Canadian Money Forum banner

Technology may be going too far, too fast.

16K views 111 replies 14 participants last post by  olivaw 
#1 ·
#2 ·
That is really funny. I wouldn't say too far, too fast though. I say thank heaven for early adopters. They spend their money on pricey new technology and suffer the growing pains & experience that ultimately shapes these things and determnes what persists and what gets tossed out.

What I do see though is a lot of 'geeky' consumer-type stuff that isn't necessarily putting technology to its best use. Go into a senior's home and give some thought to the technology, sensors, etc. that could be developed to provide assistance and improve their safety.
Cripes, ask Rogers how many calls they get in a week from people who can't turn their TV on. Their remote stopped working and they have two or three of these remote thingys (set-top box/tv/dvd) with upteen buttons on each and you have to point the right one at the right place. But they just want to on-off, change channels and adjust volume.
 
#5 ·
There was a TED talk where the guy actually says this is on the way (it has already started to a certain extent)-humans will get more and more technological hardware until eventually millions will be hybrids of machine and mammal-these millions will coexist alongside those who are still 100% mammal-just as Neanderthals coexisted and bred with Cro Magnon.
 
#6 ·
I'm still waiting for the next technology breakthrough; something completely new, and disruptive. So far, it seems to me that there are only incremental advances of existing technologies and new applications offering solutions to non-existent problems.

Watching news from the CES show in Las Vegas, it appears that VR is popular, a flying car ( like we've never heard that before ), and lots of "apps"...

Yes, with the incremental evolution of Bluetooth into BLE, you can now attach a sensor to your dog or cat, and the app on your Smartphone will tell you when to feed it. Wow, it's amazing that there hasn't been mass starvation of family pets because people had no clue when the animal was hungry.
 
#8 ·
We are approaching the development an AI "singularity" - artificial intelligence that is as smart as humans. Beyond that, the AIs will be smarter than us. The pace of scientific and technological change will accelerate to the point that it may make our past few decades seem like nothing.

The worry is that the AIs will notice that we are a danger to ourselves and enslave us for our own protection. Or they may decide we are a danger to them and wipe us out. Or the technology falls into the wrong hands. A number of very intelligent individuals have sounded the alarm.
 
#15 ·
Nelley is the intellectual equivalent of the honeybadger. (or maybe of Randall, I'm not sure)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4r7wHMg5Yjg&t=15s

We should take Nelley at his word that AI is no risk because AI cannot be creative. He's the authority. We shouldn't listen to people with experience in computer science, are exceptionally intelligent or make more money every day than Nelley will earn in his life. Those guys are suckers.
 
#20 ·
Musk's warning about the dangers of AI is somewhat ironic since he is a big developer of it with his driverless cars.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmac...down-10-million-to-fight-skynet/#17e3b854bd01

In tweets and multiple public appearances, Musk has compared the dark potential of unfettered artificial superintelligence to "summoning the demon" and to Skynet itself. On Thursday, the SpaceX and Tesla Motors head put his money where his mouth is with a $10 million donation to the Future of Life Institute for the creation of a grant program that will look into how to keep AI friendly towards meatbags like you and I.

As with most things Musk says and does, there's an aspect of salesmanship to be found when reading between the lines. Musk has invested in two major AI firms, Vicarious and DeepMind Technologies, the latter of which was acquired by Google.

.............

For all his bluster about the dangers of AI, which is supported by others like Hawking and Nick Bostrom in his recent tome on the topic, "Superintelligence," I'd wager Musk has decided to be vocal on the issue and to make this "donation" as a pre-emptive strike against negative public opinion, a potential obstacle for AI on its journey towards maturity and profitability. In other words, for Musk, it's about protecting an investment as much as it is about protecting humanity from mean-spirited machines.

After all, Musk has said that Tesla will be the first to market with self-driving autonomous vehicles. That's a low-level of artificial intelligence compared to Skynet-like superintelligence, but Musk still has to ensure that we'll be comfortable riding around in "smart" cars as AI develops further. My bet is he's willing to pay much more than $10 million in the long run to ensure the public's peace of mind on that front.
Iow, Musk is engaged in a public relations effort to soften his image as rolls out the very kind of products he criticizes.

Bill Gates has made colossal mistakes predicting what the public wants . After developing the operating system Windows for a personal computer,he did not predict that people would want to communicate with each other and that the internet would become so popular.

He tried to have the Internet Explorer browser loaded on to all new pc's so as to eliminate competition. IE is not
now the dominant browser for the internet. Chrome and Firefox have far outstripped it.
 
#22 · (Edited)
IBM's Watson supercomputer defeated all time Jeopardy champion Ken Jennings years ago, and is currently considered the best diagnostic tool for medicine after absorbing hundreds of thousands of medical histories.

It has learned the cumulative information on many topics over the years, and it's AI ability allows it to make best use of that information.

https://www.ibm.com/watson/

http://fortune.com/2016/10/11/ibm-watson-empoyees-cancer-drugs/
 
#23 ·
AI is an arms-race. Musk not pursuing it would not reduce the danger, since the incentives to make advances first are so huge.

And we have to be clear about what we mean when we say AI. Self-driving cars and the like are better described as automation. The AI that Gates/Musk/Hawking are warning about is Artificial General Intelligence, ie, software that has generalized intelligence like a human, and not merely trained/specialized intelligence in a specific domain. So the risk is not that your self-driving car will suddenly become self-aware.
 
#28 ·
The risk of AI has been explored for decades - and to an extent centuries. Numerous academic papers have been published. There have been dozens of literary works. Gates, Hawking, Woz and Musk are the latest in a string of geniuses who chose to bring the concerns to the public's attention.

Calculators and smart phones are relatively simply. As andrewf said, we have to be clear about what we mean by general artificial intelligence. We're talking about software that may be smarter than the programmers who wrote it - software that is capable of creating a smarter version of itself. - Reproduction and evolution.

We can't predict what AI will look like. The potential benefits are great. The potential risks are great.
 
#30 ·
Nelley, not everyone here reads MSN, so at least they are posting information...as opposed to, what could be considered, rude comments.

You've made your point on this and, as I understand it, other threads. You've gone well beyond that now and are beating a dead horse.

Of course you're not alone in this behaviour, but I'd appreciate it if you could move on. If you want, you can start a new "trash <insert user name here>" thread and go wild...in fact, I'll even set it up in the hot button topic thread for you and everyone else...
 
#35 · (Edited)
Please define "self-aware" and how you can determine if something else is self-aware or not. I know humans have assumed many things aren't self aware, and then later changed their minds, of course I also know some humans who think humans are the only creatures who are self aware.

Even the definition of "life" has gotten to be muddy.

Also, are you looking to closely at the object in question? The atoms, of which we are composed, may not be considered "alive". But when they combine to form cells, they would be. Of course cells are not self aware until combined to form humans...where are the boundaries? Who would ever imagine a bunch of inanimate chemicals could ever become self aware? That sounds so absurd.
 
#36 ·
Please define "self-aware" and how you can determine if something else is self-aware or not. I know humans have assumed many things aren't self aware, and then later changed their minds, of course I also know some humans who think humans are the only creatures who are self aware.

Even the definition of "life" has gotten to be muddy.

Also, are you looking to closely at the object in question? The atoms, of which we are composed, may not be considered "alive". But when they combine to form cells, they would be. Of course cells are not self aware until combined to form humans...where are the boundaries?
Einstein: Machines are not alive. Seems like a difficult concept for you to grasp, especially if the MSM tells you otherwise.
 
#37 · (Edited)
I can show you piles of chemicals that are not alive either but, when combined, properly become human beings. Heck, humans are 75+% water...not exactly an "alive" substance. Of course I can bet you that, no mater how you try to combine them, you'll never make them "live" either...but somehow it works. All this, despite what you personally believe.

Machines are on the order of 10,000 years old unless you want to talk tools. The microchip is less than 100 years old. Humans have been evolving for what a couple hundred thousand years...I prefer to wait and see how things go, before passing judgement...to do otherwise is pretty arrogant.

There were people, not to long ago who said man would never fly, couldn't survive in space, would never land on the moon...talk with someone on the other side of the world instantaneously, carry around devices which had access to a majority of the world's knowledge in your hand...

In the end, we're all just chemical reactions...

While you're thinking of your next insult, have you ever seen the movie the matrix? How can you definitely prove that you are not inside of a computer program with direct feed into your brain? The movie was based on real philisophical papers.

http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/08/04/the-philosophy-of-the-matrix/
 
#38 ·
Your're going off topic-now you are talking about the creation of new life forms-which no one disputes is inevitable-the topic was self awareness of machines-which is impossible. Re AI being a problem for humanity, if humans program AI to work against humanity it will do it. It is an advanced machine.
 
#40 ·
You still haven't defined "self aware".

Until we have a definition, it's hard to say if it's possible to meet the requirments thereof.

Heck, if you define it right, humanity may not even be self aware...or even alive.

This "reality" of which you're so sure of, may not even exist...
 
#46 ·
Nelley's initial objection was creativity. Then it became self awareness. Neither is an adequate objection because they can be simulated using current technology. The simulations will only get better.

The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment in which a benign general purpose AI destroys humanity. The AI is instructed to maximize the number of paper clips in its collection. In so doing it eventually consumes the resources necessary for human survival in pursuit of this single goal.
 
#50 ·
What if it was built into the code to allow you to find it? Or maybe they allow you to not find it. Since the code defines your actions, you can only perform within your boundaries.

I used to be a pretty good programmer. My job was to outthink the user to prevent them from doing things we didn't want them to do. We'd come up with scenarios like what happens if they just pound randomly on the computer? How can we stop the garbage input. Then, after we'd finished coming up with all our ideas, we'd test it on other people telling them to try and break it (without physically breaking it of course). We called this idiot testing. If they did something we'd never imagined, we'd code a solution.

I produced some rock solid code. They don't have time to produce code like that anymore. Heck, most code being released today is all beta code...and it's even promoted as such.
 
#58 ·
Another way of asking that question, is what is magic about a human brain that is impossible to emulate in a computer? It would seem you have to appeal to the supernatural to argue that there is some ineffable ghost in the machine that could never be reproduced in a computer (but can be produced in 9 months incubation + a few years free range using materials at hand).
 
#81 ·
Humans are life forms like rabbits and bacteria and elephants. We have been shaped by the forces of evolution,survival of the fittest
as Darwin said . May species have gone extinct, the neaderthals for example. Some people say they were a subspecies of our own, h. sapiens.
But conditions change or they were eliminated by h.sapiens and they went extinct. Will this new world of AI be another event in which a certain part of of the population is selected against? If this section of the population is not intelligent enough to thrive in this demanding new world,
will they continue to contribute to the gene pool?

Alternately , conditions may become so abundant and plentiful that there will be more than enough resources for all and everyone regardless of their ability and genetic makeup can come along for the ride .
 
#82 ·
Saying that machines cannot be intelligent/aware/etc. means that there is something about humans that is not possible to emulate in a machine. What is that? Humans are just wetware versions of computers, there doesn't seem to be any evidence of anything magical happening, so a sufficiently advanced computer should be able to have the same (or superior) cognitive abilities as a human. That humans are the product of evolution is rather moot. All it means is that the computers in our heads are highly specialized, adapted to help with our ability to reproduce our genes. It's very efficient/effective at certain computational tasks (vision, for example), far better than any computer humans make today, but far worse than even basic computers at other tasks (such as calculations, memory, etc.).
 
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top