Is the Matrix of Artificial Intelligence artificial?
I’ve just had a scan of this and immediately I felt depopulation. Artificial Intelligence is an investment in robotics that do not demand higher wages, they don’t need money or food. I felt the mindset behind this disconnected from humanity, it feels rational, productivity orientated and views the world in models. It looks at the pragmatic of overpopulation, robots serving functions that displace humans. Rather than look at ways to develop humanity to resolve conflict, climate change, greed, overconsumption, indifference, poverty, disease – it seeks to shrink the problem and replace it with artificial intelligence. That is my feeling. The question is – where does my feeling come from? Is it mine or is it emerging from a higher intelligence? Just because science cannot measure inspiration, spirituality or how life unfolds on earth and in the universe, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. If you can’t see it perhaps it is because you do not know how to see then look. This is an inner-sight. I am focusing on the real intelligence that creates universes not labour saving devices.
I wonder about the people who play God over the lives of billions, the question is does god play dice?
I love the word used in this paper ‘desiderata’ (next blog real wisdom).
Here is an excerpt out of paper I saw online.
https://nickbostrom.com/papers/aipolicy.pdf
Policy Desiderata in the Development of Superintelligent AI 1
(2017) version 3.7 (first version: 2016) Nick Bostrom† Allan Dafoe∗ † Carrick Flynn† † Future of Humanity Institute, Oxford University ∗ Department of Political Science, Yale University [working paper] www.nickbostrom.com
ABSTRACT Machine superintelligence could plausibly be developed in the coming decades or century. The prospect of this transformative development presents a host of political challenges and opportunities. This paper seeks to initiate discussion of these by identifying a set of distinctive features of the transition to a machine intelligence era. From these distinctive features, we derive a correlative set of policy desiderata—considerations that should be given extra weight in long-term AI policy compared to other policy contexts. We argue that these desiderata are relevant for a wide range of actors (including states, AI technology firms, investors, and NGOs) with an interest in AI policy. However, developing concrete policy options that satisfy these desiderata will require additional work. Keywords: artificial intelligence, ethics, policy, technology, global governance, AI, superintelligence
1 For comment and discussion, we’re grateful to Stuart Armstrong, Michael Barnett, Seth Baum, Dominic Becker, Nick Beckstead, Devi Borg, Miles Brundage, Paul Christiano, Jack Clark, Rebecca Crootof, Richard Danzig, Daniel Dewey, Eric Drexler, Sebastian Farquhar, Sophie Fischer, Ben Garfinkel, Katja Grace, Tom Grant, Hilary Greaves, John Halstead, Robin Hanson, Verity Harding, Sean Legassick, Wendy Lin, Jelena Luketina, Matthijs Maas, Luke Muehlhauser, Toby Ord, Mahendra Prasad, Anders Sandberg, Carl Shulman, Andrew Snyder-Beattie, Nate Soares, Mojmir Stehlik, Jaan Tallinn, Alex Tymchenko, and several anonymous referees. This work was supported by grants from the H2020 European Research Council and the Future of Life Institute. 1 …
Prospects of machine intelligence Advanced artificial intelligence (AI) is a general-purpose technology with transformative potential. The development of superintelligent AI—machine intelligence more cognitively capable than humans in all practically relevant domains—would rank among the most important transitions in history. Superintelligent machines could produce great benefits for human health and longevity, scientific understanding, entertainment, space exploration, and in many other areas. Taken together, these applications would enable vast improvements in human welfare. At the same time, the development of superintelligence will be associated with significant challenges, likely including novel security concerns, labor market dislocations, and a potential for exacerbated inequality. It may even involve, in the form of accident or misuse, significant existential risk (Bostrom, 2014; Russell, Dewey and Tegmark, 2016). There is currently no consensus on the likelihood and timeline of the development of superintelligent AI. In opinion surveys of AI experts, a majority place a significant chance of high-level machine intelligence (HLMI) being developed in the coming decades. When HLMI is defined as a machine intelligence capable of carrying out “most human professions at least as well as a typical human,” the median view among a sample of the top 100 most cited AI researchers was a 10% chance of such AI being developed by 2024, and a 50% chance of it being developed by 2050 (Müller and Bostrom, 2016). When HLMI was defined as “unaided machines [accomplishing] every task better and more cheaply than human workers,” a majority of the sample of authors at two leading technical machine learning conferences (the 2015 NIPS and ICML) believed there was at least a 10% chance of it being developed by 2031 (Grace et al., 2017). In view of how much could be at stake, even a modest chance of advanced general AI being developed in the next several decades would provide sufficient reason to give this topic careful examination.
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The transformativeness of such a transition to a machine intelligence era is brought out if we reflect on a few implications. Cheap generally intelligent machines could substitute for most human labor. Inexpensive (relative to human labor) superintelligent AI is the last invention that 2 humans would ever need to make, since all future inventions would be more effectively delegated to AI (Good, 1965). Early versions of machine superintelligence may quickly build more advanced versions, plausibly leading to an “intelligence explosion”. This acceleration of machine intelligence would likely drive all other forms of technological progress, producing a plethora of innovations, such as in life extension medicine, space settlement, weapons systems and military logistics, surveillance, brain emulations, and virtual reality. Economic growth rates would increase dramatically (Nordhaus, 2015), plausibly by several orders of magnitude (Hanson, 2016, ch. 16). Such developments could alter political dynamics at local and global levels, and would force humanity to confront important collective choice problems. These may include: securing 3 cooperation and a high level of investment in safety despite potential private incentives to shirk on safety and engage in an AI technology race; ensuring a reasonably equitable distribution of benefits and influence; preventing novel forms of misuse and abuse; maintaining peace and stability under conditions of a potentially rapidly shifting balance of power; arranging for global stabilization if offensive or destructive technologies become strongly dominant at some level of technological development; and navigating onto a favorable long-term trajectory for humanity in the presence of evolutionary or other competitive dynamics that might operate within or between technologically mature civilizations. Achieving a successful transition to the machine intelligence era will thus require solving several different types of problem. First, technological progress is required to increase the capability of AI systems. Great resources are devoted to making this happen, with major (and growing) investments from both industry and academia in many countries. Second, there is the technical control problem of developing scalable control methods that could ensure that a superintelligent AI will be safe and will behave as its programmers intend even if its intellectual capabilities are increased to arbitrary levels. Until recently, this problem was almost entirely neglected; but in the last couple of years, technical research agendas have been developed, and there are now several research groups pursuing work in this area. Total investment in long-term AI safety, 4 however, remains orders of magnitude less than investment in increasing AI capabilities. And third, there is the political challenge of making sure that AI is developed, deployed, and governed in a responsible and generally beneficial way. This, also, remains relatively neglected. Some AI-related governance issues have begun to be explored, such as the ethics of lethal autonomous weapons (Roff, 2014; Bhuta et al., 2016), AI-augmented surveillance (Calo, 2010), 2 An exception would arise if there is demand specifically for human labor, such as a consumer preference for goods made “by hand”. 3 Other technologies, such as nuclear weapons, also seem to have shifted the global political landscape (Wendt 2003, Deudney 2007). 4 Three research agendas that have raised particular interest recently are the one developed by researchers at Google Brain and OpenAI (Amodei et al., 2016) and two produced by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (Soares and Fallenstein, 2014; Taylor et al., 2016). Additionally, there has been an increase in the number of published pieces on technical AI safety topics, including by researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, and various academic institutions (Orseau and Armstrong, 2016; OpenAI, 2016; Hadfield-Menell et al., 2016; Christiano, 2016; Everitt and Hutter, 2016; Evans et al., 2015). 3
over-attachment to social robots (Lin, Abney and Bekey, 2011), and the design of domestic regulatory frameworks (Scherer 2016). Research also needs to examine the fundamental set of issues that the world would confront with the arrival of superintelligent AI (Conitzer, 2016). Governance issues related to these more long-term AI prospects remain almost entirely unexplored. 5 In this paper, we seek to begin a conversation around these longer term issues. In particular, we are interested in the question of how one should evaluate a proposal for the governance of AI development. What desiderata should such a proposal satisfy? We construe this question broadly. Thus, by “governance” we refer not only to the actions of states but also to transnational governance (Hale and Held 2011) involving norms and arrangements arising from AI technology firms, investors, NGOs, and other relevant actors, and the many kinds of global power that shape outcomes (Barnett and Duvall 2005). And while ethical considerations are relevant, they do not exhaust the scope of the proposed inquiry—we wish to include desiderata focused on prudential interests of important constituencies as well as considerations of technical and political feasibility. Distinctive circumstances and corresponding desiderata In the most general terms, we optimistically take the overarching objective to be the realization of a widely appealing and inclusive near- and long-term future that ultimately achieves humanity’s potential for desirable development while being considerate to beings of all kinds whose interests may be affected by our choices. An ideal proposal for governance arrangements would be one conducive to that end. To make progress in our inquiry, we will not directly attempt to precisify this very broad and vague objective. Instead, we take an indirect approach. We identify several respects in which the prospect of advanced AI presents special circumstances
—challenges or opportunities that are either unique to the context of advanced AI or are expected to present there in unusual ways or to unusual degrees. We argue that these special circumstances have some relatively unambiguous implications for policy analysis in the sense that there are certain policy properties that are far more important in these special circumstances (than in most other policy contexts) for
5 Although major governments are increasingly aware of long-term AI issues, this has not yet resulted in substantial policy formulation. In October 2016, the White House released a report which considered long-term issues in AI, including AI safety and the risks posed by recursive self-improvement (National Science and Technology Council, 2016). Included in this report was the recommendation that “AI professionals, safety professionals, and their professional societies should work together to continue progress toward a mature field of AI safety engineering” (ibid., p. 34). Following this report, in November the US Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness held hearings on AI during which some long-term safety and policy considerations were broached (U.S. Senate, 2016). In the UK, in October 2016, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee released a report that highlighted recent work in the area of AI safety, recommending the establishment of a standing Commission on Artificial Intelligence, and a Robotics and Autonomous Systems Leadership Council, to produce a national strategy on AI and Robotics (House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2016). However, this recent surge in interest notwithstanding, there has not yet been much focus on the unique policy issues that arise specifically from these long-term considerations. 4
the satisfaction of many widely shared prudential and moral preferences. We express these especially relevant and important policy properties as a set of desiderata. The desiderata are thus meant to provide other-things-equal reasons for pursuing certain policies. Our recommendations take the form: “Whatever weight you ordinarily give to factor X in your decision-making (relative to other factors), in the context of advanced AI you should place more weight on X, because of the special circumstances that are present in this domain”. Recommendations of this form can be relevant to a wide range of actors (individuals, institutions, or more loosely defined groups and collectives) pursuing a wide set of different goals. Because of their different goals or beliefs, such different actors may place different weights on some factor X; and yet it may be true for all of them that a particular circumstance should change the weight accorded to X in the same way. The starting point and the end point are different for each actor, but the vectors between them (representing how the actor’s policy has changed) are aligned in similar directions.