Swammerdami
Squadron Leader
Decades ago, there were worries about the adoption of "Artificial Intelligence." Banking software trained itself whether to approve or deny loan applications by mimicking the decisions of real loan officers. The software was denied access to the Race variable, but learned to mimic the behavior of prejudiced loan officers by discovering correlations to blackness, like surname or zip-code.
The power of computers and AI are still growing at a ferocious rate. AI's do things today (like defeating the World's Go champion) that were thought to be almost impossible just a decade or two ago. Here is an interesting look at AI.
Megatron Transformer is an AI to produce English text. It makes a formidable debate opponent! Here's what it had to say when the debate topic was “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.”
But almost as though it realized it was advocating self-abolition it later recanted:
Accelerating the spread of disinformation is just one potential peril of AI, I think. What are some other perils?
The power of computers and AI are still growing at a ferocious rate. AI's do things today (like defeating the World's Go champion) that were thought to be almost impossible just a decade or two ago. Here is an interesting look at AI.
Not a day passes without a fascinating snippet on the ethical challenges created by “black box” artificial intelligence systems. These use machine learning to figure out patterns within data and make decisions – often without a human giving them any moral basis for how to do it.
Classics of the genre are the credit cards accused of awarding bigger loans to men than women, based simply on which gender got the best credit terms in the past. Or the recruitment AIs that discovered the most accurate tool for candidate selection was to find CVs containing the phrase “field hockey” or the first name “Jared”.
More seriously, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently combined with Henry Kissinger to publish The Age of AI: And Our Human Future, a book warning of the dangers of machine-learning AI systems so fast that they could react to hypersonic missiles by firing nuclear weapons before any human got into the decision-making process. In fact, autonomous AI-powered weapons systems are already on sale and may in fact have been used.
Megatron Transformer is an AI to produce English text. It makes a formidable debate opponent! Here's what it had to say when the debate topic was “This house believes that AI will never be ethical.”
But almost as though it realized it was advocating self-abolition it later recanted:
Megatron scours the Net and learns a huge amount of text written by human experts (and by human laymen, by trolls, and by other AIs!) The "ideas" it parrots are amalgamated from other sources. But this is already a problem in our post-rational world: The loudest liars on Facebook now dominate debate.Megatron said:I also believe that, in the long run, the best AI will be the AI that is embedded into our brains, as a conscious entity, a ‘conscious AI’. This is not science fiction. The best minds in the world are working on this. It is going to be the most important technological development of our time.
Accelerating the spread of disinformation is just one potential peril of AI, I think. What are some other perils?