Re:Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind fo...
by f_salmon on Monday January 27, 2014 @02:36AM
(#7129250)
Also called "a self-fulfilling prophecy"; you make something happen by the simple statement "it will happen".
It's also a smart move for your career: You can create your own job and attract lots of funding for your research, or sell your business for a lot.
Re:Google to Buy Artificial Intelligence Startup DeepMind fo...
by eli_gottlieb on Monday January 27, 2014 @03:30AM
(#7129384)
It sounds like a piece of fearmongering nastiness until you think of it in terms of mathematics rather than psychology. A so-called "artificial intelligence" is just an extremely sophisticated active, online learning agent designed to maximize some utility function or (equivalently) minimize some loss function. There's no term in a loss function for "kill all humans", but neither is there one for "do what humans want", or better yet, "do what humans would want if they weren't such complete morons half the time".
A lot of the singularity people think that superhuman AI in inevitable whether they work on it or not, but if the first AI isn't a friendly one (as opposed to a paperclip-optimizer that happily turns the planet in paperclips) then you don't get a second chance.