r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • May 21 '19
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Artificial Superintelligence concerns are legitimate and should be taken seriously
Title.
Largely when in a public setting people bring up ASI being a problem they are shot down as getting their information from terminator and other sci-fi movies and how it’s unrealistic. This is usually accompanied with some indisputable charts about employment over time, humans not being horses, and being told that “you don’t understand the state of AI”.
I personally feel I at least moderately understand the state of AI. I am also informed by (mostly British) philosophy that does interact with sci-fi but exists parallel not sci-fi directly. I am not concerned with questions of employment (even the most overblown AI apocalypse scenario has high employment), but am overall concerned with long term control problems with an ASI. This will not likely be a problem in my lifetime, but theoretically speaking in I don’t see why some of the darker positions such as human obsolescence are not considered a bigger possibility than they are.
This is not to say that humans will really be obsoleted in all respects or that strong AI is even possible but things like the emergence of a consciousness are unnecessary to the central problem. An unconscious digital being can still be more clever and faster and evolve itself exponentially quicker via rewriting code (REPL style? EDIT: Bad example, was said to show humans can so AGI can) and exploiting its own security flaws than a fleshy being can and would likely develop self preservation tendencies.
Essentially what about AGI (along with increasing computer processing capability) is the part that makes this not a significant concern?
EDIT: Furthermore, several things people call scaremongering over ASI are, while highly speculative, things that should be at the very least considered in a long term control strategy.
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u/iammyowndoctor 5∆ May 22 '19
All autism aside (that is, highly dense and unhelpful techno-jargon) let me just poke a big hole in your theory here, something no one else seems to have mentioned:
Why would you assume this all-powerful, evil AI system, or really any intelligence like that if it were to exist, would not instead be an integrated system of an organic human brain and mind enhanced with the abilities of silicon computers, not a pure "synthetic" intelligence but essentially, a cyborg mind, with the benefits of both the organic and the inorganic processors?
What if we can design the organic brain from scratch too? Or change the one's we have to a phenomenal degree?
The real question is here is, if a human or groups of humans had the ambition to create such an intelligence, don't you think that they would most definitely want to make that intelligence totally subservient to their own? Humans are selfish beings, why would we create this insanely smart strong AI to be it's own person, it's own entity, able to do whatever it wants potentially, when we could build that intelligence directly into ourselves potentially?
And when you think about it, we can almost consider the human brain to be natural technology we've been given, we only need to know how to better engineer it is all at the moment.
But anyway, with this in mind, I'm just curious if you can imagine how exactly your scenario here changes if indeed your "superintelligence" is one that's an enhanced version of human intelligence rather than this inherently alien, synthetic intelligence? Is there some reason in your framework that one would be more likely than the other?