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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @10:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @10:57AM (#137203)

    Humans, as a species, are weak and stupid. What matters the difference between a HAL or a Hitler? A Stalin or a Skynet?

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @04:04PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @04:04PM (#137278)

    The difference is that Hitler and Stalin had limited life times, as they were humans. An AI might have unlimited lifetime. OK, Hitler was defeated and ultimately killed himself; one might assume a sufficiently advanced AI would have been more intelligent and thus would not have been defeated. However we only got rid of Stalin due to his natural death. Imagine an immortal Stalin and you already know an important difference.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @06:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 23 2015, @06:09PM (#137347)

    Nice Godwin, dude....

  • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday January 24 2015, @12:30AM

    by HiThere (866) on Saturday January 24 2015, @12:30AM (#137488) Journal

    That's actually a reasonable comment, if you stop to think about it.

    The AI will not have human motives. At most it will have been designed to appear comprehensible to humans. It will not, necessarily, have a predetermined lifetime. And it won't necessarily object to being debugged...though debugging an advanced AI will not be a trivial operation.

    OTOH, I'd be far more willing to trust the future of humanity to an AI with a decent motivational structure than I am to the current government leaders.

    --
    Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.