Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by redblacktree 3040 days ago
And our species will have birthed another. That's pretty damn cool in itself.
1 comments

We want our children to surpass our own success. I don't see why a hypothetical race of artificial brain-gods would be any different, as long as they propagate our values and don't crush us.
That theme is explored in Hans Moravec's books: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec "In his 1988 book Mind Children (ISBN 0674576187), Moravec outlines Moore's law and predictions about the future of artificial life. Moravec outlines a timeline and a scenario in this regard,[6][7] in that the robots will evolve into a new series of artificial species, starting around 2030-2040.[8]"

Obviously, it's a complex topic with a lot of opinions. I spent time in Hans' lab in the mid-1980s. What concerned me is that, in our human ignorance and greed and hubris, we might instead get robotic cockroaches that wipe out humanity and then fade away. Or if we did get strong AIs they might wipe out humanity without noticing, and only a long time later reflect on their origins perhaps with regret.

I left robotics and AI in the late 1980s. That was after creating one of the first simulations of self-replicating robots (on a Symbolics) -- which accidentally turned cannibalistic until I added a sense of smell to avoid eating offspring. Someone from DARPA has also literally patted me on the back as a symposium on AI and Simulation where I presented on that simulation and told me "Keep up the good work". Although I was not sure if that was from my saying how easy it was to make creatures that were destructive (even if they were just striving towards an ideal) or my also saying how we should learn more about designing them to be cooperative.

I've since spent much of my time and energy based on the premise that our direction out of any singularity may have a lot to do with out direction going into one -- so we should make the Earth a place that works better for more people right now. Thus a garden simulator to help people learn to grow their own food (also needed in space habitats), and ways for people to share their stories (which help shape the values of the next generation), and aspiring towards better knowledge management tools in other ways, and creating ways for people to design an abundant tomorrow (like evolutionary arts of plant breeding and music breeding), and exploring alternative economic philosophy like on five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft). And also boiling it all down to my sig, which I hope AIs read and take to heart someday: "The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity."

Thanks for wanting to make the world a better place and not help progress mutually assured destruction via weaponized AI r&d
> as long as they propagate our values and don't crush us.

There's a paradox here I think. If they propagate our values, then there's a very good chance that they will crush us. How do more "primitive" people fare in our modern world? Where's neanderthal? What about our primate cousins? Or even the other animal species in general? If AI really share our values, at best we might end up in a zoo.

Yeah, I agree with this. We likely die to the AI, but that's ok.