The only thing which keeps you alive is the unwillingness of your neighbors and those who surround you to kill you. The law might punish them afterward, but extensive research has shown that it provides no disuasion to people who are actually willing to kill someone.
A military AI being used to wipe out large numbers of people is exactly as 'inevitable' as the weapons we already have being used to wipe out large numbers of people. The exact same people will be making the decisions and setting the goals. In that scenario, the AI is nothing but a fancy new gun, and I don't see any reason to think it would be used differently in most cases. With drones we have seen the CIA, a civilian intelligence agency, waging war on other nations without any legal basis, but that's primarily a political issue and the fact that it can be done in pure cowardice, without risking the life of those pulling the trigger, which I think is a distinct problem from AI.
Saying "humans have spied on each other for centuries" is nothing but a distraction for how far beyond what should be legal mass surveillance is, because it makes it so easy to have everything on everyone all the time. It's nothing like pass targeted surveillance. If anything it's much more like Stasi-style surveillance, but on a much bigger and more indepth scale. And we already know how dangerous such surveillance is with the wrong person leading a country.
When war becomes easy and cheap (to the attacker), you'll just end up having more of it. It doesn't help the the military industrial complex constantly lobbies for it either.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240531119041067045765832...
As far as predicting the future goes, I can't.
Killing people when neither they nor their friends can retaliate is easier. Being able to say do X or I kill you, without the other party having a defense that will even inconvenience you gives you a shitton of power.
Military AI would basically be nukes without the fall-out or collateral damage.
Some people find that scary, and it may seem like a shaky thing to stake your life on. But, firstly, you have no choice. Secondly, it works for billions of people and has kept us safe for tens of thousands of years. Even after we developed the knowledge, tools, and ability to kill millions at the push of a button.
AI doesn't change this it just makes it easier.
What would we do if a drone made by a no-name manyfacturer dropped some bombs in Times Square? Who would we blame when someone uses AI to actually sow social mistrust and subvert our existing systems?
Well, for the rest of the world, state actors wreaking havoc with drones and AI with inpunity is already a problem.
It doesn't seem substantively different from destroying a target via long-range missile or via a laser-guided bomb dropped from a human pilot flying thousands of feet over head. All three are impersonal ways of killing other human beings from a mostly-safe distance – especially in our modern asymmetrical engagements.
I agree that it feels gross to imagine a soldier sitting in a skyscraper pulling a trigger to kill people half way round the world, and it feels odd for someone to kill people in the morning and go home to sleep their bed that night, again and again, day after day. But military commanders have effectively been doing that since we've had faster-than-horse battlefield communication. So, I'm not convinced this is some brave new world of impersonal killing.
HOWEVER, I get the problem with drone warfare. Drones provide commanders with several benefits (no human casualties on "our" side, generally great accuracy, relatively low cost, etc.) that let them scale up the killing with minimal public outcry. This seems a real problem.
I guess my point is that the problem is not drones. The problem is killing so many people with so little oversight and so little apparent concern – whether by Cruise missile, drone, nanoswarm, T2, whatever.
I'd reword your sentence to be: "how we collectively became accepting of our governments casually killing our fellow humans half way round the world is remarkable"
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/a_chilling_new_post_traumati...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/28/life-us-drone-...
In fact, the only reason such drone attacks don't happen, or why people hadn't been casually blowing each other up for the past five decades with explosives attached to RC cars / planes is that in general, people are nice to each other. There's plenty of tools out there for dedicated people to wreck havoc in populated areas. Such people simply are very, very rare.
To be fair, it's a small step from effective AI that doesn't malfunction, to an AI over which humans have lost control. It's precisely one vaguely specified command away in fact, and humans are quite excellent at being imprecise.
A rogue AI's "oxygen" is electrical power, which is really kind of fragile. The emergency power for most datacenters won't last more than a few days without replenishing diesel fuel.
For a distributed threat, take out fiber with backhoes. Happens every day now, we just happen to repair it. Stop fixing cuts and it's "Dave, my mind is going...".
Of course you have to deal with the AI making contracts with maintenance crews of its own, and do all this before it hardens its power supplies. But our current infrastructure is definitely not hardened against low to moderate effort.
Sure, but nobody thinks AI is a threat right now. They're claiming AI could be a threat in the near future, which is entirely reasonable.
And with battery tech improving steadily, and solar now becoming cheaper than fossil fuels, it becomes progressively easier to depend solely on disconnected, distributed power generation which is resistant to exactly the kind of attack you're suggesting.
We can certainly argue the probabilities of such an outcome, but I hope we can all agree that it's not outright implausible. Which doesn't even count the dangers of AI for our economy, which are even more plausible. So overall, AI has the potential for much harm (and much good of course).
Antennas and solar panels can be smashed, but they can also be protected, since they would be mostly concentrated in one area.
Throw in EMP hardened circuitry, and things get a bit harder to destroy.
The Matrix of the original film was originally envisioned as a bootstrap AI, in which the machines were farming humans for their collective processing power - and the simulation that was the Matrix was integral to this purpose, as it served as an operating system for the imprisoned human minds. However, the film's backers felt that concept was too complex for the average moviegoer, and forced the change to "humans = batteries."
But, the canonical Matrix would be too inefficient to actually work. The amount of energy needed to maintain a human being over the course of an entire lifetime far surpasses the amount of energy that can be harvested as body heat - and adding some kind VR simulation over that just to keep people who are already physically trapped from "escaping" would just a pointless waste of resources.
However, that depends on the people between the president and nuclear launch being decent human beings that care about law and order and proper procedure. You need to look at the system, not just individuals.
Alternatively, let's say someone came to power who genuinely believed nuking Russia was a good option. Rather than order a launch on the spot, what they'd actually do is gradually build a case, appoint pliable or similarly thinking people to key positions, get the launch protocols revised, engineer a geopolitical crisis by provoking Russia and drive events towards a situation in which a nuclear launch seems like a legitimate option.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/11/18/the-president-and-...
You might say "sure, but there are people who have to actually execute those orders." But give the Pentagon some credit--those are people who have been systematically selected because they follow orders quickly and without question. For example, consider what happened to Harold Hering when it became obvious that he was not one of those people.
Which is why President Obama pivoted to a drone war in areas like Pakistan. Scores of Pakistani civilians are killed on a regular basis for crimes no worse than standing next to a tall bearded man or attending the funeral of a neighbour. The American public has no issues with this because hey, it's cheap to deploy the drones and no American lives are ever in jeopardy. And to be fair about it, apart from the high collateral damage, the Drone War in Pakistan is generally considered to be successful at inhibiting the Pakistani Taliban.
This Drone War was the first successful war that we've seen fought without boots on the ground. It's likely that we'll see many more like this as on-board AI improves.
In Nuremberg we developed a way to think about this: people outside the central circles of power have a tremendous amount of pressures they are considering. It's definitely the case that some are sadistic and horrible, but more are just following orders and trying to get by as best they can, and punishing them for war crimes is not appropriate.
The other side of that coin is that it isn't realistic to expect soldiery en masse to resist illegal orders. It's always more complicated than that.
And then there's always that soldier ready to denounce his camarads for having raped some poor Vietnamese women who had nothing to do with the war itself. Why risk such a PR disaster which might see your funding cut when you can use robots instead? Warzone robots don't snitch on their fellow robots in front of the press and they don't rape, they're only build to kill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_Principles#Principle...
Actually, the unwillingness of the Red Army to do any more invasions was arguably the precipitating factor in the fall of the Soviet empire. In 1988, Gorbachev gave a speech to the Warsaw pact meeting where he told them that the Brezhnev doctrine was no more. No socialist government would be able any longer to count on Russian aid in putting down popular uprisings. A year later, the empire crumbled. Of course, it wasn't the soldiers per se who refused, but the generals who were afraid of the potential mutinies (and the occasional actual ones).
And economic problems were a big incentive for everyone in charge to step back from wars. For country's with a strong economy there would be little incentive to stop, especially if AI makes war cheaper.
We speak of Nazis frequnetly, but consider what Curtis LeMay did in war and prepared to do after the war.
AI and robots give plausible deniability and reduce the number of witnesses. They also make suicide raids more practical.
What horrible things to you have in mind that armies have not already done?
Or American death squads in Afghanistan. Might as well call them rape and death squads.
What about Guantanamo?
Srebrenica?
Should I go on?
How unenlightened and naive are you?
Currently there's a high cost to it. War is very expensive; even the richest country in the history of the world, the US, doesn't want to bear the costs. And it requires persuading masses of soldiers to go along with it.
Roboticized warfare might eliminate those constraints.
Anyone power that has significant leverage over another power already has that ability.
A bunch of 'super smart evil AI robots' will not be able to physical deter/control 500 million Europeans - but - a small Army of them would be enough to control the powers that be, and from there on in it trickles down.
Much the same way the Soviets controlled Poland et. al. with only small installations. The 'legitimate threat of violent domination' is all that is needed.
So - many countries already have the power to do those things to many, many others via conventional weapons and highly trained soldiers. That risk is already there. Think about it: a decent soldier today is already pretty much a 'better weapon' than AI will be for a very, very long time. And it' not that hard to make decent soldiers.
The risk for 'evil AI robots' is that a non-state, inauthentic actor - like a terrorist group, militia etc. gets control of enough of them to do project power.
The other risk I think, is that given the lack of bloodshed, states may employ them without fear of political repercussions at home. We see this with drones. If Obama had to do a 'seal team 6' for every drone strike, many, many of those guys would have died, and people coming home on body bags wears on the population. Eventually the war-fever fades and they want out.
Whatever goals the AI has, it will certainly be better at achieving them if it can stay alive. And it will be more likely to stay alive if there are no humans around to interfere. Now you might say, why don't we just hardcode in a goal to the AI like "solve aging, and also don't hurt anyone"? And ensure that the AI's method of achieving its goals won't have terrible unintended consequences? Oh, and the AI's goals can't change? This is called the AI control problem, and nobody's been able to solve it yet. It's hard to come up with good goals for the AI. It's hard to translate those goals into math. It's hard to prevent the AI from misinterpreting or modifying its own goals. It's hard to work on AI safety when you don't know what the first strong AI will look like. It's hard to prove with 99.999% certainty that your safety measures will work when you can't test them.
Things will not turn out okay if the first organization to develop strong AI is not extremely concerned about AI risk, because the default is to get AI control wrong, the same way the default is for planets to not support life.
My counterpoint to the risks of more limited AI is that limited AI doesn't sound as scary when you rename it statistical software, and probably won't have effects much larger in magnitude than the effects of all other kinds of technology combined. Limited AI already does make militaries more effective, but most of the problem comes from the fact that these militaries exist, not from the AI. It's hard for me to imagine an AI carrying out a military operation without much human intervention that wouldn't pose a control problem.
--------- Edited in response to comment--------
These are not bad arguments you are making, or hard ones to get behind. There are just added layers of complexity that the author would like us to think about. Things like how we could actually 'hard-code' a limit or a governor on certain types of motivation. Or what 'motivation' is even driven by at all.
I think you'll enjoy the originally linked article. It's got a lot to consider.
This is a sequence of deductive reasoning that you brought up there. Quite natural for human beings, but why would the paperclip maximiser be equipped with it?
Seriously, the talks specifically argues most of the points that you brought up.
Shit is complicated yo. Complicated like the world is - not complicated like an algorithm is. Those are entirely different dimensions of complicated that are in fact incomparable.
This scenario I agree with. For instance: the AI decides that it doesn't want to live on this planet and consumes our star for energy, or exploits our natural resources leaving us with none.
The whole AI war scenario is highly unlikely. As per the article, the opponents of AI are all regarded as prime examples of human intelligence - many of them have voiced opposition to war and poverty (by virtue of being philanthropists). Surely something more intelligent than humans would be even less inclined to wage war. Furthermore, every argument against AI posits that humans are far more important than they really are. How much time of day do you spend thinking about bacteria in the Marianas Trench?
> AI control
My argument is with exception to this scenario. By attaching human constraints to AI, you are intrinsically attaching human ideologies to it. This may limit the reach of the superintelligence - which means that we create a machine that is better at participating in human-level intelligence than humans are. Put simply, we'd plausibly create an AI rendition of Trump.
The default mode for a machine would be to not care if people died, just as we don't care about most lower life forms.
> Furthermore, every argument against AI posits that humans are far more important than they really are. How much time of day do you spend thinking about bacteria in the Marianas Trench?
Exactly.
Which is why worrying about ourselves in a world with superintelligence is not wasted effort.
The extreme difference in productive abilities of superintelligence, vs a human population who's labor and intelligence has been devalued into obsolescence, suggests there will be serious unrest.
Serious unrest in a situation where a few have all the options tends to lead to extermination, as is evident every time an ant colony attempts to raid a home for food crumbs.
The AI's might not care whether we live or not, but they won't put up with us causing them harm or blocking their access to resources, even if we are doing it not to hurt them but only to survive.
Why would this ever apply? We're building them, not picking them out of a hat.
Right now we're just discarding all the ones that are defective, at a stupendously high rate as we train neural nets.
I can't speak to what method would generate the first strong AI, but I suspect the overall process - if not the details - will be similar. Training, discarding, training, discarding, testing, and so on. And the first truly strong AI will likely just be the first random assemblage of parts that passes those tests.
Either way, the randomness in initial conditions means the solution found is one of many different solutions that could have been found, and depending on the problem, different initial conditions can result in very different solutions even on the same data.
You know, you don't need to go that far. You know what a great way to kill a particular group of people is? Well, let's take a look at what a group of human military officers decided to do (quoting from a paper of Elizabeth Anscombe's, discussing various logics of action and deliberation):
""" Kenny's system allows many natural moves, but does not allow the inference from "Kill everyone!" to "Kill Jones!". It has been blamed for having an inference from "Kill Jones!" to "Kill everyone!" but this is not so absurd as it may seem. It may be decided to kill everyone in a certain place in order to get the particular people that one one wants. The British, for example, wanted to destroy some German soldiers on a Dutch island in the Second World War, and chose to accomplish this by bombing the dykes and drowning everybody. (The Dutch were their allies.) """
There's a footnote:
""" Alf Ross shews some innocence when he dismisses Kenny’s idea: ‘From plan B (to prevent overpopulation) we may infer plan A (to kill half the population) but the inference is hardly of any practical interest.’ We hope it may not be. """
It's not an ineffective plan.
Machine learning advances are predicated on the internet, will grow the internet and will become what we already ought to know we are. A globe spanning hyper intelligence working to make more intelligence at break neck pace.
Somewhere along this accelerating continuum of intelligence, we need to consciously decide to make thing awesome. So people aim to build competent self driving cars, that way fewer people die of drunk driving or boredom. Let's keep trying. Keep trying to give without thought of getting something in return. Try to make the world you want to live in. Take a stand against things that are harmful to your body (in the large sense and small sense) and your character. Live long and prosper!!!
And in an almost miraculous result, we've managed not to annihilate each other with them so far.
> Income inequality is already rising at a breathtaking pace.
In the US, yes, but inequality is lessening globally.
> The internet has given birth to history's most powerful surveillance system and tools of propaganda.
It has also given birth to a lot of good things, some that are mentioned in a sibling comment.
This has been done many times by human-run militaries; would AI make it worse somehow?
Groups of humans acting collectively can look a lot like an "AI" from the right perspective. Corporations focused on optimizing their profit spend a huge amount of collective intelligence to make this single number go up, often at the expense of the rest of society.
Solders in developed countries no longer want to die en masse.
That's why I found the "outside arguments" here equally important and compelling.
> The outside view doesn't care about content, it sees the form and the context, and it doesn't look good.
If it sounds like and acts like a cult, why should we treat it any differently from a cult? Even if the people in it are all very smart, wealthy, well-dressed, and appear very rational, they're still preaching the end of the world on a certain date. All of those groups have only one thing in common: they're all wrong.
The best rebuttals to all this are the least engaging.
"Dude, are you telling me you want to build Skynet?"
That's not to say that his general premise is wrong, but it's hard for me to take it seriously when his rebuttals are this weak.
Occasionally the crazies are right. Remember when the idea that the NSA was recording everyone's emails was paranoid conspiracy theory talk, except turns out they were actually doing this the whole time.
The fact that the world hasn't ended tells us virtually nothing about how likely the end of the world is, for the simple reason that if the world had ended we wouldn't be here to talk about it. So we can't take it as evidence, at least, not conclusive evidence. Note also that the same argument works just as well against global warming as it does against AI risk.
Turn it around. Suppose there was a genuinely real risk of destroying the world. How would you tell? How would you distinguish between the groups that had spotted the real danger and the run-of-the-mill end-of-the-world cults?
I wouldn't call suspecting the government of surveilling people "crazy." Claiming you know the timeframe for the apocalypse with precision is different. I am from North Carolina -- try a Google Image search for "May 21, 2011."
Ray Kurzweil believes he will never die. Balancing content with form and context, what we have here is clearly an atheistic, scientist version of "May 21, 2011."
No, I remember the time that we'd known there were various signal intelligence programs operated by the US government for decades, and it was just a matter of guessing what the next and biggest one would be.
I think that's beside the point. Why would the "aristocracy" owning the factories care about money, when they have all the goods (or can trade for them with other aristos)?
It's not like they need money to pay other people (the destitute masses are useless to them). With their only inherent "capital", --the ability to work-- made worthless by automation, the destitute masses have no recourse-- they get slowly extinguished, until only a tiny fraction of humanity is left.
In this scenario, they only need enough factories to meet the needs of themselves and the other aristocrats. Which means there will be massive demand for goods for the common people, which means there will be jobs for people. The only way your scenario works is if the aristocracy produces enough goods for the entire world cheaper than anyone else can, but also making them too expensive for anyone to afford. But that would mean the factories are producing enough goods for everyone despite the fact to very few can actually buy them. Piles of good wasting away outside the factory. The only reason to do this is if the aristocracy was malicious: trying to hurt the rest of humanity despite the fact that there is no real benefit.
That could still end up taking all of the planet's resources, if enough aristocrats try to maximize their military capacity to protect themselves or play some kind of planet-wide game of Risk, or if they create new goods that require absolutely insane amounts of resources.
I mean, ultimately, the issue is that the common people have nothing of value to trade except for resources that they already own, and no way to accumulate things of value. Because of this, the aristocrats will never have an incentive to sell anything to them: if they had any use for the common people's resources, they would just take them. So I think there are three possible outcomes:
* The aristocrats' needs become more and more sophisticated until they need literally the whole planet to meet them, destroying the common people in the process.
* The aristocrats provide to the common people, no strings attached, out of humanism (best case scenario).
* The aristocrats take what they need and let the common people fend off for themselves, creating a parallel economy. In that case the common people would have jobs, although they would live in constant worry that the aristocrats take more land away from them.
It has happened before.
That means the vast majority of people will have no means of income or resources, unless they appropriate the use land or resources they don't own in a shadow economy.
But the appropriation of resources is not likely to be perceived positively by those that own the resources, given that ownership is the only thing separating the rich from the destitute.
If you as a manufacturer move to a jobless production system, you gain net margin.
If everybody moves to jobless production, the topline demand shrinks radically.
Yet, for each individual mfg, the optimal choice is jobless production (aka, "loot the commons", aka "defect").
At that point, the economy will continue to grow, despite what will seem like an economic disaster to most of the human race.
This happens all the time to other species today, where humans suck up all the resources leaving incumbent creatures to die off.
- a military AI in the hands of bad actors that does bad stuff with it intentionally.
- a badly coded runaway AI that destroys earth.
These two failure modes are not mutually exclusive. When nukes were first developed, the physicists thought there is a small but plausible chance, around 1%, that detonating a nuke would ignite the air and blow up the whole world.
Let's imagine we live in a world where they're right. Let's suppose somebody comes around and says, "let's ignore the smelly and badly dressed and megalomanic physicists and their mumbo jumbo, the real problem is if a terrorist gets their hands on one of these and blows up a city."
Well, yes, that would be a problem. But the other thing is also a problem. And it would kill a lot more people.
I make lots of money right now completely via the internet and I am not even breaking laws. It is just probable that an AI at our present level of intelligence could very quickly amass a fortune and leverage it to control everything that matters without humanity even being aware of the changeover.
Ultimately, AI is neither necessary nor sufficient for the powerful to kill the less powerful.
And if it's powerful people trying to build hard military AI, they probably aren't reading LessWrong to understand how to ensure their AI plays nice anyway.
If we want to grow to adulthood as a species and manage to colonize the cosmos, we need to pass _every_ skill challenge. If in 50 years there'll be a risk of unfriendly superintelligence and it'll have needed 40 years of run-up prep work to make safe, then it will do us absolutely zero good to claim that we instead concentrated on risk of military AI and hey, we got this far, right?
Considering the amount of human utility on the line, "one foot short of the goal" is little better than "stumbled at the first hurdle".
I also tend to agree with Maciej that the argument for focusing on the A probability of B is rescued by making the AI threat seem even worse with appeals to human utility like "but what if, instead of simply killing off humanity, they decided to enslave us or keep us alive forever to administer eternal punishment..." either.
But most resources are not spent on risk mitigation. The question of what priority to give risk mitigation naturally (should) go up the more credible existential risks are identified.
http://voxeu.org/article/parametric-estimations-world-distri...
superintelligence of a military AI is worrisome, but superintelligence of a cantankerous thinking is quite reassuring...
Kind of like what we're already seeing now in Courts, and kind of how NSA and CIA's own algorithms for assigning a target are still far less than 99% accurate.
The real AI risk isn't an all-powerful savant which misinterprets a command to "make everyone on Earth happy" and destroys the Earth. It's a military AI that correctly interprets a command to kill a particular group of people, so effectively that its masters start thinking about the next group, and the next. It's smart factories that create a vast chasm between a new, tiny Hyperclass and the destitute masses... AI is hardly the only technology powerful enough to turn dangerous people into existential threats. We already have nuclear weapons, which like almost everything else are always getting cheaper to produce. Income inequality is already rising at a breathtaking pace. The internet has given birth to history's most powerful surveillance system and tools of propaganda.