2 December 2014
Does rampant AI threaten humanity?
By Mark Ward. Technology correspondent, BBC News
Retrieved from http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-30293863 on Jan 19, 2014.
Pity the poor meat bags. They are doomed if a growing number of scientists,
engineers and artists are to be believed.
Prof Stephen Hawking has joined a roster of experts worried about what
follows when humans build a device or write some software that can properly
be called intelligent.
Such an artificial intelligence (AI), he fears, could spell the end
of humanity.
Similar worries were voiced by Tesla boss Elon Musk in October. He
declared rampant AI to be the "biggest existential threat" facing mankind.
He wonders if we will find our end beneath the heels of a cruel and calculating
artificial intelligence.
So too does the University of Oxford's Prof Nick Bostrom, who has said
an AI-led apocalypse could engulf us within a century.
Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, is also worried about
AI, albeit for more subtle reasons. He is concerned that it may be hard
to write an algorithmic moral code strong enough to constrain and contain
super-smart software.
"We're already living in the early days of the post-AI world”
Charles Stross
Many films, such as The Terminator movies, 2001, The Matrix, Blade Runner,
to mention a few, pit puny humans against AI-driven enemies.
More recently, Spike Jonze's Her involved a romance between man and
operating system, Alex Garland's forthcoming Ex Machina debates the humanity
of an android and the new Avengers movie sees superheroes battle Ultron
- a super-intelligent AI intent on extinguishing mankind. Which it would
do with ease were it not for Thor, Iron Man and their super-friends.
Even today we are getting hints about how paltry human wits can be
when set against computers who throw all their computational horsepower
at a problem. Chess computers now routinely beat all but the best human
players. Complicated mathematics is a snap to as lowly a device as the
smartphone in your pocket.
IBM's Watson supercomputer took on and beat the best players of US
TV game show Jeopardy. And there are many, many examples of computers finding
novel and creative solutions to problems across diverse fields that, before
now, never occurred to us humans.
The machines are slowly but surely getting smarter and the pursuits
in which humans remain champions are diminishing.
AI is only dangerous because of the way it amplifies human goals, warns
author Charles Stross But is the risk real? Once humans code the first
genuinely smart computer program that then goes on to develop its smarter
successors, is the writing on the wall for humans?
Maybe, said Neil Jacobstein, AI and robotics co-chairman at California's
Singularity University.
"I don't think that ethical outcomes from AI come for free," he said,
adding that work now will significantly improve our chances of surviving
the rise of rampant AI.
What we must do, he said, is consider the consequences of what we were
creating and prepare our societies and institutions for the sweeping changes
that might arise.
The movie Her offered a less threatening view of what artificial intelligence
might entail
"It's best to do that before the technologies are fully developed and
AI and robotics are certainly not fully developed yet," he said. "The possibility
of something going wrong increases when you don't think about what those
potential wrong things are."
"I think there is a great opportunity for us to be proactive about
anticipating those possible negative risks and doing our best to develop
redundant, layered thoughtful controls for those risks," he told the BBC.
So far, said Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial
College, those actively working on AI were not really putting in place
safety systems to stop their creations running amok.
"The AI community does not think its a substantial worry," he said,
"whereas the public does think it's much more of an issue."
"The right place to be is probably in-between those two extremes,"
he said, adding: "There's no need for panic right now.
"I do not think we are about to develop human-level AI within the next
10-20 years," he said. "On the other hand its probably a good idea for
AI researchers to start thinking about the issues that Stephen Hawking
and others have raised."
Prof Murray Shanahan offers a brief introduction to the topic of artificial
intelligence
And, said Prof Shanahan, the greatest obstacle to developing those
genuinely smart machines had yet to be overcome - how we actually create
machine-based intelligence.
"We do not really know yet whether the best way is to copy nature or
start from scratch," said Prof Shanahan.
For science-fiction author Charles Stross, the dangers inherent in
artificially smart systems do not arise because they will out-think us
or suddenly realise they can please themselves rather than their human
masters.
"Nobody wants an AI that will set its own goals because the probable
outcome is that it will decide to do the AI equivalent of sacking out on
the sofa with a bowl of chips and the cable TV controller rather than doing
whatever it is that we consider to be useful," he said.
A glance at all the work being done on AI right now shows that much
of it is concentrating on systems that specifically lack the autonomy and
consciousness that could spell problems for us humans.
The malevolent robot Ultron will portray AI gone wrong in 2015's Avengers
sequel
The AI's we were getting now and which were likely to appear in the
future might be dangerous, Stross said, but only because of the people
they served.
"Our biggest threat from AI, as I see it, comes from the consciousnesses
that set their goals," he said.
"Drones don't kill people - people who instruct drones to fly to grid
coordinates (X, Y) and unleash a Hellfire missile kill people," he said.
"It's the people who control them whose intentions must be questioned.
"We're already living in the early days of the post-AI world, and we
haven't recognised that all AI is is a proxy for our own selves - tools
for thinking faster and more efficiently, but not necessarily more benevolently,"
he said.
The End