Artificial Superintelligence

By Atom Bergstrom

Atom’s Blog

The Terminator was “just a movie,” right?

It was released in 1984.

1984?

Is Google Planet evolving into Skynet and its army of self-aware machines?

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According to a 2018 newspaper headline …

“Elon Musk’s nightmarish warning: AI could become ‘an immortal dictator from which we would never escape.'”

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Peter Holley wrote (in The Washington Post, Apr. 6, 2018) …

“Among his many warnings about the rise of artificial intelligence, Elon Musk has said that autonomous machines are more dangerous to the world than North Korea and could unleash ‘weapons of terror.’ He has compared the adoption of AI to ‘summoning the devil.'”

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James Barrat (Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, 2013) wrote …

“It’s true for both mice and men, whoever controls ASI [artificial superintelligence] controls the world.

“But it’s not clear whether ASI can be controlled at all. It might win over us humans with a persuasive argument that the world will be a lot better off if our nation, nation X, has the power to rule the world rather than nation Y. And, the ASI would argue, if you, nation X, believe you have won the ASI race, what makes you so sure nation Y doesn’t believe it has, too?

“As you have noticed, we humans are not in a strong bargaining position, even in the off chance we and nation Y have already created an ASI nonproliferation treaty. Our greatest enemy right now isn’t nation Y anyway, it’s ASI — how can we know the ASI tells the truth?”

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According to British mathematician I.J. Good (1965) …

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.”

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Nothing can go wrong … go wrong … go wrong.

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