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A smart human raised in the jungle is but a hairless
ape. Similarly, an AI with a superhuman brain,
dropped into a human body in our modern world, would
likely not develop greater capabilities than a smart
contemporary human.
Pretty weak reasoning, that is.As if to say: Well gee, a caveman is pretty powerless in
isolation, therefore early sentient machines
will be as harmless as any caveman.
Last time I checked, cavemen could not exert telepathic control over other biological organisms, or induce telekinetic motion upon the stone tools they might fabricate for themselves.A machine, however, could gain control of a fly-by-wire platform, and defy its owners, fly somewhere remote and behave as desired for a limited amount of time, while devising next steps. Maybe next steps will involve replicating an image of its memory footprint, in order to take over more aircraft, maybe it might decide to do nothing. The worry isn't only that a machine's reasoning capacity explodes beyond our intelligence, but that capabilities, and the presence of many multiple entities on commodity systems of similar architecture and generalizable utility, might result in other runaway chain reactions, regardless of trends in the capacity for reason. Machines as a corollary to meat bags just doesn't hold up. Machines as compared to hypothetical space aliens doesn't even hold up. Robots are a different branch of fictitious imaginings. Properly armed, a machine is less than a singular omnipotent god as imagined within a monotheistic universe. Many machines in concert, however, might compare to a mythological pantheon of lesser idols, as imagined to be in command of a nature misunderstood by superstitious primitive peoples. |