
The Terminator Is Not Coming. The Future Will Thank Us - fchollet
http://recode.net/2015/03/02/the-terminator-is-not-coming-the-future-will-thank-us/?refresh=1
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ElectronCharge
There is a massive fallacy in this paragraph:

"This doomsday scenario can’t happen. Intelligence is a product of learning. A
brain, no matter how big or how fast, does not become intelligent until it
learns. In humans, learning is a slow process requiring practice, repetition
and study over many years. Unlike humans, intelligent machines can be cloned,
transferring the learning from one machine to a new one, eliminating the
learning time. However, for an intelligent machine to discover new truths, to
learn new skills, to extend knowledge beyond what has been achieved before, it
will need to go through the same difficult and slow discovery process humans
do. Yes, an intelligent machine could think much faster than a biological
brain, but the slower process of discovery still has to occur."

The person writing this fails to understand the difference between engineering
and biological evolution. The AI would be engineered to begin with. There
would be nothing haphazard or extraneous about its design. The "slow process
of discovery" would be bootstrapped, as stated, by "cloning" (copying
extremely fast memory compared with humans). Then, the AI would attack new
problems with very likely a minimum 100-1 speed advantage over humans, based
on electronic versus chemical speeds. Nerve impulses travel at well less than
100 miles per hour, versus the over 150,000 miles per second of electronic
impulses.

Consider a first-gen AI engineer, with "only" a 150 IQ human equivalent
intelligence, attempting to design a better AI. Such an AI would have no
distractions (food, sleep or sex) and would likely have a monomaniacal focus
on its job. It would have a perfect, near-instantaneous memory of arbitrary
size (we can already do this). I expect it would in fairly short order produce
an IQ 300 version of itself, and that that cycle would likely continue.

That is the basis for the idea of the "singularity", and I find it completely
believable. What it would mean, I don't know...and neither does anyone else.
We have the same relationship to an IQ 1000 AI that a chimp has with us.

That is the concern that Musk, Hawking and others share.

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p1esk
You're confusing "brain" and "intelligence". A brain will be engineered to
begin with. Then is has to learn. Once it learns some amount of information,
it is intelligent, and this intelligence can be cloned. However, to increase
its intelligence, that brain has to start learning again. And this process can
be slow, because it is limited by the speed of experimentation.

I agree that the machine will probably be able to learn faster than humans,
but it's not at all clear how much faster. Also, we know little about human
intelligence. For example, Einstein's brain wasn't much bigger or faster than
an average human brain, yet he could make profound discoveries. It's not clear
to me that if you take an average brain, and make it faster/bigger, it will
suddenly be able to make scientific breakthroughs.

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Shivetya
Terminators did not have to be self aware or have desires to do their job,
killing. They simply had to follow a set of rules. Intelligence will merely
help them follow the rules when circumstances go beyond the originally coded
set of conditions.

The real threat of intelligent machines is the people who would use them. Not
everyone with ability acts rationally and why would we expect them to use such
ability correctly?

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JoeAltmaier
"In the 1940s, no one envisioned the smartphone, the Internet or GPS
satellites."

Except Arthur C Clarke, and the creator of Dick Tracey? So, no one but comic
strip creators and short story writers?

Or are smart phones substantially different from portable communicators? I
guess so. Nobody saw the 'fart app' from 1940.

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higherpurpose
I'm not as worried about _completely_ autonomous AI/robots, as I am about
_government-controlled_ "autonomous" robots, or even non-autonomous ones.

For instance, for someone in the Middle East, or any poor country being in war
with US, it would very much look like the Terminator war, if the US only sends
remote-controlled robots and drones to invade that country.

~~~
DanBC
I would prefer they use drones and robots that have some kind of targeting,
even though the targeting is imperfect, than they use cluster bombs on
civilian populations.

Especially when they make the unfortunate mistake of making the cluster
bomblets the same colour as air-dropped food packages.

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gonvaled
That would be true if it were not for the fact that targeting comfortably from
your desk makes it _much_ more likely that you do not care about killing
people. It is just a game, after all. And you are the good one!

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gonvaled
Side thought: what is the purpose of designing a humanoid robot? To make it
tolerable to humans.

What is the purpose of designing a _terrifying_ humanoid robot (even if it is
covered by fake nice-looking flesh)? None whatsoever!

Whatever shape terminator takes, it won't be the one in the movie ...

~~~
p1esk
A robot becomes much more capable if you can't tell it's a robot!

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rosser
I put exactly as much stock in predictions like this as I do in those that say
that Terminator-alikes _are_ coming.

Zero.

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throwawaymaroon
It might be comforting, and it might even be true, but this kind of cheerful
optimism is simply in bad taste in my view.

It's either hubristic or it's empty in content, in that we _know_ the promise
the future _might_ hold. Technology has been promising us the world for a
while now, but what we've gotten has actually been a shift towards dystopia.
Yeah, the future might be a paradise where you can virtually travel to see
relatives in Guam while also learning to cross-stitch, but Silicon Valley
thinking currently presents us with ad-infested crapware.

We don't actually need more cheerleading.

The kind of people that write this kind of article aren't the kind of people
that are actually working against the threats these writers want to ignore.

