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Wednesday, August 28, 2019

AI, Humanity and Civilization

A future look at AI.  I think too pessimistic, but suggests some cautions about how we will need to utilize it.   Augmentation rather than autonomy may be the best initial guide.

The Metamorphosis

AI will bring many wonders. It may also destabilize everything from nuclear détente to human friendships. We need to think much harder about how to adapt.    August 19, 2019  Atlantic

By  Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser and secretary of state to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford; Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman of Alphabet; and Daniel Huttenlocher, the founder and former dean of Cornell Tech and the current dean of the MIT Schwarzman College of Computing, met regularly for three years to discuss AI. In an Atlantic article, they discuss the impact AI may have on society, from the fairly predictable (how will we monitor and regulate AI and what to do about AI weaponry) to what AI isn’t telling us that it’s learning and how AI could induce humans to feel emotions toward it that it’s incapable of reciprocating ....  Via O'Reilly: 

Humanity is at the edge of a revolution driven by artificial intelligence. It has the potential to be one of the most significant and far-reaching revolutions in history, yet it has developed out of disparate efforts to solve specific practical problems rather than a comprehensive plan. Ironically, the ultimate effect of this case-by-case problem solving may be the transformation of human reasoning and decision making.

This article appears in the August 2019 issue.

This revolution is unstoppable. Attempts to halt it would cede the future to that element of humanity more courageous in facing the implications of its own inventiveness. Instead, we should accept that AI is bound to become increasingly sophisticated and ubiquitous, and ask ourselves: How will its evolution affect human perception, cognition, and interaction? What will be its impact on our culture and, in the end, our history?

Such questions brought together the three authors of this article: a historian and sometime policy maker; a former chief executive of a major technology company; and the dean of a principal technology-oriented academic institution. We have been meeting for three years to try to understand these issues and their associated riddles. Each of us is convinced of our inability, within the confines of our respective fields of expertise, to fully analyze a future in which machines help guide their own evolution, improving themselves to better solve the problems for which they were designed. So as a starting point—and, we hope, a springboard for wider discussion—we are engaged in framing a more detailed set of questions about the significance of AI’s development for human civilization. ... "

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