killer Meteors must fail.