THE MASTER ALGORITHM: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos (2015)
HUMAN COMPATIBLE: Artificial Intelligence and the Problem of Control by Stuart Russell (2019)
NEW LAWS OF ROBOTICS: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale (2020)
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A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
==Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics.
The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.
==William Gibson
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Artificial intelligence presents us, the human race, with a problem: How do we control an entity that is more intelligent than we are, that we don’t fully understand, that’s not fully under our control, and that can enhance its own powers?
Computers were once logic made manifest. They could perform calculations with a speed, accuracy and complexity beyond the power of any unaided human operator, based on the ability of their circuitry – the AND, OR, NOR and NAND gates – to duplicate the work of logicians and mathematicians.
The computer programs were purely mechanical, purely deterministic based on their circuitry, completely understandable in principle if you delved deeply enough.
Today’s most advanced artificial intelligence programs are far beyond that. They can reason empirically and not just logically. They can learn on their own without human input. They can reprogram themselves and develop capabilities their human masters did not plan on.
Computer expert friends of mine say that the ever-evolving, ever-changing AIs are more like organisms or ecological systems than they are like machines.
But they are not sentient. They don’t think their own thoughts. They don’t have desires and emotions as we do—at least not insofar as we humans can tell.
AI is so embedded in our society that few of us would want to shut it down altogether, or even know how to do it if we wanted to.
If you’re an urban, middle-class American, AIs are involved in almost every aspect of your life.
AIs determine the placement of products on supermarket shelves. AIs correct your grammar when you use word processors. AIs diagnose illnesses. AIs help prospecting companies find oil, gas and mineral deposits. AIs make social media and on-line games more engaging and addictive.
AIs help marketers plan advertising campaigns, politicians plan political campaigns, stockbrokers plan investment strategies and generals and admirals plan military strategy. They can beat grand masters at chess and Go. They confer so many competitive advantages that it is hard to imagine them being rolled back.
This may be just the beginning.
The goal of top AI researchers is artificial general intelligence (AGI), or super intelligence. This would be an AI that can reason as humans do and perceive the world as humans do, in terms of sights and sounds, but a million times more powerfully, and to be able to do it not for specialized purposes, as current AIs do, but for any human purpose.
Such an AI would not necessarily be a conscious, living being, but it most likely would be a convincing imitation of one, and not all computer scientists rule out the possibility of actual sentience.
If biological life and consciousness somehow emerged by themselves in a mysterious way from complex organic molecules, maybe another form of life and consciousness—not necessarily one we could recognize—could emerge from complex electronic processes.
Be that as it may, a powerful force would be unleashed into the human environment, a force with huge potential for both good and evil, which humans would not fully understand and could not fully control.
What we would need to worry about is not a real-life version of Skynet. computers deciding to replace human beings. AIs are altruists. They don’t have goals or drives save those that are programmed into them.
The danger would be unintended consequences, the story of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice writ large. Whether that is an immediate danger, a long-range danger or an imaginary danger, I do not know.