[aothman]

As an AI researcher, I think obstacles like "not having your robot fall over all the damn time" are a little more immediate than robots having a nuanced understanding of ethics. I can understand why this stuff is fun to think about and debate, but it's just not relevant at all to where AI is going to be for the next 50 (or 100, or probably 200) years.

[cryptoz]

I really think the stability of your robot is a completely separate issue. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both use flying robots with missiles to hunt down and kill people they don't like. Don't you think that perhaps, as these flying robots gain more and more autonomy, that discussions of ethics are actually important, and important now? 50 years is a long, long time in computer science.

I'm surprised that you are so pessimistic about your research that you think ethics won't even be relevant in year 2205. Holy cow you must think AI is hard.

[jordan0day]

George W. Bush and Barack Obama both use flying robots with missiles to hunt down and kill people they don't like.

This is a very good point. It's always good to be reminded that we're already living in the future.

That said, I feel like aothman is discussing real artificial intelligence, that is, an entity capable of making a conscious decision that it wants to, in this case, fire the missiles. If I had to guess, if predator drones gain the ability to "decide" for themselves whether or not to fire their missiles, it will be built on a system of complex rules, and not because they're "intelligent". Potayto, Potahto? Maybe. I'm not an AI researcher and I don't even come close to understanding human intelligence, but I feel like even if it is just a complex system of rules, it's at a much deeper level than we'll be able to simulate soon.

[cabalamat]

> It's always good to be reminded that we're already living in the future.

This is not a new phenomenon; the first use of autonomous killer robots was in 1943, in the form of acoustically guided torpedoes.

[hugh3]

Well heck, if we're going to stretch the analogy why not a mouse trap?

[krschultz]

Because nobody has ever been killed by a misguided mousetrap?

[hugh3]

Bear trap, then.

[curiousepic]

I'm disappointed in the number of people commenting on HN that assume AI = robotics. A true AGI will solve robotics itself whether it's already instantiated in a robotic form or not.

[randallsquared]

> AI is going to be for the next 50 (or 100, or probably 200) years.

To be clear about that "probably 200", are you saying that you believe we'll need trillions of times the processing power of the human brain in order to crack how it works, or that you believe that we've nearly reached the end of increases in processing power, for at least the next 200 years?

[bermanoid]

If I had to guess, he's saying that at the current rate of software and research progress, we won't be able to cobble together the weak and specialized subsystems that we currently call "AI" into anything more interesting for quite some time. Not an altogether uncommon belief, esp. amongst those that specialize in robotics or other practical AI applications, because they know first-hand how hard it is to create humanlike behavior with any of the techniques we know of today.

But self improving AI is not remotely predictable based on our current progress, and really, it's not even the same field as what we call AI today: extrapolating our current progress to predict where we'll be in 50 years is like asking a bombmaker from 1935 to look at a log log plot of historical explosive power in bombs to try to predict what the maximum yield from a bomb in 1950 would be. It doesn't matter how slow the mainstream research is if someone finds a chain reaction to exploit, and it's impossible to predict when someone will successfully exploit that chain reaction.

IMO there's very good reason to believe that we're already deep into the "yellow zone" of danger here, where we have more than enough computational power to set off a self-improving chain reaction, though we don't actually know how to write that software. What we really have to worry about is that as time goes by, we creep closer to the "red zone", where we don't even need to know how to write the software because any idiot with an expensive computer can brute force the search through program space (more realistically, they would rely on evolutionary or other types of relatively unguided methods). That's exceptionally dangerous because the vast majority of self improving AIs will be hostile, and we want to make sure that the first to emerge is benevolent.

So yes, there's a lot of uncertainty here, but I think it's a mistake to say that we don't need to worry about it until it's here. By the time it's inevitable and the mainstream has started to even accept it as possible, it's probably going to be impossible to ensure that (for instance) some irresponsible government won't be the first to achieve it merely by throwing a lot of funding at the problem and doing it unsafely.