(Updated) Superintelligence Considered in New Context

Brought to my attention, a new book: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies  by Nick Bostrom   http://www.nickbostrom.com/

Reading.  They write:

" ... Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. 

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. ... "  ... 

A Doomsday Invention?

Following up on my reading of Bostrom's book:  Superintelligence, this 2015 article.  My take on this is that the dangers are still decades away, but does need to be thought about now.

The  New Yorker, November 23,  2015
The Doomsday Invention
Will artificial intelligence bring us utopia or destruction?
Features work of Nick Bostrum
By Raffi Khatchadourian

Superintelligence Considered

Quite late, but making my way through the well known Superintelligence book by Nick Bostrom. Some quite fascinating statistics of the futurist kind that are worth looking at.   Will the development of AI being seen today, that uses methods like neural nets and Bayesian methods,  be able to leverage itself to be self-replicating?  And become in a sense 'Super', and go beyond human intelligence?   What are the dangers involved?  As Bostrom asks, what are the paths, dangers and strategies to be considered?

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies  by Nick Bostrom  and his site  http://www.nickbostrom.com/  Lots of new resources at this link.

 They write:

" ... Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. 

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. ... " 

What AI Needs is a Dose of Realism

Good thoughts, though I am a strong proponent of AI, there is still much to do.

What AI needs is a dose of realism
Oren Etzioni talks about the current AI landscape, projects at the Allen Institute, and why we need AI to make sense of AI.

Video by Jenn Webb January 5, 2017  ,,, 

"I think what's missing in the AI conversation is a dose of realism. We have on the one extreme people like Kurzweil, who are fantastically optimistic but don't really have data to back up their wildly optimistic predictions. On the other hand, we have people who are very afraid, like Nick Bostrom, who's a philosopher from Oxford, or Elon Musk, who needs no introduction, and say AI is like summoning the demon, which is really religious imagery. But again, neither party has the data to base their conclusions on; it's wild extrapolations, it's metaphor (like AI is a demon), it's philosophical argumentation.

"I think we need to have a more measured approach, where we measure AI's performance, where we understand that superhuman success on a narrow task like Go doesn't translate to even human performance level on a broad range of tasks, the kind that people do. I like saying my six-year-old is a lot smarter than AlphaGo—he can cross the street, more or less."

—Oren Etzioni

Layering Realities for Better Simulation

 Am a long time practitioner of industrial simulation for problem solving, so this intrigued me.   Can we more effectively use VR to model worlds that represent our own?   And can that can be used to test design alternatives?  Does this only work in spaces that drirectly map to our own, like 3D flight simulation?. When the worlds are more abstract, the case is not so clear.  See below for video demo.

Layered Realities:
Oculus Quill shows how 'Inception'-like layered realities appear in VR   By Adario Strange

Mention made of Nick Bostrom's  Simulation Theory paper.

Thinking about SuperIntelligence

Brought to my attention, a new book: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies  by Nick Bostrom   http://www.nickbostrom.com/

Will be reading.  They write:

" ... Superintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. 

The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position. If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control. As the fate of the gorillas now depends more on humans than on the species itself, so would the fate of humankind depend on the actions of the machine superintelligence. ... "