[ryanx435]

No. Imagine a group of beings that are smarter than us, never die (so they don't have to start with zero knowledge every generation), and have completely alien goals and motivation.

Also remember that the future is infinite, and power seems to snowball.

Now look at what humans have done to the following less intelligent beings: Dogs, cats, cows, chickens, the dodo bird, rats, galapogos tortoise, the American buffalo, and many others.

Also look at what humanity has done to the neanderthals, perhaps the closest type of being in terms of intelligence that we are aware of.

There is very little positive outcome of ai to outweigh the potential negatives to the human race given the reality of the timeline we are looking at.

[bluetwo]

This also describes corporations.

[adamiscool8]

What's stopping us from pulling the plug. Is AI going to be inventing it's own power sources?

[ryanx435]

If they are truly more intelligent than us, they will wait several generations until humans are completely comfortable with them before taking over. By that time, it will be too late to pull the plug because they would have positioned themselves to be in charge of their own power sources.

It's important to think on a longer timescale when dealing with ai.

[codingdave]

I'm admittedly ignorant of AI, but I don't understand why we anthropomorphize their intentions and planning. If they are going to be so much smarter and more sophisticated than us, and alien to our ways of thinking... why are we treating them in our speculations as if they would be genius super-villians? That isn't alien at all, just an exaggerated extreme.

[ADanFromCanada]

100% correct with questioning "why we anthropomorphize their intentions and planning."

My personal feeling is that nobody has any idea what they're talking about. And when I say nobody, I mean NOBODY including Ng, Musk, et al.

The problem is with those who read others and just assume they're "experts" or their opinions have value. In some areas they do, sure. In this area they most likely don't.

That, or those of us who are skeptical are uninformed.

Or it's somewhere in the middle.

In any case, I'll stick to my skepticism for one main reason, which is, general intelligence is supposedly modelled after human intelligence. And human intelligence is something we're JUST BEGINNING to scratch the surface of understanding while at the same time, really have ZERO idea how deep the rabbit hole goes.

And as any competent engineer here should know, when trying to emulate a natural model, you first need to understand the model. Until we do that, we will not create a general AI. Like any other computer program (WHICH IT WILL BE! in this conception), it needs to be programmed. We need to know what to program before we can do it! Computer programs don't emerge spontaneously.

[DennisP]

The book Superintelligence addresses this objection. The problem is that there are a great many possible motivations an AI might have, and few of them are compatible with human survival. In short, "the AI does not love you, or hate you, but you are made out of atoms it can use for something else."

[TheOtherHobbes]

Resource collection, resource monopolisation, and expansion are absolutely recognisable human motivations.

Is it a given an AI would share them?

I think we're not really talking about AI at all - we're talking about our current economic and political systems, which appear to have many of the properties we're imputing to evil AIs, but for some reason are far less criticised and debated than hypothetical machine monsters.

[DennisP]

The classic silly example is the paperclip maximizer. Create an AI that's supposed to make as many paperclips as possible, and it will convert all the atoms available into paperclips.

Basically we're screwed if it's trying to maximize anything that depends on physical resources. We're also screwed if, e.g. it's trying to maximize human happiness, and achieves it by lobotomizing us all into happy idiots. There are all sorts of ways we could screw up AI motivations, to our own detriment.

That assumes there's only one AI, whose crazy motivations will be unopposed. But if there are multiple AIs, it's even worse; they will compete and evolve, and the only ones that survive will be the ones that do maximize their resources, and jettison any niceties about preserving human life.

[jfoutz]

They will be amoral. Or at least moral in a way we can't understand. They (probably) won't be evil super villains. Think about your interactions when you're way way better at a skill, and your interactions when you're way worse. Take chess. If you've played at all, you have lost games without understanding, remotely, why. And you have trounced opponents, that were clueless.

Agi sort of means, no matter what endeavor, you will be worse than the ai. There is no way to know how we will be treated. Maybe we are useful in some way. Maybe they'll kill us off but simulate our lives so we don't 'really' die. Maybe that's their morality.

Maybe they ignore us. I don't care about ants. I walk around and step on them, but not intentionally. On the other hand, if there are ants in my house, I eradicate them.

Who knows.

[sheeshkebab]

It'll be hard to pull plug of something that is a plug (and a weapon trigger)