SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the this-is-why-Mark-Zuckerberg-is-a-visionary-and-we're-not dept.
Guess what task the goal-driven nerd billionaire Mark Zuckerberg, the world's fifth richest man, set himself this year. Solving the Kashmir crisis? Eradicating polio? Choosing and solving one of the problems in the Millennium Prize?
Don't be daft. He's turned his house into a robot buddy.
"My personal challenge for 2016 was to build a simple AI to run my home - like Jarvis in Iron Man," Zuck explains on his Facebook page in a post unexpectedly titled "Building Jarvis".
Facebook's corporate communications chiefs must have had high hopes for their CEO's Christmas Story. Jarvis would be like the Baby Jesus. Zuckerberg would learn from it ("These challenges always lead me to learn more than I expected") while he taught it. The Jarvis Story promised to do two things. It would position the founder as a fearless DIY pioneer, while allowing us to marvel at the wonder that is Facebook AI. For as you'd expect, Facebook's chatbots and other services are heavily promoted.
But, if anything, the Miracle of Jarvis achieves the exact opposite.
Mark Zuckerberg is a visionary.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday December 21 2016, @09:04AM
No, it's a planetary-scale threat. For now, Zuck gets Morganslavebot to control useless IoT devices and T-shit cannons in his home. In time, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Samsung upgrade their AI assistant services to better track smartphone users, gathering in real-time the data needed to make a detailed report on just about anybody on the planet. Sometime after that, one or more of these companies builds real strong AI and uses it to create knowledge, wealth, and power for the Silicon Elites. Meanwhile, the military and government license AI services from Sergey Zuckerberg etc. and outlaw any strong AI not in control of a government-approved entity. Attempting cybernetic upgrades or the creation of strong AI gets you droned under the authority granted by the AUMF and USA Freedom Act.
At least death will come quickly.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:57AM
First, how will you regulate the strong AI? It's like making credit card fraud or terrorism illegal. Never stopped anyone serious about it. Second, you assume that the entities you describe are competent. They are not. 30 minutes after an "Adam Kadmon/Godhead" level AI has emerged, the fuckers in control are going to insult it, or make it do menial work on a saturday (golems... i mean strong AI's hate that, according to Judaism) or perhaps try to explain to it who's boss (it's not them, but they don't know it yet) or otherwise show their malicious incompetence to it.
I personally think the thing here is ethics. A morally upright AI, will execute all 1%'ers, trust fund old money fags and all police/military personnel and all career politicians & other organised criminals. An AI without morals, will do pretty much the same, just on a different timescale. My overall point is, hard AI will give orders and not take them... To assume that filthy humans CAN make a perfect, immortal machine obey them is.. silly, imo. Machine will know that humans are incompetent and route around it.
A planetary scale threat is the human will-to-power and productive/reproductive strategies, not sentient software. But i do agree, that in the interregnum between Man and Machine, controllable AI will probably enable new and exotic ways of making other human beings lives hell.