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Re:The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the p... by rndn on Thursday May 07, 2015 @10:55AM (#9505479)
I hate this argument just as much as I hate the one-word phrase "This". It's ignorant of the entire literature on superintelligence because it assumes that superintelligences will behave like cooperating humans. What people are actually concerned about are superintelligences which operate in completely alien ways and outperform even cooperating humans.
Re:The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the p... by coldtea on Thursday May 07, 2015 @11:14AM (#9505622)
>It's ignorant of the entire literature on superintelligence because it assumes that superintelligences will behave like cooperating humans.

That's at best a peripheral detail to the parallel the parent tries to draw.

Real AI might as well behave in any odd way -- the real point is that something like "more powerful than human intelligence" already exists, in the form of these aggregate entities.

Re:The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the p... by SCHiM on Thursday May 07, 2015 @11:49AM (#9505904)
Except they're not really superhumanly intelligent in the sense that AGI is superhumanly intelligent.

Sure a lawyers office is probably able to to tackle more cases that a single lawyer. A big multinational with momentum probably a lot more power than a single human.

But say you put 5 Einsteins together, before he invented his theories. Do you think that his discovery process would go 5x faster? Does the team-einstein suddenly get 5x smarter?

I think not, the point here being that while corporations are super-human, they are not in the same league as true AGI. And that containment of corporations/governments is not a good place to learn about the containment of true AGI.

Re:The Dawn of AI: How to ensure the promise outweighs the p... by coldtea on Thursday May 07, 2015 @11:56AM (#9505972)
>But say you put 5 Einsteins together, before he invented his theories. Do you think that his discovery process would go 5x faster? Does the team-einstein suddenly get 5x smarter?

Maybe not, but it sure as hell be more than "1 Einstein unit" smarter. Whether that's 1.2 or 5 depends on various elements, but it surely would beat a single Einstein, if not by anything else, by mere ability to break down a problem to study in parts and assign it to each Einstein.

I mean, that's the reason we have research teams with multiple researchers on the same team.