Tuesday, September 11, 2007
AI: Will it eat us or keep us as pets?
Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?
- And other questions from the Singularity Summit
Ronald Bailey | September 11, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO—By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?
These were some of the questions pondered by the 600 or so technosavants meeting in the Palace of Fine Arts at the second annual Singularity Summit this past weekend. The meeting was convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute's chief goal is to make sure that whatever smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is eventually spawned by exponentially accelerating information technology that it will be friendly to humans.
[full story at http://reason.com/news/show/122423.html ]
I liked this bit especially:
Hall suggested that instead of fixed moral rules (which a super smart AI with access to its own source code could change later anyway) progenitors should try to inculcate something like a conscience into the AIs they foster. A conscience allows humans to extend and apply moral rules flexibly in new and different contexts. One rule of thumb that Hall would like to see implemented in AIs is: " Ideas should compete; bodies should cooperate."
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Susan Hogarth
http://www.colliething.com
¶ 5:13 PM
- And other questions from the Singularity Summit
Ronald Bailey | September 11, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO—By 2030, or by 2050 at the latest, will a super-smart artificial intelligence decide to keep humans around as pets? Will it instead choose to turn the entire Earth, including the messy organic bits like us, into computronium? Or is there a third alternative?
These were some of the questions pondered by the 600 or so technosavants meeting in the Palace of Fine Arts at the second annual Singularity Summit this past weekend. The meeting was convened by the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence. The Institute's chief goal is to make sure that whatever smarter-than-human artificial intelligence is eventually spawned by exponentially accelerating information technology that it will be friendly to humans.
[full story at http://reason.com/news/show/122423.html ]
I liked this bit especially:
Hall suggested that instead of fixed moral rules (which a super smart AI with access to its own source code could change later anyway) progenitors should try to inculcate something like a conscience into the AIs they foster. A conscience allows humans to extend and apply moral rules flexibly in new and different contexts. One rule of thumb that Hall would like to see implemented in AIs is: " Ideas should compete; bodies should cooperate."
--
Susan Hogarth
http://www.colliething.com
¶ 5:13 PM
