Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent AI are wrong?

Re:Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent... by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @12:42PM (#21194167)

Depends on your definition of "singularity". Yes, life is very different from 170 years ago. We can communicate with people around the world with very little effort, almost instantly. We can cure a huge number of the diseases that killed people back then. We have electricity, which powers almost everything. We have cars and airplanes. Life is massively different.

But the singularity is defined as more than just massive change. It's defined as, essentially, an infinite rate of change. (Of course, the last 170 years may have felt infinite to someone in 1820, taken all together. But at no point did the change look infinite to someone living at the time.)

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Re:Experts who say we shouldn't worry about superintelligent... by XorNot on Tuesday October 08, 2019 @08:40PM (#21198802)

Well no, technically it's just the point of maximum change, where our existing model would trend towards infinity. In much the same way as this is a meaningless result in physics for a black hole (and hence a lot of new theory to try and bound that infinity) it's a meaningless prediction for the future as well.

But it is very much reasonable to posit that certain, seemingly achievable advances, do imply that predictive models of the future become meaningless beyond them.

In some areas I would contend we're circling that right now: I don't think anyone has a good model for what society looks like if deep fakes become accessible to the point of ubiquity for example (think: whole performance replacement in movies with moderate investments in computing power) or the like. We don't have a predictive model, really, for how society operates when "perfect" fakes are possible.

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