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Machines probably aren’t interested in global takeover. Here’s why.
What most people worry about when it comes to artificial intelligence likely comes from science-fiction fantasy.
GARY MARCUS: A lot of people are really scared about AI. I think they're scared about the wrong things. Most people who talk about AI risk are worried About AI taking over the universe. There's an example from Nick Bostrom that sticks in a lot of people's heads. This is an AI system that is supposed to be rewarded for making paper clips. And this is all well and good for a little while, and then it runs out of the metals that it needs. Eventually it starts turning people into paperclips because there's a little bit of metal in people and there's no more metal to get. So this is our kind of sorcerer's apprentice terror that I think a lot of people are living in. I don't think it's a realistic terror for a couple of reasons. First of all, it's certainly not realistic right now. We don't have machines that are resourceful enough to know how to make paperclips unless you carefully show them every detail of the process. They're not innovators right now. So this is a long way away, if ever. It also assumes that the machines that could do this are so dumb that they don't understand anything else. But that doesn't actually make sense. Like, if you were smart enough not only to want to collect metal from human beings but to chase the human beings down, then you actually have a lot of common sense, a lot of understanding of the world. If you had some common sense and a basic law that says don't do harm to humans, which Asimov thought of in the '40s, then I think that you could actually preclude these kinds of things. So, we need a little bit of legislation. We need a lot of common sense in the machines and some basic values in the machines. But once we do that, I think we'll be OK. And I don't think we're going to get to machines that are so resourceful that they could even contemplate these kinds of scenarios until we have all that stuff built in. So I don't think that's really going to happen. And the other side of this is machines have never shown any interest in doing anything like that. You think about the game of Go, that's a game of taking territory. In 1970 no machine could play go at all. Now machines can play go better than the best human. So they're really good at taking territory on the board. And in that time the increase in their desire to take actual territory on the actual planet is zero. That hasn't changed at all. They're just not interested in us. And so I think these things are just science fiction fantasies. On the other hand, I think there's something to be worried about, which is that current AI is lousy. And thinking about people in the White House, the issue is not how bright somebody is, It's how much power they have. So you could be extremely bright and use your power wisely, or not so bright but have a lot of power and not use it wisely. Right now we have a lot of AI that's increasingly playing an important role in our lives, but it's not necessarily doing the careful multi-step reasoning that we want it to do. That's a problem. So it means, for example, that the systems we have now are very subject to bias. You just, statistics in, and you're not careful about the statistics, you get all kinds of garbage. You do Google searches for, like, "grandmother and child," and you get mostly examples of white people, because there's no system there monitoring the searches trying to make things representative of the world's population. They're just taking what we call a "convenient sample." And turns out there's more labeled pictures with grandmother and grandchild among white people, because more white people use the software or something like that. I'm slightly making up the example, but I think you'll find examples like that. These systems have no awareness of the general properties of the world. They just use statistics. And yet they're in a position, for example, to do job interviews. Amazon tried this for like four years and finally gave up and decided they couldn't do it well. But people are more and more saying, well, let's get the data. Let's get deep learning. Let's get machine learning. And we'll have it solve all our problems. Well, systems we have now are not sophisticated enough to do that. And so trusting a system that's basically a glorified calculator to make decisions about who should go to jail, or who should get a job, things like that, those are, at best risky and probably foolish.
- When someone says they fear artificial intelligence, what are they imagining? Robots taking over the world is the stuff of science-fiction fantasy.
- Despite decades of beating humans at the game of Go, AI has never developed the desire to take over actual territory. The reality is that machines are not resourceful and have no interest in us.
- Although AI plays an increasingly important role in our lives, we have a ways to go before deep learning and machines are solving all of our problems.
- Human-like AI could emerge in 5 to 10 years - Big Think ›
- Putin Weighs in on Artificial Intelligence and Elon Musk Is Alarmed ... ›
‘Designer baby’ book trilogy explores the moral dilemmas humans may soon create
How would the ability to genetically customize children change society? Sci-fi author Eugene Clark explores the future on our horizon in Volume I of the "Genetic Pressure" series.
- A new sci-fi book series called "Genetic Pressure" explores the scientific and moral implications of a world with a burgeoning designer baby industry.
- It's currently illegal to implant genetically edited human embryos in most nations, but designer babies may someday become widespread.
- While gene-editing technology could help humans eliminate genetic diseases, some in the scientific community fear it may also usher in a new era of eugenics.
Tribalism and discrimination
<p>One question the "Genetic Pressure" series explores: What would tribalism and discrimination look like in a world with designer babies? As designer babies grow up, they could be noticeably different from other people, potentially being smarter, more attractive and healthier. This could breed resentment between the groups—as it does in the series.</p><p>"[Designer babies] slowly find that 'everyone else,' and even their own parents, becomes less and less tolerable," author Eugene Clark told Big Think. "Meanwhile, everyone else slowly feels threatened by the designer babies."</p><p>For example, one character in the series who was born a designer baby faces discrimination and harassment from "normal people"—they call her "soulless" and say she was "made in a factory," a "consumer product." </p><p>Would such divisions emerge in the real world? The answer may depend on who's able to afford designer baby services. If it's only the ultra-wealthy, then it's easy to imagine how being a designer baby could be seen by society as a kind of hyper-privilege, which designer babies would have to reckon with. </p><p>Even if people from all socioeconomic backgrounds can someday afford designer babies, people born designer babies may struggle with tough existential questions: Can they ever take full credit for things they achieve, or were they born with an unfair advantage? To what extent should they spend their lives helping the less fortunate? </p>Sexuality dilemmas
<p>Sexuality presents another set of thorny questions. If a designer baby industry someday allows people to optimize humans for attractiveness, designer babies could grow up to find themselves surrounded by ultra-attractive people. That may not sound like a big problem.</p><p>But consider that, if designer babies someday become the standard way to have children, there'd necessarily be a years-long gap in which only some people are having designer babies. Meanwhile, the rest of society would be having children the old-fashioned way. So, in terms of attractiveness, society could see increasingly apparent disparities in physical appearances between the two groups. "Normal people" could begin to seem increasingly ugly.</p><p>But ultra-attractive people who were born designer babies could face problems, too. One could be the loss of body image. </p><p>When designer babies grow up in the "Genetic Pressure" series, men look like all the other men, and women look like all the other women. This homogeneity of physical appearance occurs because parents of designer babies start following trends, all choosing similar traits for their children: tall, athletic build, olive skin, etc. </p><p>Sure, facial traits remain relatively unique, but everyone's more or less equally attractive. And this causes strange changes to sexual preferences.</p><p>"In a society of sexual equals, they start looking for other differentiators," he said, noting that violet-colored eyes become a rare trait that genetically engineered humans find especially attractive in the series.</p><p>But what about sexual relationships between genetically engineered humans and "normal" people? In the "Genetic Pressure" series, many "normal" people want to have kids with (or at least have sex with) genetically engineered humans. But a minority of engineered humans oppose breeding with "normal" people, and this leads to an ideology that considers engineered humans to be racially supreme. </p>Regulating designer babies
<p>On a policy level, there are many open questions about how governments might legislate a world with designer babies. But it's not totally new territory, considering the West's dark history of eugenics experiments.</p><p>In the 20th century, the U.S. conducted multiple eugenics programs, including immigration restrictions based on genetic inferiority and forced sterilizations. In 1927, for example, the Supreme Court ruled that forcibly sterilizing the mentally handicapped didn't violate the Constitution. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes wrote, "… three generations of imbeciles are enough." </p><p>After the Holocaust, eugenics programs became increasingly taboo and regulated in the U.S. (though some states continued forced sterilizations <a href="https://www.uvm.edu/~lkaelber/eugenics/" target="_blank">into the 1970s</a>). In recent years, some policymakers and scientists have expressed concerns about how gene-editing technologies could reanimate the eugenics nightmares of the 20th century. </p><p>Currently, the U.S. doesn't explicitly ban human germline genetic editing on the federal level, but a combination of laws effectively render it <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">illegal to implant a genetically modified embryo</a>. Part of the reason is that scientists still aren't sure of the unintended consequences of new gene-editing technologies. </p><p>But there are also concerns that these technologies could usher in a new era of eugenics. After all, the function of a designer baby industry, like the one in the "Genetic Pressure" series, wouldn't necessarily be limited to eliminating genetic diseases; it could also work to increase the occurrence of "desirable" traits. </p><p>If the industry did that, it'd effectively signal that the <em>opposites of those traits are undesirable. </em>As the International Bioethics Committee <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jlb/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jlb/lsaa006/5841599#204481018" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">wrote</a>, this would "jeopardize the inherent and therefore equal dignity of all human beings and renew eugenics, disguised as the fulfillment of the wish for a better, improved life."</p><p><em>"Genetic Pressure Volume I: Baby Steps"</em><em> by Eugene Clark is <a href="http://bigth.ink/38VhJn3" target="_blank">available now.</a></em></p>The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle may finally be solved
Meteorologists propose a stunning new explanation for the mysterious events in the Bermuda Triangle.
One of life's great mysteries, the Bermuda Triangle might have finally found an explanation. This strange region, that lies in the North Atlantic Ocean between Bermuda, Miami and San Juan, Puerto Rico, has been the presumed cause of dozens and dozens of mind-boggling disappearances of ships and planes.
Astrophysicists find unique "hot Jupiter" planet without clouds
A unique exoplanet without clouds or haze was found by astrophysicists from Harvard and Smithsonian.
Illustration of WASP-62b, the Jupiter-like planet without clouds or haze in its atmosphere.
- Astronomers from Harvard and Smithsonian find a very rare "hot Jupiter" exoplanet without clouds or haze.
- Such planets were formed differently from others and offer unique research opportunities.
- Only one other such exoplanet was found previously.
Munazza Alam – a graduate student at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian.
Credit: Jackie Faherty
Jupiter's Colorful Cloud Bands Studied by Spacecraft
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="8a72dfe5b407b584cf867852c36211dc"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/GzUzCesfVuw?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>Lair of giant predator worms from 20 million years ago found
Scientists discover burrows of giant predator worms that lived on the seafloor 20 million years ago.
Bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois)
- Scientists in Taiwan find the lair of giant predator worms that inhabited the seafloor 20 million years ago.
- The worm is possibly related to the modern bobbit worm (Eunice aphroditois).
- The creatures can reach several meters in length and famously ambush their pray.
A three-dimensional model of the feeding behavior of Bobbit worms and the proposed formation of Pennichnus formosae.
Credit: Scientific Reports
Beware the Bobbit Worm!
<span style="display:block;position:relative;padding-top:56.25%;" class="rm-shortcode" data-rm-shortcode-id="1f9918e77851242c91382369581d3aac"><iframe type="lazy-iframe" data-runner-src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/_As1pHhyDHY?rel=0" width="100%" height="auto" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;"></iframe></span>FOSTA-SESTA: Have controversial sex trafficking acts done more harm than good?
The idea behind the law was simple: make it more difficult for online sex traffickers to find victims.
