Guest essay by Eric Worrall
As I predicted in 2017, the malevolent AI threat is rapidly moving up the ranks of candidate replacements for the failed climate change scare.
Artificial Intelligence is greater concern than climate change or terrorism, says new head of British Science Association
By Sarah Knapton, science editor
6 SEPTEMBER 2018 • 12:01AMArtificial Intelligence is a greater concern than antibiotic resistance, climate change or terrorism for the future of Britain, the incoming president of the British Science Association has warned.
Jim Al-Khalili, Professor of physics and public engagement at the University of Surrey, said the unprecedented technological progress in AI was ‘happening too fast’ without proper scrutiny or regulation.
Prof Al-Khalili warned that the full threat to jobs and security had not been properly assessed and urged the government to urgently regulate.
Speaking at a briefing in London ahead of the British Science Festival in Hull next week, he said: “Until maybe a couple of years ago had I been asked what is the most pressing and important conversation we should be having about our future, I might have said climate change or one of the other big challenges facing humanity, such as terrorism, antimicrobial resistance, the threat of pandemics or world poverty.
“But today I am certain the most important conversation we should be having is about the future of AI. It will dominate what happens with all of these other issues for better or for worse.
…
Artificial intelligence has a lot of potential as a replacement scare story.
- AI directly threatens jobs and economic stability.
- AI undermines democracy – the elite owners of powerful AIs have an unprecedented advantage over everyone else.
- Hollywood is onboard – there are plenty of movies featuring dangerous AI adversaries out to control or destroy the world.
- AI threatens national security – a nation whose geopolitics is advised by greater than human intelligence will have a possibly insurmountable advantage.
- Powerful AIs may be difficult to control – humans will struggle to constrain machines more intelligent than their creators.
- Since Artificial General Intelligence (i.e. human level AI or better than human AI) does not yet exist, researchers can make stuff up, and nobody can prove they are wrong.
Obviously it will be difficult for climate scientists to jump ship and join the AI gravy train – or will it? Plenty of climate scientists have degrees which could be stretched to cover expert sounding pontification about artificial intelligence.
My 2018 prediction – expect to see more studies in the next five years exploring the impact of AI on climate change, written by climate scientists keen to build a parallel academic track record studying artificial intelligence issues.
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The elephant in the room of course, is the threat of a space alien invasion. Now that’s scary. Ack-ack-ack-ack- ack! (That’s Boo! in space alienese).
This will play nicely to the deeply paranoid “my cat/vacuum cleaner/ television is planning to kill me/us” lobby. If it means they give us a rest over climate I’m all for encouraging them.
But an apposite warning from Nietzsche : ‘The disciple…who has no eyes for the weakness of the doctrine, the religion, and so forth, dazzled by the aspect of the master and by his reverence for him, has on that on that account usually more power than the master himself. Without blind disciples the influence of a man and his work has never yet become great. To help a doctrine to victory often means only so to mix it with stupidity that the weight of the latter carries off also the victory of the former’.
If a computer is evil and smart, that might be one better than following a human who is evil and dumb. Al Gore has followers. MIchael Mann has followers. Jim Jones had followers.
Should I go on?
I think that maybe the uptick in searches could be more related to the TV shows Westworld and Humans, both of which portray a near future with sentient AI.
Progressives look to the day when AI algorithms replace actual voting.
Until they realize the AI algorithms work on logic, not emotion, and thus are unlikely to vote for anything Progressives believe in.
I have to laugh … its a computer program … the only way its smarter than a human is if you define smart as how much data you can store and recall … but thats not intelligence thats just a trained monkey …
Modern AI systems aren’t conventional computer programs simply accessing a set of databases. Machine learning + neural nets + massively parallel processing capabilities creates adaptive scenarios that can and do diverge far from the human programmer’s original intent and design.
Humans store less data and recall it less well. Then they apply a glitchy set of prejudices and learning and preferences and misunderstandings to the incomplete and poorly recalled data to generate a solution.
Once the computer can apply a version of that seriously flawed algorithm to its superior data and recall it has humans beat hands down.
Question is, who controls the computer?
Of course, “climate change” is no more of a threat now than it ever was, but artificial intelligence a threat? Lack of NATURAL intelligence is the threat. Even now we have a large part of the population that would panic & not know what to do without their IPhones or whatever.
Threats mentioned: AI, Climate Change, Terrorism, Pandemics, Antimicrobial resistance, global poverty.
Those threats obviously have a widely varying death toll in today’s world. Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of government as a threat, though since 1900 bad governance has caused more destruction than all other issues combined.
Bingo! 1913 was a particularly bad year for limited government and freedom. The U.S. 16th and 17th Amendment, and the Federal Reserve Act where all passed in 1913.
The problem with trying to regulate AI development is that you can’t.
Sure you can pass laws, but enforcing them is all but impossible.
It will require the intense vigilance of SCEPTICS!
Maybe AI software could enforce these.
Computers are getting smarter all the time.
If we ever do pass the AI threshold, we won’t realize it until decades after the fact.
Speculative fiction either way.
The greatest risk is and always has been policy over reach.
Failure to see that only amounts to a diversion.
The risk to goods-producing jobs is already here in the Made in China and Made in Mexico labels. I suppose they are worried about the risk to service jobs without saying so. I’m more worried about the decline of science at the hands of advocacy abusers than AI.
They fear that IA will take their job of “worst than we thought” headline writing.
AI can also cause dandruff. It’s worse than we thought. We must have a Socialist oligarchy to prevent world-wide flaking. Robust. Think of the children. Everyone who believe otherwise is a doo-doo brain. No, we don’t debate doo-doo brains. Sign the GropinShaggin Agreement! Send us grants. Heck, send me unprecedented franklins!
It all depends on what motivations are programmed into AI.
Humans aren’t motivated by intelligence, we are motivated by primal biological construction.
What motivates never Trumpers and anti Marine Le Pen hysterics?
“My 2018 prediction – expect to see more studies in the next five years exploring the impact of AI on climate change…”
Or the opposite will happen. They will try to convince us that climate change will make AI more dangerous. I’m not sure how they will explain it, but they already seem to believe that CO2 possesses some kind of evil intelligence. It can hide in the deep oceans until ready to reek havoc on the planet. It can selectively target poor nations and minorities. And it can choose to create heat waves or cold snaps, rain or drought, extreme weather or long periods of calm at its own pleasure. Mix intelligent CO2 with intelligent Silicon, and there is no limit to the evil the two might cook up together.
AI does not even have to show up for Congressional testimony…..in the tradition of Hillary.
I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlords.
In a related story, scientists at the University of Pennsylbrainia conducted a series of tests wherein the power from a fossil fuel power plant to the intelligent computer was cut.
The resulting death of the artificial intelligence proving conclusively (97.1% certainty) that CO2 causes AI!
103% of scientists ate now calling for the unplugging of any computers smarter than they are. (100%)
Oh yeah! No more CO2 production, too!
Researchers at Smerkley concur.
and human intelligence is the biggest threat to the global warming scamsters – I may have just made up the word scamster
Even scarier is the looming threat of artificial stupidity (AS). Oh wait, that’s already here — computer climate models — AS in its nascent stages, soon to be followed by much worse.
The only thing worse than a cyborg is a stupid cyborg — I bees bak [not as scary as the original is it?]
No poop! Lots of things are much more concerning than the biggest scam in human history.
Yea, I was thinking about a WUWT article earlier this week — about the woman lying awake at night worrying about the effect of human-induced climate change on her children’s future. And I was thinking, “Wow, you must be living an extremely comfortable life to have this worry as the major one keeping you awake at night!” The kicker is that fossil fuels enable such a level of comfort.
The British Science Association itself is a greater threat to civilization than climate change.
So is the AAAS, for that matter.
When two AI self driving cars are going to collide, which one decides who dies?
I do have serious doubts about artificial intelligence, but I also see that there is not enough of the natural kind.
I spend several hours a day witnessing the achievements of AI in the realm of tv broadcast captions. The ability of the AI available to such corporations as the CBC, BBC, PBS, and TV5(France) is underwhelming. Some of the failures are simply astonishing. I worry about AI from the perspective of its capability to crash and burn the world through shoddy programming and inadequate testing.
Micro$oft doesn’t test, just lets the world do it for them.