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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  3113 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Threat from Artificial Intelligence not just Hollywood fantasy

You're annoying me (you're annoying the shit out of me) because you keep dodging the question:

HOW IS THE AI GOING TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD?

Your answer has been nineteen flavors of "take it on faith."

NO.

ANSWER THE QUESTION.

Everyone's response - all the people who are so hopped up on malevolent AIs taking over the world - is always "take it on faith."

NO. ANSWER THE QUESTION.

Let's take your WTC example. Yep. It took ten guys to crash a plane into the WTC. But you know what? It only took one guy to say "here's how you'd crash a plane into the WTC." His name was Tom Clancy, and the book he predicted it in was a NYT Bestseller. See, it's a whole lot easier to imagine the attack than to carry out the attack yet the best imagining of an AI attack we've got so far is "well, they could hack traffic signals."

Except that wouldn't even work in the US. Which you didn't even know. Because thesis or not, you haven't really thought about this. Worse, you're refusing to.

So I guess where we're at is that you're insisting we're one Singularity away from Skynet tanks crushing skulls and I'm pointing out that we're one Singularity away from traffic jams in your hood but not mine because apparently the US takes traffic more seriously than Germany. I really don't know how many more ways you can say "use your imagination, don't make me prove a point" and I can say "you can't prove it because it can't be proven."

So I'll say this:

11 days ago, my point was

    In popular conception, the distance between "machines that think" and "A T-1000 with a shotgun" is about 1/2 a faith-leap. The basic assumption is the minute we've achieved "artificial intelligence" (which nobody bothers to define), it will Skynet the fuck out of everything and it'll be all over for America and apple pie.

That point hasn't been changed. It hasn't even been challenged. Your counter-arguments have been getting more and more feeble. I'm really not sure what either of us get out of continuing.





hyperflare  ·  3113 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I don't think it'S that easy to have a plan for ending the world. It'S not something you can seriously expect someone alone to do in a few minutes. It's complicated. But just because it's too complicated for me doesn't mean it's impossible.

Reiterating my point from above, your 200 police cars which can override a traffic light for a few minutes won't help you fix 2000 red traffic lights. You can still hack the traffic lights. You will still have traffic jams. But whatever.

The biggest danger from AI is that it accidentally destroys the world because it wasn't taught to value it. (Popular scenarios are using the earth for raw material for a dyson sphere or something). Obviously those scenarios make very different assumptions about the state of the world. That'S what I'm worried about. I'm not worried about the singularity happening and creating skynet, because who the fuck would create a malevolent AI?

Again, I would like reiterate that in order to imagine how a superintelligent AI would destroy the world, we'd have to ask one itself! right now our discussion is just "how would hyperflare fuck up the world if he could hack anything", which is so far off the mark it's not even sad anymore.

kleinbl00  ·  3113 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Dude. 55 million people lost power for half a day. The world did not come to an end. Yet you're still harping on traffic lights.

Natural disasters destroy infrastructure regularly. Bad things happen all the time. Hell - the Soviets had their entire nuclear arsenal on automatic and humans still managed to prevent nuclear war.

There's still this assumption in your thinking that AI will have the ability to destroy the world. You've done nothing to back that up. You keep waving it away with platitudes like "just because it's too complicated for me doesn't mean it's impossible."

Nobody's saying it's impossible. But "possible" is a long fucking walk from "probable" and three connecting flights and a layover from "inevitable." And your best efforts - EVERYONE'S BEST EFFORTS - have gotten us no closer than "they could produce false data."

False data doesn't end the world. It lowers productivity. "Lower productivity" isn't "the threat from artificial intelligence."