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Thursday, November 30, 2017

Why We Should Be Concerned About Artificial Superintelligence

Matthew Graves
Skeptic Magazine
Originally published November 2017

Here is an excerpt:

Our intelligence is ultimately a mechanistic process that happens in the brain, but there is no reason to assume that human intelligence is the only possible form of intelligence. And while the brain is complex, this is partly an artifact of the blind, incremental progress that shaped it—natural selection. This suggests that developing machine intelligence may turn out to be a simpler task than reverse- engineering the entire brain. The brain sets an upper bound on the difficulty of building machine intelligence; work to date in the field of artificial intelligence sets a lower bound; and within that range, it’s highly uncertain exactly how difficult the problem is. We could be 15 years away from the conceptual breakthroughs required, or 50 years away, or more.

The fact that artificial intelligence may be very different from human intelligence also suggests that we should be very careful about anthropomorphizing AI. Depending on the design choices AI scientists make, future AI systems may not share our goals or motivations; they may have very different concepts and intuitions; or terms like “goal” and “intuition” may not even be particularly applicable to the way AI systems think and act. AI systems may also have blind spots regarding questions that strike us as obvious. AI systems might also end up far more intelligent than any human.

The last possibility deserves special attention, since superintelligent AI has far more practical significance than other kinds of AI.

AI researchers generally agree that superintelligent AI is possible, though they have different views on how and when it’s likely to be developed. In a 2013 survey, top-cited experts in artificial intelligence assigned a median 50% probability to AI being able to “carry out most human professions at least as well as a typical human” by the year 2050, and also assigned a 50% probability to AI greatly surpassing the performance of every human in most professions within 30 years of reaching that threshold.

The article is here.