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edge.org's Question of the Year: "What Do You Think About Machines That Think?"

posted by Blackmoore on Friday January 23 2015, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the dreaming-of-electric-sheep? dept.

prospectacle writes:

Physicists, philosophers, professors, authors, cognitive scientists, and many others have weighed in on edge.org's annual question 2015: What do you think about machines that think? See all 186 responses here

Also, what do you think?

My 2ยข: There's been a lot of focus on potential disasters that are almost certainly not going to happen. E.g. a robot uprising, or mass poverty through unemployment. Most manufacturers of artificial intelligence won't program their machines to seek self preservation at the expense of their human masters. It wouldn't sell. Secondly, if robots can one day produce almost everything we need, including more robots, with almost no human labour required, then robot-powered factories will become like libraries: relatively cheap to maintain, plentiful, and a public one will be set up in every town or suburb, for public use. If you think the big corporations wouldn't allow it, why do they allow public libraries?

 
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  • (Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Friday January 23 2015, @07:45AM

    by q.kontinuum (532) on Friday January 23 2015, @07:45AM (#137169) Journal

    The software will need more time to catch up, but probably not much more time.

    Being a software engineer, I have a feeling the time to develop good, stable software is always underestimated by orders of magnitude. We still don't have any decent operating system, and SW engineers are working on the topic for half a century. We know in principle that micro-kernel systems can be implemented efficiently, yet we still don't have a viable system available. There are some interesting articles recently about Apple and SW quality (just search for "Apple software quality"). Most articles I found in a hurry had the same baseline: Apple was known for producing software that "just works", but by pumping out too many products, fresh hardware etc. the SW engineering teams can't catch up anymore. The effort for SW development was gravely underestimated.

    And don't let me get started on Microsofts fruitless [*] effort to build a stable OS. The Linux community had a good start, but the past couple of years I had an increasing amount of problems with new desktop distributions:

    • One laptop will stop booting, no indication why. Only after a lot of senseless key-bashing I found out that klicking [ESC] produces a message informing me that it's waiting for the key-phrase for my encrypted home folder (Fedora 20)
    • Another laptop will boot, but ends up with root- and home-partitions mounted read-only although configured otherwise in /etc/fstab (Also Fedora, IIRC it's FC19
    • When playing minecraft and closing the lid, the display sometimes remains dark after re-opening the lid, no way to continue using it. Hard reset required. (I'll have to make it a habit to write down the IP address so I might try to log in via ssh)
    • Ubuntu with its Unity display manager is also getting worse/un-maintainable by hiding more and more of the functonaliy in shiny frontends with too little debug-information
    • I still didn't see any distribution with a properly pre-configured SE-Linux. Each distro has a couple of broken standard packages per default. This is IMO an example of a great concept where the adaptation-effort to the rest of the distro was hugely underestimated.

    I can imagine that we get potent enough hardware, but I doubt we will have reasonable good software within this century.

    [*] Actually, MS efforts are not entirely fruitless. It looks impressive, like a Durian fruit. Unfortunately it stinks like one as well, once trying to use it productively.

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  • (Score: 2) by jbWolf on Friday January 23 2015, @08:11AM

    by jbWolf (2774) <{jb} {at} {jb-wolf.com}> on Friday January 23 2015, @08:11AM (#137174) Homepage

    Being a software engineer, I have a feeling the time to develop good, stable software is always underestimated by orders of magnitude. We still don't have any decent operating system, and SW engineers are working on the topic for half a century.

    The software to run an AI doesn't need to be stable. Our brains are already good examples of that. I know I have my share of odd quirks and problems in my gray matter.

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