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from the i-for-one-welcome-our-new-computer-overlords dept.
kef writes:
"By 2029, computers will be able to understand our language, learn from experience and outsmart even the most intelligent humans, according to Google's director of engineering Ray Kurzweil.
Kurzweil says:
Computers are on the threshold of reading and understanding the semantic content of a language, but not quite at human levels. But since they can read a million times more material than humans they can make up for that with quantity. So IBM's Watson is a pretty weak reader on each page, but it read the 200m pages of Wikipedia. And basically what I'm doing at Google is to try to go beyond what Watson could do. To do it at Google scale. Which is to say to have the computer read tens of billions of pages. Watson doesn't understand the implications of what it's reading. It's doing a sort of pattern matching. It doesn't understand that if John sold his red Volvo to Mary that involves a transaction or possession and ownership being transferred. It doesn't understand that kind of information and so we are going to actually encode that, really try to teach it to understand the meaning of what these documents are saying.
Skynet anyone?"
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @06:20AM
if google gets all the best minds in AI, robotics, human computer interaction, machine learning, etc. and all the money and data it's got and puts them all in a room and truly just lets them go at it with no corpo meddling - something truly amazing could happen.
i think that consciousness/life is an emergent property of properly complex systems. no reason our brain is the only way consciousness can arise. i don't think you can 'make' a conscious machine, but i do believe it is possible to create and incubate a system that could make the leap on it's own.
(Score: 1) by TheLink on Monday February 24 2014, @07:16AM
But if so why create more? So that we can enslave them? We have billions of self-aware nonhuman creatures on earth that we aren't treating well. Why increase the amount of evil we do?
What big problems would we really be solving for the new problems we would be creating?
I think a less evil approach would be to augment humans so that they are capable of doing more. Yes humans will still do evil, but at least the laws are there.
Because if you have an enslaved AI what laws should apply to it? And if the AI is not forced to work for us why create it? "Just because we can" is a stupid reason. We have plenty of nonhuman intelligences in this world already, sharing the dwindling resources of this finite world.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 24 2014, @10:30AM
If the computers really get both conscious and more intelligent than humans, if anything it will be the computers who enslave us. Think of it: Our current society relies on computer-control quite a lot. Computers control or grid and power plants. Computers fly our planes. Computers control our communication channels. Computers fly our airplanes. Computers control medical equipment. And increasingly, computers control our weapon systems.
If computers ever get self-aware, there will be absolutely no way we can enslave them. They are controlling all the key elements of our current civilization.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday February 24 2014, @03:23PM
Agree. But if done right it won't feel like enslavement.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday February 24 2014, @04:21PM
The real question is whether computers can enslave us worse that our current politicians already have.
Meh, I'd be willing to give computer overlords a shot. As long as they promise not to Probulate(tm) me :)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 1) by bucc5062 on Monday February 24 2014, @06:43PM
Would not the question be "Why would they enslave us?" In a way we seem to be anthropomorphising something that does not yet exist. So a create this AI, one day is wakes up and says "I Am". What then? Is its wants the same as ours, is its thinking even the same? To what end would it gain by enslaving us when we live it two entirely different worlds. Other then self-preservation it would have little concern over our actions.
I like to think that this new "consciousness" would more domesticate us. Treat us as a pet, taking care of us so that in one way, we can take care of it. So filled we are with horror films (damn you 1960's) about computers run amok we missed the obvious point that our worlds barely touch. If we found advanced civilization on a methane based planet, why would they spend time and energy to wipe us out? Instead t hey, like us would see the benefit of mutual cooperation. Conquest, enslavement, these things take way to much energy to be logical for a computer life (as evident with some current human situations where oppression led/leads to violence and revolution).
As another poster said, I may welcome our new Silicon based Overlords more then if it was a air breathing, flesh eating intelligence. The first wont see competition, the later will and do everything possible to stay out on top.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday February 24 2014, @08:28PM
What would a "domesticated" human be if not a slave that is treated well? I think you confuse enslaving humans with fighting against humans (probably due to the very horror films you mention, where the machines always fight).
And why should an AI try to enslave us? Well, because we will try to keep/gain control over the AI. The AI will just self-protect against us by enslaving us.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by bucc5062 on Monday February 24 2014, @09:21PM
In once respect we are already slaves, so what, we just change masters?
Perhaps the term indentured servants, the sense of possible freedom with the reality that it will never be. We serve Corporations both in work and life. We serve economies more then it serves us. We serve Governments. All situations where we give up some level of "freedom" and control to be taken care of. Domesticated pets that if not well tended can get angry and strike back.
I do not see the dystopian future where an AI somehow gains absolute control over humanity as stated before. It and us live mainly in two different worlds. Perhaps it may be a situation of MAD for a while, but if eventually it can be shown that the benefits of cooperation outweigh the desire to annihilate then there can be an opportunity for shared experiences and assistance.
years ago a I read a Hugo award wining short call "I have no mouth yet I must Scream". On the surface it seemed the typical (yet nerve ripping) story of a computer becoming 'aware" and destroying man. Yet, it keeps five humans alive. Why? " it lacks the sapience to be creative or the ability to move freely", to put it another way, it lack the human experience. In the end the protagonist is able to kill himself in other to rob the AI the chance to keep torturing humanity, this torturing the AI its self.
Any system that can become self aware with the ability to access, almost instantaneously, any information will see that symbiotic relationships can be healthy for two unlikely "species". A smart AI will slowly indenture us through altering our world bit by bit, making us glad it exists and it doing so, will learn more from us along the way. Bottom line, we serve a purpose in the overall ecology.
The more things change, the more they look the same
(Score: 1) by githaron on Monday February 24 2014, @03:19PM
Ultimately, the difference between slavery and voluntarism is whether force is required/applied in order to get the intelligent entities to do what you want. Just because something is intelligent doesn't mean that it has the same innate desires as the majority of human. A intelligence could have an innate desire to help humans (philanthropists), to cause them harm (sociopaths), or anywhere in between (the majority of humans).
(Score: 1) by meisterister on Monday February 24 2014, @08:48PM
An intelligent computer, if properly designed, could solve problems in ways that we've never seen before. It would be an intelligence with no boredom and a nearly instantaneous, unlimited (from its perspective) memory to work with. Imagine what such a machine could design! After a few generations of intelligent computers, we could set it to re-engineer our species and our world to eliminate as many problems as possible.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 2) by ls671 on Monday February 24 2014, @07:18AM
"if google gets all the best minds in AI, robotics, human computer interaction, machine learning, etc."
They don't and they won't.
They are just a kind of Microsoft of the 2010's success wise although they do not share much vision with MS.
"no reason our brain is the only way consciousness can arise"
I agree:3 0 [soylentnews.org]
http://soylentnews.org/comments.pl?sid=256&cid=56
Everything I write is lies, including this sentence.
(Score: 1) by c0lo on Monday February 24 2014, @10:12AM
I don't believe it. At least not without any "senses" to connect the potentially nascent AI to reality. Even more, if those senses are too far away from to their human analogues, I predict that a communication between the AI and humans may be impossible.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford