Timothy Birdnow

I pretty much agree with this. It may be a bit overblown but I think the article puts the danger of AI in perspective. Interestingly enough I agree with Bill Gates, although I wouldn't want HIM to be the person in control of restraining the technology.

We call it AI - artificial intelligence - but it is far from sentient, just a machine with capabilities of learning on it's own. What it is is a superior tool, and where there are tools there are bad people misusing them. A club was a great tool for hunting animals and providing food, but some schmuck decided it was a great weapon and stove in his neighbor's skull. Fire was Man's most useful tool but it was turned into terrible weapons of war. Now we have AI and it can be weaponized too.

It can also be used for criminality. And for the worst sort of criminality - politics.

I fear it's abuse in politics. A politician could run an interactive version of himself, answering questions and speaking personally to voters. Imagine it! The politician's image calling a voter by name, asking about his family members and talking about his interests (gleaned from a web search) and then asking for his support. It would be immensely powerful. The politician who could do THAT could own the world if he kept others out of the game.

It would have immense brainwashing capabilities.

It could even reproduce the voice of a loved one who passed away. How powerful would that be?

(The T.V. show Evil had an episode about that; a company that reproduced a loved one's voice to help the grieving widow/widower but the AI system doing it was evil and began encouraging people to kill themselves or do other bad things.)

This IS dangerous technology but I see no way of stopping it. It's like the industrial revolution; the Luddites tried to stop it because it was costing them jobs but there was just no way to stop it. The AI revolution is no different. We have to learn to live with it, to guide it in a proper direction, to put in safeguards. We need Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics for AI.(There were actually four in the end.) They read:

1.A robot may not injure a human being, or,

through inaction, allow a human being to come

to harm.

 

2.A robot must obey the orders given it by human

beings except where such orders would conflict

with the First Law.

 

3.A robot must protect its own existence so long

as such protection does not conflict with the

First or Second Laws.

 

0. The Zeroth Law of Robotics: A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

These laws were not just software patches; they were built into the robot brains so that if a robot disobeyed them, even if accidentally, they would short out. There was a kill switch on a robot to stop it, because society realized robots had the potential to be very dangerous machines. In fact, it almost caused a war when the people of the planet Aurora learned the people of Solaria had been tampering with the three laws in their robots; all the societies that used robots feared them to a greater or lesser degree.

We should fear AI for similar reasons and should find ways to restrict them. Man must remain the master of his own technology and not it's servant.

Another television program about AI was Person of Interest. In it a reclusive billionaire named Harold Finch invents an AI and gives it to the government to stop terrorist attacks. It collects data from public cameras and predicts terrorism. It also predicts premeditated crimes and the government throws the list of those crimes away - so Finch hires an ex-CIA agent to hep him save those people. In the end the government has an ex-MI6 Agent to build a new machine and the first AI has to go, so a war breaks out between the machines using human agents. The original AI (known simply as The Machine) has safeguards built into it by Finch, the other (known as Samaritan) does not; it intends to build a "paradise" by manipulating and controlling human beings. The war ends with half of the main characters dead and the world in tatters. It was a good show.

There have, of course, been plenty of other fictional warnings about AI systems, starting with Frankenstein and proceeding through years. Even Frankenstein was not the first; there was the legend of the Golem, a monster created by a Kabaalist rabbi. There were others.

So it's not like we haven't had sufficient warning.

In the end playing God is dangerous and since we do not have the wisdom of God nor His complete knowledge we will make mistakes and with something as powerful as AI those mistakes could be very costly indeed. But this is a runaway train and getting off would be even more dangerous than staying on board and trying to control the locomotive.

Anyway, Bill Gates thinks AI is going to offer us a nasty surprise and he may be right. But he is most definitely not the guy we want in the Engine room.

One final thought; in the Book of Revelations about midway through there is the fall of Babylon, and it is mentioned how ship captains sit off-shore and watch the city burning and mourn because they got rich of it and now it was all gone. This suggests a great source of wealth will be lost and it occurs to me that if there WERE to be an AI attack on our financial system it could crash it and a great source of wealth could be lost. Wouldn't everyone who traded and made vast sums of money off the current banking and trading system stand from afar and mourn? This, by the way, is what leads to the rise of the Antichrist in the book. Might we be on the cusp of witnessing the fall of Babylon now? If Gates is right we just might be.

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