15th June 2015, 12:44 PM
People have talked about AI for decades, the fears and such. I'd like to say my biggest concern, and it's not about fearing what could happen to humans. Movies have done that to death, and generally speaking every scenario they envision breaks down to "that wouldn't have happened if you weren't so cruel to the AI" or "if you just taught the AI some morals". That's the warning I get, that we should impart some values to the AI and treat it with respect.
My biggest concern isn't what they could do to us though, but the sheer depths of what we could do to them. There's people talking about making AIs for our games, as learning partners that go with us through a narrative. Now, I think it's all just talk, I don't think we're going to be able to make thinking and feeling AI on modern consoles at all, but the IDEA still frightens me on a moral level.
The problem is, people are generally pretty terrible. There are too many psychopaths in the world, and the last thing we need to give ANY of them is the ability to make their own victims and have complete control of that victim's entire reality. Forget books or shows you may have seen with a similar premise, they don't have the imagination to truly grasp just how nightmarish such a reality could be to our supposed victim AI. I'm talking about being able to literally send an innocent being to hell, mocking it, vastly accelerating it's experienced time, giving it hope, taking it away, laughing at it, wiping it's memories, giving it loved ones, destroying those loved ones, and doing it all over again, forever and ever, with zero hope of anyone outside that sicko's bedroom EVER finding out about it, especially if it's a billion years of this hell compressed down to a real-world 10 seconds. It is literally the worst thing I can possible imagine, and if we gain the ability to create AI, somewhere, it'll happen.
Personally, I think that ANY amount of real-world suffering we could supposedly lesson pails in comparison to the infinity of suffering even ONE of these beings might be put through.
I'm going to go ahead and say it. The more I think about this scenario, the more I conclude that I would rather our whole species go EXTINCT, rather that LIFE go extinct, than allow for the possibility that even ONE such AI construct go through infinite torture as we obliviously go through our lives ignorantly trying to love laugh and live. At least with extinction, the suffering is finite.
Well, that's all I've got to say about that.
My biggest concern isn't what they could do to us though, but the sheer depths of what we could do to them. There's people talking about making AIs for our games, as learning partners that go with us through a narrative. Now, I think it's all just talk, I don't think we're going to be able to make thinking and feeling AI on modern consoles at all, but the IDEA still frightens me on a moral level.
The problem is, people are generally pretty terrible. There are too many psychopaths in the world, and the last thing we need to give ANY of them is the ability to make their own victims and have complete control of that victim's entire reality. Forget books or shows you may have seen with a similar premise, they don't have the imagination to truly grasp just how nightmarish such a reality could be to our supposed victim AI. I'm talking about being able to literally send an innocent being to hell, mocking it, vastly accelerating it's experienced time, giving it hope, taking it away, laughing at it, wiping it's memories, giving it loved ones, destroying those loved ones, and doing it all over again, forever and ever, with zero hope of anyone outside that sicko's bedroom EVER finding out about it, especially if it's a billion years of this hell compressed down to a real-world 10 seconds. It is literally the worst thing I can possible imagine, and if we gain the ability to create AI, somewhere, it'll happen.
Personally, I think that ANY amount of real-world suffering we could supposedly lesson pails in comparison to the infinity of suffering even ONE of these beings might be put through.
I'm going to go ahead and say it. The more I think about this scenario, the more I conclude that I would rather our whole species go EXTINCT, rather that LIFE go extinct, than allow for the possibility that even ONE such AI construct go through infinite torture as we obliviously go through our lives ignorantly trying to love laugh and live. At least with extinction, the suffering is finite.
Well, that's all I've got to say about that.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)