Re: Existential risks

Curt Welch wrote:

I don't have as much faith as Tim seems to in the idea of AI becoming the
dominate life form any time soon. I see no motivation for a smart robot to
want to reproduce, or to build other robots that want to reproduce.

There is no motivation for cell phones to reproduce - but nonetheless
there seem to have been an awful lot of them made recently.

Memetically speaking, the cellphone blueprints evolve, and
cell phones are part of their phenotype. AIs and robots
will probably be like that.

Why would man want to build robots that would want to steal resources away
from us by motivating them to want to survive and reproduce? It's as
stupid an idea as trying to build a machine to dril for oil and burn it up
when it found it. What on earth would motivate us to build machines to
consume our energy and raw material without producing something we wanted
as a side effect?

Machines compete with humans for resources whether we like it or not -
their ecological niche overlaps with our own. Why then do we build
them? Because of the things they let us do.

Any AI which doesn't continue to serve man's needs, will be seen as a
threat and eliminated. No sane person will build a machine that will kill
them, and a self reproducing resource stealing AI will kill us. The sane
people of the world will do whatever it takes to protect themselves from
the insane people who build such machines and from the accidents that might
happen where something thought to be good turns bad.

I don't think AIs will kill us. At least that is not very likely.
More like, in a machine-dominated economy, many unmodified humans
will find it difficult to compete - which means that they will be
forced away from the centres of industry, to where land is cheap.

There will be rebels against this state of affairs - but they will
be rebels against the rest of civilisation.

I could agree to an argument that it's inevitable that life forms very
different from man may inherit the earth at some distant point in the
future. But it's hard for me to accept the idea that it will happen any
time soon.

One point of the accelerating change observations is that the long
term arrives sooner than you might think.

Strong AI I believe will happen soon, but man won't be replaced
any time soon. Who knows how we will evolve with the help of advancements
in technology and genetics, but whatever we evolove into is what will most
likely inherit the earth.

Humans are a crummy starting point for any future development -
so our descendants will most likely be more closely related to
today's machines than they are to us.

Building on the human foundation is a ridiculous plan.

Augmenting humans would just wind up with their brains
being replaced by computers, and their bodies by robots -
not a significantly different result from a straght
machine takeover.

Uploads may preserve some human minds, but you need an
extremely advanced AI to make that possible, and then,
the motivation to upload old personalities becomes pretty
weak. How many people play with Commodore PET emulators
these days - not many. Human minds will be even more
archaic and useless, by the time they can be uploaded.
--
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|im |yler http://timtyler.org/ tim@xxxxxxxxxxx Remove lock to reply.
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