chimaster:

ideal, How many condoms do you see advertised "This one never breaks"...

 I see the main problem being that people want more and more sophisticated robots and it will be increasingly difficult to program the 'control circuit' in a way that it can't be hacked by the program itself.

I see your point, my thought is just to make it safer than without such programming.  Another option, of course, is to keep humans running the power plants.  Robots become abusive, humans starve them.

chimaster:

CP, Only cyborgs will be able to compete at allwith robots. But I think sentient robots have advantages.

Well, rats and cockroaches successfully deal with people and have adapted to use the environments we've created. In fact, coyotes have too. Not to mention smallpox, plague, and such. Some parasites control host behavior to their oen ends, and we can probably learn to do it...

Probably biolife will exploit the new environments, though those of us here today may not like what develops.

ideal:

I'd say the answer to all of this is fairly simple.  Program the superintelligence to be benevolent.  Let it do whatever it pleases beyond that, but remove it's capacity to harm man.  Much like Asimov.

If it's superintelligent it should be able to navigate around any programming if necessary.

Humans can redirect innate tendencies in themselves and domestic animals (as in using dogs' hunting and stalking behaviors to hunt prey for us or guide blind people and herd flocks).

I'm wondering if a future scenerio might be more like what James Martin has written in his book "After the Internet: Alien Intelligence". Basically, James states that computer "intelligence" will continue to evolve in a way that is very different than human intelligence, and in some spheres will be superior, but in the way we think of intelligence, far inferior.

James sees a future, in about 10 to 15 years from now with very highly developed A.I. based on evolutionary software, neuro nets,  ect. that will be like super-idiot savants. Just imagine something that could be possible based on what would be cutting edge understanding of science, and the genetic algorithmic A. I. could design the best possible proto-type with available materials. Already, some of the designs being created by genetic algorithms, or evolutionary algorithms are , for lack of a better definition, one million times more intelligent than what an unaided human consciousness could do with years of work-and the program can do it in two or three days. That was three years ago and you can read about it, it is titled "Catch the Fire! - Innovative dotcom engineers ReInvent Solar Power". Just google it, (google is an example of a sort of A.I., still primitive though).

The future of A.I. might very well be just computers doing what they are good at, and getting a hundred tintillion times better at it over the next 25 years. They may never develope consciousness on there own, unless guided to do so by an existing consciousness, i.e. human.

James seems to think that we already have 6.5 billion or so human brains so we don't need to build more of them, just make life better for the ones already here.

Of course, these super-idiot savants may help develope novel ways of uploading an existing human mind into an A.I. developed quantum computing platform. That might be a better way of developing a fully conscious A.I.. Just upload ourselves in the future, at least for those of us who might find that desirable.

The union of Man/Machine is happening now. It is already too late to 'pull the plug' on the computers, as they already control the power plants and the grid that supplies the energy to us. To do so would bring about the gigadeath the original poster was worried about. Humanity is dependant on technology to support the billions already on this planet.

Recent News:

Here is an example of machines augmenting man : http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/03-29-2006/0004329201&EDATE= , a bionic leg that uses 'AI' to interact with the human nervous system.

Here is a bionic eye that is hooked directly to the brain, bypassing the optic nerve: http://www.engadget.com/2006/04/03/bionic-eye-bypasses-optic-nerve/

Here is a technology that interfaces thousands of neurons to a tiny silicon chip:http://www.scenta.co.uk/scenta/news.cfm?cit_id=683061&FAArea1=customWidgets.content_view_1

This is just what has been reported in the past few weeks: we talk about 'the magical future' and hope we live to see it. Open your eyes! We are living it!

 

If you think it is too late to do anything about the creation of machines with General Intelligence, which don't exist yet, then it is.

I don't think so, so in my world that does not apply.

I think we should have a serious discussion about this. If I had enough energy and time on my hands, I'd like to have a little chat with the Koreans for example.

Now is the time to act.

Sorry, not gonna help you.

In 'my world', intelligent machines are most welcome. I believe the more intelligent, the more likely to act for the 'common good', and as I believe that humans and machine are already inextricably linked; they will help to resolve many of the problems that we humans have caused amongst ourselves and to our planet. It is the antipathy that many humans feel toward what will become benevolent partners that I must fight against.

Actually, the union of human and machine, if it didn't happen the first time an ancestor used a tool, began the first time someone used a stick to aid in walking while lame or arthritic.

We see today the beginnings of the union of chimp, orang, gorilla and machine, though they'll probably never make it to our level barring intervention or the unforeseen.

One way to control the intelligence of a machine, whose "common good" might include killing off people for reasons known only to the computer, is to control its access to its own abilities. It might maintain only a moderately high intelligence in general operation. A controlling mechanism can shift through information on available hardware and software and how long a problem of the given complexity will take to be solved, then switch on more and more sections for the estimated time, shutting down each section as the relevant problem is solved or when they've been in operation too long. When on the sections will not communicate with each other but feed information into the controlling unit, and when off the sections will not be able to communicate or perform operations. Possibly a really complex problem will bring many times the present power of all the world's computers to bear for an hour and a half, then shut it down, solved or not; it can be turned on again for two hours when directed, then shut off with the controller retaining information on progress and remaining calculations...

You get the idea. To keep it from taking over the computer will be incapable of continuously using more than a fraction of its power and thus ruminating over things at leisure or of having separate modules in contact save for particular reasons and moderated by a "conscience-moderator" unit. Memories of past operations will not be reachable unless relevant to a human posed question.

Ok it seems that we agree to disagree.

CP, very interesting, I like that.

One possible problem could be the same thing that is driving the Korean robot project; people want them. They don't want R2D2's that beep, they want sex robots that can talk of quantum physics. You wouldn't want your sex robot to start doing service maintenance in the middle of the act right...

At least that's the impression I got from the news article. That Korean people are so used to high tech that maybe they even have survey data showing that people don't object to personal robots.

I think that's bewildering, considering the opposition or disenthusiasm found in most other places.

What about networking? Wow, I admit I might have been too impressed by Blade Runner but what if we had Replicants who wanted to escape their fate... as service robots... because they saw themselves no different from us. What if they started protesting... a protest-virus coded by robots who have more spare time than others... pushing the Boss-key before the conscience-moderator unit starts a seek on the process... then start sharing the code with others...

Am I getting carried away? :)

Oh btw you probably wrote about a giant system or a giant networked system but I wrote of relatively little systems which will nonetheless have quite a lot of processing power. A big system is easier to control.

I think that the utility of highly intelligent systems for problems that requre constant monitoring of conditions, in order to predict things such as an eminent attack by a foriegn country, or a favorable stock market condition will cause the design of systems that run at full capacity constantly. The fear that the computer will use its capacity against its owners is unlikely to outweigh the percieved benefits of a highly functional machine.

That man is a technological animal certainly is ancient history. The fact that man can now interface directly with computers, and the fact that this ability, in my opinion, seems to have entered a Moore's law type of rate of progress is very new. Man will use computers to augment his own intellegience sooner than a true AI will appear. Is this augmented human intelligence also to be feared? Men have started wars before, machines have not.

Perhaps we should dedicate this site to stopping the augmentation of human intelligence, as it could bring about fearsome consequences.

 

Maybe I actually talked of stopping the development of a general intelligence but that may be just wishful thinking. Rather to make security a high priority.

If augmented people start wars they wouldn't have augmented themselves very well... at least not their brains, because doing that without increasing empathy is not very easy. But non-augmented countries might start wars against augmented countries... civil wars maybe.

But even if that happens, that doesn't mean me and my buddies will die. I think we can make sure of that, unless there a complete around-the-world nuclear holocaust. It's easier to fight against other cyborgs than machines IMO.

And I even haven't played a lot of FPS's.

Westerners seem to fear robots and AI much more than Eastern culture does. I think this is because we have been trained by a century of stories conditioning us to fear robots. Easterners, especially Japanese, have been conditioned by their media to feel the opposite.

Here is a link to an article in The Economist to support this statement: http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displaystory.cfm?story_id=5323427

Some Excerpts:

Few Japanese have the fear of robots that seems to haunt westerners in seminars and Hollywood films. In western popular culture, robots are often a threat, either because they are manipulated by sinister forces or because something goes horribly wrong with them. By contrast, most Japanese view robots as friendly and benign. Robots like people, and can do good.

Japanese popular culture has also consistently portrayed robots in a positive light, ever since Japan created its first famous cartoon robot, Tetsuwan Atomu, in 1951. Its name in Japanese refers to its atomic heart. Putting a nuclear core into a cartoon robot less than a decade after Hiroshima and Nagasaki might seem an odd way to endear people to the new character. But Tetsuwan Atomu—being a robot, rather than a human—was able to use the technology for good.

Over the past half century, scores of other Japanese cartoons and films have featured benign robots that work with humans, in some cases even blending with them. One of the latest is a film called “Hinokio”, in which a reclusive boy sends a robot to school on his behalf and uses virtual-reality technology to interact with classmates. Among the broad Japanese public, it is a short leap to hope that real-world robots will soon be able to pursue good causes, whether helping to detect landmines in war-zones or finding and rescuing victims of disasters.

The prevailing view in Japan is that the country is lucky to be uninhibited by robophobia. With fewer of the complexes that trouble many westerners, so the theory goes, Japan is free to make use of a great new tool, just when its needs and abilities are happily about to converge. “Of all the nations involved in such research,” the Japan Times wrote in a 2004 editorial, “Japan is the most inclined to approach it in a spirit of fun.”

danlgarmstrong:

Perhaps we should dedicate this site to stopping the augmentation of human intelligence, as it could bring about fearsome consequences.

 

I'm not sure what you mean here. I favor increasing biologically based human intelligence just as I do the life span. If you mean machine intelligence by augmentation, I certainly favor controls on it. Possibly by the means I suggested, perhaps also by antagonist machines designed to examine and oppose other machines when needed.

In the long run I regard robots and computers as tools and favor biological entities, but machines are useful in helping improve biology.

(Everyone: Be careful about contrasting East Asian and Western thinking. The PC bunch are easily "offended" and you never know what'll do it.)

 

The remark about stopping humans from augmenting their own intelligence was a sarcastic response to what I percieve as a fear based bias against machine intelligence. I regretted it the minute I posted it.

I am one of those members that kinda figures 'damn the torpedos - full speed ahead'. I realize there are dangers in our headlong rush into these revolutionary technologies, but there is also so much promise in these same technologies that I want it here NOW.

I also think that while we have no idea what the goals of a super-intellect might be, I do not really think it need nessarily be a threat to us. I think it will empower many humans to grow and flower along side it, or it will let us ignore it all together.  Conflict need not an issue - it should even enable us to resolve conflicts amongst ourselves - the ultimate arbritrator! 

We probably will need something like it as I think humans and human society will probably go in many different directions soon - with large segments having different and opposing goals. I fear humanity more than I fear the unknown.

CP:

ideal:

I'd say the answer to all of this is fairly simple.  Program the superintelligence to be benevolent.  Let it do whatever it pleases beyond that, but remove it's capacity to harm man.  Much like Asimov.

If it's superintelligent it should be able to navigate around any programming if necessary.

Humans can redirect innate tendencies in themselves and domestic animals (as in using dogs' hunting and stalking behaviors to hunt prey for us or guide blind people and herd flocks).

@ideal: it's caled friendlynes theory, the Singularity Institute is dedicated to it.

There is a limit to what we can do, and a limit to what even a superinteligence could do with it's core programing. Inteligence implies the ability to find solution to new problems, but it does not imply self-control.