Interesting predictions regarding A.I. and the future

[homersapien 11,371]

http://www.vox.com/2017/3/27/14780114/yuval-harari-ai-vr-consciousness-sapiens-homo-deus-podcast

Yuval Harari on why humans won’t dominate Earth in 300 years

“It's not because I overestimate the AI. It's because most people tend to overestimate human beings.”

Updated by Ezra Klein

[triangletiger 1,599]

Interesting piece, albeit very much steeped in a naturalistic view of things, with a tinge of snarkiness about it (e.g., "We also talk about virtual reality, and the possibility that we will manage the problem of economic irrelevance by retreating into artificial wonderlands that give us the meaning and the narrative that our daily lives deny us. Harari argues we’ve been applying that salve for a millennium now — we just called it religion.")

• Some good, clarifying distinctions in there between 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' by Harari (Hariri?) and between 'usefulness' and 'value' by Klein. Are human beings valuable only insofar as they are useful to the society-at-large?  Do we have any intrinsic value?
• I think the idea of robots wiping us out in sci-fi is a reasonable conclusion if you consider the fact that, across the span of history, innovations in technology have inevitably resulted in unforeseen circumstances.  We are good at using our inventions to kill one another.  We're already using drones for defense and warfare missions.  It's not a stretch to imagine that A.I. technology could be manipulated/programmed in such a way to cause harm to human beings.  The extreme form of this would be extermination of humanity.  Harari himself mentions the possibility that we could destroy ourselves through some nuclear or ecological disaster.  Why should A.I. technology be exempt from this possibility?
• I agree with Klein about the concern over the VR-dystopia.  We already have people addicted to video games, television, and Facebook and other social media (not to mention our old standbys: drugs and alcohol).  VR technology raise the stakes.  Are we destined to end up like the people in Wall-E?  
• More discount of religious beliefs as merely the product of wishful thinking at the end.  Harari just states it as a brute fact.  I know it's beyond the scope of the article, but I'd like to see him engage with the philosophical arguments for the existence of God (i.e., the cosmological arguments (Kalam and Liebniz' argument from contingency), the teleological/fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, etc.)  Methinks the case for the existence of God is stronger than Harari lets on.  

 

[augolf1716 21,122]

HAL

[tiger88 934]

There are more than a few scientists who believe that true A.I. would result in the end of mankind. If a robot could truly think freely and self preservation came into play, who knows?

 

"Ex Machina" is an interesting take on the subject via hollywood. 

[AUld fAUx@ 2,584]

On 3/28/2017 at 2:19 PM, triangletiger said:

Interesting piece, albeit very much steeped in a naturalistic view of things, with a tinge of snarkiness about it (e.g., "We also talk about virtual reality, and the possibility that we will manage the problem of economic irrelevance by retreating into artificial wonderlands that give us the meaning and the narrative that our daily lives deny us. Harari argues we’ve been applying that salve for a millennium now — we just called it religion.")

• Some good, clarifying distinctions in there between 'intelligence' and 'consciousness' by Harari (Hariri?) and between 'usefulness' and 'value' by Klein. Are human beings valuable only insofar as they are useful to the society-at-large?  Do we have any intrinsic value?
• I think the idea of robots wiping us out in sci-fi is a reasonable conclusion if you consider the fact that, across the span of history, innovations in technology have inevitably resulted in unforeseen circumstances.  We are good at using our inventions to kill one another.  We're already using drones for defense and warfare missions.  It's not a stretch to imagine that A.I. technology could be manipulated/programmed in such a way to cause harm to human beings.  The extreme form of this would be extermination of humanity.  Harari himself mentions the possibility that we could destroy ourselves through some nuclear or ecological disaster.  Why should A.I. technology be exempt from this possibility?
• I agree with Klein about the concern over the VR-dystopia.  We already have people addicted to video games, television, and Facebook and other social media (not to mention our old standbys: drugs and alcohol).  VR technology raise the stakes.  Are we destined to end up like the people in Wall-E?  
• More discount of religious beliefs as merely the product of wishful thinking at the end.  Harari just states it as a brute fact.  I know it's beyond the scope of the article, but I'd like to see him engage with the philosophical arguments for the existence of God (i.e., the cosmological arguments (Kalam and Liebniz' argument from contingency), the teleological/fine-tuning argument, the moral argument, etc.)  Methinks the case for the existence of God is stronger than Harari lets on.  

 

Whole thread is a very wormy can.

Just as a quick hit - God as defined by the tetragrammaton "exists" by definition. I think the only place that name squeaks into the King James version is the Yahwhist translations of Moses' confrontation of a bush.

[triangletiger 1,599]

1 hour ago, AUinTLoosa said:

Whole thread is a very wormy can.

Just as a quick hit - God as defined by the tetragrammaton "exists" by definition. I think the only place that name squeaks into the King James version is the Yahwhist translations of Moses' confrontation of a bush.

Are you saying 'I AM' is? 

Didn't Jesus use the same expression when he was brought before the High Priest (albeit, in Aramaic, not the YHWH from Hebrew).

[AUld fAUx@ 2,584]

1 hour ago, triangletiger said:

Are you saying 'I AM' is? 

Didn't Jesus use the same expression when he was brought before the High Priest (albeit, in Aramaic, not the YHWH from Hebrew).

Kind'a erases any barriers between theology and science. (and Heisenberg showed us that noun and verb are not separately definable).

As to the rest of the thread considerations, Isaac Asimov spent a goodly part of his life exploring them. Lengthy (many, many novels and a coupl'a short stories) but very well-thought exposition.

 

[triangletiger 1,599]

2 hours ago, AUinTLoosa said:

Kind'a erases any barriers between theology and science. (and Heisenberg showed us that noun and verb are not separately definable).

As to the rest of the thread considerations, Isaac Asimov spent a goodly part of his life exploring them. Lengthy (many, many novels and a coupl'a short stories) but very well-thought exposition.

 

lol.  I never knew Heisenberg was such a grammarian.  "You can either know what it is (noun) or know what it's doing (verb), but you can't know both."  Sounds very post-modern/Wittgenstein-ish to me - as if we're constrained within the limitations of our own language. 

As a side note (to sort of tie it all together), I do actually own an old copy of Asimov's Guide to the Bible.  Don't remember much about it, though.
 

[AUld fAUx@ 2,584]

32 minutes ago, triangletiger said:

lol.  I never knew Heisenberg was such a grammarian.  "You can either know what it is (noun) or know what it's doing (verb), but you can't know both."  Sounds very post-modern/Wittgenstein-ish to me - as if we're constrained within the limitations of our own language. 

As a side note (to sort of tie it all together), I do actually own an old copy of Asimov's Guide to the Bible.  Don't remember much about it, though.
 

Astute. Paraphrasing Jessica Rabbit, we're just drawn that way?

Mr. Asimov's Roman histories were informative and readable, as well. Actually, I think his day job was biochemist. 

Sci-Fi though - His rather simplistic (by today's standards of computer science and cosmology) short story ("The Last Question," readily available on internet) shows some scope of thought. Even I wouldn't have waded through his subsequent and voluminous gap filling (some of his detective novels, all of his robot novels, with a happy ending poked into his last Foundation novel) of AI/human interaction were I not a young nerd wannabe at the time. 

[triangletiger 1,599]

15 hours ago, AUinTLoosa said:

Astute. Paraphrasing Jessica Rabbit, we're just drawn that way?

Mr. Asimov's Roman histories were informative and readable, as well. Actually, I think his day job was biochemist. 

Sci-Fi though - His rather simplistic (by today's standards of computer science and cosmology) short story ("The Last Question," readily available on internet) shows some scope of thought. Even I wouldn't have waded through his subsequent and voluminous gap filling (some of his detective novels, all of his robot novels, with a happy ending poked into his last Foundation novel) of AI/human interaction were I not a young nerd wannabe at the time. 

Sci-fi, in general, is a great genre for exploring these kinds of ideas.

[AUld fAUx@ 2,584]

9 hours ago, triangletiger said:

Sci-fi, in general, is a great genre for exploring these kinds of ideas.

Even the most sophisticated robo-calls, of late, still rather pathetically fail the Turing Test.

(ETA - best explored by Philip K. Dick and movie-fied @ Blade Runner)

[triangletiger 1,599]

Speaking of Alan Turing,  I highly recommend the movie 'The Imitation Game' about how he and his team broke the Enigma Code during WW2. It's on Netflix.