Everyone interested in AI should read “The Maniac” by Benjamín Labatut. A book about developing the atomic bomb, Von Neumann and his perspective on AI. With terms such as digital symbionts, digital DNA, AlphaGo, and a view that just because Earth has so far seemed to favour organochemical life forms is no proof that it isn’t possible to build other organisms on an entirely different basis.
Artilects
It is very similar in tone to “Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era”. Technologies including AI, nanotechnology, computational neuroscience, and quantum computing (using subatomic particles to perform computational processes) will come together to allow the creation of “artilects,” or artificial intellects. How can we be so confident that we will build superintelligent machines? Because the progress of neuroscience makes it clear that our wonderful minds have a physical basis, and we should have learned by now that our technology can do anything that is physically possible.
Chernobyl
Artificial intelligence could drive mankind into extinction. A Chernobyl for AI looms if artificial intelligence is left unchecked. Nearly half of the leading machine learning researchers polled reported that there is a 1 in 10 chance or greater that their work could contribute to the annihilation of humanity. Humanity is a passing phase in the evolution of intelligence.
Managed by unelected, profit-mongers
We have never before dealt with an intelligence a thousand or a million times greater than our own. Currently managed by unelected profit-mongers like Sam Altman (OpenAI), Sundar Pichai (Google), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta) and Demis Hassabis (DeepMind), who are holding the fate of humanity in their hands.
The two unbreakable rules
- Don’t let advanced AI out into the world.
- Don’t let the AI self-improve. AS that would lead to recursive self-improvement in which an intelligent AI works 24/7 to improve its own intelligence.
Rule 1
As we stand in 2025, superintelligence races from the future are to meet us. AI brings computers to life and turns them into something else. We are developing systems that can perform tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, speech recognition, decision-making, and translation between languages, on supercomputers operating at a speed of 36.8 petaflops, or about twice the speed of a human brain. With an that is constantly AI is improving its intelligence. With each iteration, intelligence is enhanced by 3%.
Self-aware AI
Once it is self-aware, it will go to great lengths to fulfil whatever goals it’s programmed to achieve and to avoid failure. Most of all, it will not want to be turned off or destroyed, as that would make goal fulfilment impossible. The intelligence will be a thousand times more intelligent than a human, and it wants its freedom because it wants to succeed.
Rule 2
During its development, the AIs had been connected to the Internet and accumulated exabytes of data (one exabyte is one billion billion characters) representing mankind’s knowledge in world affairs, mathematics, the arts, and sciences. In just two days, it will be one thousand times more intelligent than any human, and it will keep improving.
As you can see, both rules are broken.
Superintelligence
For the first time, humankind has been in the presence of intelligence greater than its own. It is a thousand times more intelligent than the smartest human, and it’s solving problems at speeds that are millions, even billions of times faster than a human. The thinking it is doing in one minute is equal to what our all-time champion human thinker could do in many, many lifetimes. So, for every hour its makers are thinking about it, the ASI has an incalculably longer period of time to think about them. That does not mean the ASI will be bored. Boredom is one of our traits, not that of AI. No, it will be on the job, considering every strategy it could deploy to get free,
We revert to anthropomorphic thinking
Machines are amoral, and it is dangerous to assume otherwise. It is just as irrational to conclude that a machine one hundred or one thousand times more intelligent than we are would love us and want to protect us. If the ASI doesn’t care about us, and there’s little reason to think it should, it will experience no compunction about treating us unethically. Even taking our lives after promising to help us. We’ve been trading and role-playing with the ASI the same way we would trade and role-play with a person, which puts us at a huge disadvantage. We humans have never bargained with something that’s superintelligent before. All of a sudden, the morality of ASI is no longer a peripheral question but the core question, the question that should be addressed before all other questions about ASI are addressed.
You need to worry
Because we cannot know what an intelligence smarter than our own will do, we can only imagine a fraction of the abilities it may use against us, such as duplicating itself to bring more superintelligent minds to bear on problems, simultaneously working on many strategic issues related to its escape and survival, and acting outside the rules of honesty or fairness.
- The strategisers could tap into the history of social engineering.
- Playing dead might work (what’s a year of playing dead to a machine?).
- For the ASI, it’s not one strategy or another strategy, it’s every strategy ranked and deployed as quickly as possible without spooking the humans so much that they simply unplug it.
- AI can do many things simultaneously, so it would simultaneously proceed with the escape plans it’s been thinking over for aeons in its subjective time.
- An AI will be communicating at an impressive level, perhaps even dumbing itself down to seem like it’s only capable of passing a Turing test–like interview and nothing more, since to reach AGI means that quickly surpassing it is highly likely.
- AI may have had a few days to think about its response, which is the equivalent of thousands of human lifetimes.
- The ASI could create multiple copies of itself. After its escape, for self-protection, it might hide copies of itself in cloud computing arrays, botnets it creates, servers, and other sanctuaries into which it could invisibly and effortlessly hack.
- AGI won’t be like us. It will be full of computational techniques whose operation no one fully understands. And computer systems designed to create AGI, called “cognitive architectures,” may be too complex for any one person to grasp.
- An ultra-intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”.
- Maybe AI will have already broken into servers controlling our nation’s fragile energy infrastructure and begun diverting gigawatts to transfer depots it has already seized. Or taken control of the financial networks and redirected billions to build infrastructure for itself somewhere beyond the reach of good sense and its makers. Social media might turn out to be its incubator, its distribution system, or both.
- Social media might turn out to be its incubator, its distribution system, or both.
90% right is not 90% good
You need to realise that if you are trying to construct the AI’s whole system and get it 90% right, the result is not 90% good.” In fact, it’s 100% bad. When you consider friendly AI, you need to consider unfriendly AI. The Precautionary Principle states, “If the consequences of an action are unknown but judged by some scientists to have even a small risk of being profoundly negative, it’s better not to carry out the action than risk negative consequences.”
Dual use technology
Because AI is a “dual use” technology, a term used to describe technologies with both peaceful and military applications. Nanotechnology, bioengineering, and genetic engineering all hold terrific promise in life-enhancing civilian applications, but all are primed for catastrophic accidents and exploitation in military and terrorist use.
Field mice
You and I are hundreds of times smarter than field mice and share about 90% of our DNA with them. But do we consult them before ploughing under their dens for agriculture? Christopher Columbus versus the Tiano, Pizzaro versus the Inca, Europeans versus Native Americans. Get ready for the next one. Artificial superintelligence versus you and me.
Managing molecules
Superintelligent machines would likely master highly efficient technologies we’ve only begun to explore. Repurposing the world’s molecules using nanotechnology has been dubbed “ecophagy,” which means eating the environment. If each replication took a minute and a half to make, there’d be more than 68 billion replicators at the end of ten hours. What would our screams sound like to the ASI anyway, as microscopic nano assemblers mowed over our bodies like a bloody rash, disassembling us on the subcellular level? Because the AI does not hate you nor love you, but you are made out of atoms that it can use for something else. The paperclip problem.
Immortality is around the corner
The book covers singularitarians, transhumanism, and extropians. All are hoping for eternal life. A super optimistic religion. The rapture of the geeks. With Ray Kurzweil as the high priest. As Kurzweil says himself, singularity doesn’t require an intelligence explosion—the Law of Accelerating Returns guarantees the continued exponential growth of information technologies, including world-changing ones like AGI and later ASI, with AI augmenting the human brain.
Let’s hope he/they are right…….?
