
Elon Musk Predicts World War III - Bud
http://money.cnn.com/2017/09/04/technology/culture/elon-musk-ai-world-war/index.html
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observation
In my opinion AGI won't exist for quite a long time.

I also think for gigantic disruption in business or the military AGI is not
required - the right species of narrow AI coupled with human intervention
could be very effective.

Organizing a military invasion is one of the most difficult examples of
complex coordination. The USA already has used similar systems for the first
Iraq war. I suspect any nation that developed strategic agent systems to
augment human generals would have an advantage comparable to going from
infantry to motorized vehicles.

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ackfoo
The only problem with Elon's idea is that general AI does not exist and there
is no theoretical framework at present for developing it. Even limited AI is
mostly an over-hyped pile of crap.

This is comparable to Elon's plan to retire on Mars. There is so much basic
science to be done before it is feasible that it doesn't make sense to
promulgate it as if it is an imminent reality.

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pamqzl
At least we know how to get to Mars, and roughly what new technologies we'd
need for a colony. For AGI we have no clue even roughly how difficult it is.

My own suspicion (and hope) is that we will eventually find we're able to
build arbitrarily intelligent-at-some-task machines which avoid the
unnecessary burden of having their own consciousness. I suspect consciousness
is a nasty and inefficient evolutionary kludge rather than something actually
necessary to perform specific tasks.

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observation
It is surely true we have no idea how difficult constructing an AGI is. It
could require wholly new forms of hardware e.g. photon computation or
parallelism similar to the brain's neuron might be a prerequisite.

It is intriguing (I think) we know AGI is possible, I think we get there by
emulations/ems if in no other way. Civilizations might rise and fall before it
becomes feasible.

I expect consciousness to be a lower level product, the development of
language, reasoning, arithmetic, those are high level products. What's odd
about our efforts in computer science is that we are plausibly going to be
able to replace the higher functions without the lower ones such as mobility,
consciousness. Moravec's Paradox is a kind of deep truth, perhaps more than we
presently understand.

The other inkling is that there is something Lovecraftian about the brain or
intelligence in general. Consider how upsetting the atomic weapons were in the
20th, evolution theory in the 19th. I think it likely that venturing into the
interior will reveal a truth mankind shall feel is at least as horrifying,
probably more than giant bombs or genetic ancestry because it would register
as being inescapable.

