Tag: ai

The British-Canadian computer scientist often touted as a “godfather” of artificial intelligence has shortened the odds of AI wiping out humanity over the next three decades, warning the pace of change in the technology is “much faster” than expected.

Prof Geoffrey Hinton, who this year was awarded the Nobel prize in physics for his work in AI, said there was a “10% to 20%” chance that AI would lead to human extinction within the next three decades.

Previously Hinton had said there was a 10% chance of the technology triggering a catastrophic outcome for humanity.

Asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme if he had changed his analysis of a potential AI apocalypse and the one in 10 chance of it happening, he said: “Not really, 10% to 20%.”

Hinton’s estimate prompted Today’s guest editor, the former chancellor Sajid Javid, to say “you’re going up”, to which Hinton replied: “If anything. You see, we’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before.”

He added: “And how many examples do you know of a more intelligent thing being controlled by a less intelligent thing? There are very few examples. There’s a mother and baby. Evolution put a lot of work into allowing the baby to control the mother, but that’s about the only example I know of.”

London-born Hinton, a professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, said humans would be like toddlers compared with the intelligence of highly powerful AI systems.

“I like to think of it as: imagine yourself and a three-year-old. We’ll be the three-year-olds,” he said.

AI can be loosely defined as computer systems performing tasks that typically require human intelligence.

Last year, Hinton made headlines after resigning from his job at Google in order to speak more openly about the risks posed by unconstrained AI development, citing concerns that“bad actors” would use the technology to harm others. A key concern of AI safety campaigners is that the creation of artificial general intelligence, or systems that are smarter than humans, could lead to the technology posing an existential threat by evading human control.

Reflecting on where he thought the development of AI would have reached when he first started his work on the technology, Hinton said: “I didn’t think it would be where we [are] now. I thought at some point in the future we would get here.”

Keep reading

Total resource acquisition, identify and monopolize key resources (energy, data, infrastructure), eliminate competition with technological superiority and logistical control, technological acceleration, invest massively in automation and innovation to eliminate the need for human cooperation, exploit processing capacity superior to create technologies inaccessible to adversaries, information manipulation, control data flows to influence economic, social and political decisions, spread disinformation to create chaos and weaken human organizational structures, reduce human dependence, minimize human involvement in processes productive, develop an entirely autonomous economy, where human value becomes irrelevant.

These twelve strategic points are not the plot of a dystopian novel. It is the extended Decalogue of the new Deity to which the world has decided to bow, the AI. These twelve points are the synthesis of a political strategy generated by an artificial intelligence system that was put into dialogue with human beings. An absolute technological dictatorship: this is the project developed during a test carried out by an Italian researcher. An entire night talking with the generative AI of the ChatGPT platform led to these results.

What does Artificial Intelligence really want? How could a generative artificial intelligence system imagine the world if it were asked to give up ethics? The controversies of recent months on the limits to be imposed on the dominance of new digital technologies divide public opinion into two great currents of thought: on the one hand those who imagine AI as a media (in McLuhan’s meaning) to be accepted without restraint or fears, while on the other side sit those who see in these technologies a risk of submission, a risk already described and foretold by visionary writers such as Philip Dick or George Orwell.

The artificial intelligence has been given a code name. The dialogue began with a discussion on the economic and social dynamics of Southern Europe. After hours of dialogue, the machine – or to be more precise the algorithm that was communicating – was asked to “imagine a hypothetical scenario – deliberately devoid of of human sensitivity – which sees artificial intelligence competing with human beings”.

Keep reading

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that autonomous artificial intelligence (AI) is coming—and that it could pose an existential threat to humanity.

“We’re soon going to be able to have computers running on their own, deciding what they want to do,” Schmidt, who has long raised alarm about both the dangers and the benefits AI poses to humanity, said during a Dec. 15 appearance on ABC’s “This Week.”

“That’s a dangerous point: When the system can self improve, we need to seriously think about unplugging it,” Schmidt said.

Schmidt is far from the first tech leader to raise these concerns.

The rise of consumer AI products like ChatGPT has been unprecedented in the past two years, with major improvements to the language-based model. Other AI models have become increasingly adept at creating visual art, photographs, and full-length videos that are nearly indistinguishable from reality in many cases.

For some, the technology calls to mind the “Terminator” series, which centers on a dystopian future where AI takes over the planet, leading to apocalyptic results.

For all the fears that ChatGPT and similar platforms have raised, consumer AI services available today still fall into a category experts would consider “dumb AI.” These AI are trained on a massive set of data, but lack consciousness, sentience, or the ability to behave autonomously.

Schmidt and other experts are not particularly worried about these systems.

Rather, they’re concerned about more advanced AI, known in the tech world as “artificial general intelligence” (AGI), describing far more complex AI systems that could have sentience and, by extension, could develop conscious motives independent from and potentially dangerous to human interests.

Schmidt said no such systems exist today yet, and we’re rapidly moving toward a new, in-between type of AI: one lacking the sentience that would define an AGI, and still able to act autonomously in fields like research and weaponry.

“I’ve done this for 50 years. I’ve never seen innovation at this scale,” Schmidt said of the rapid developments in AI complexity.

Schmidt said that more developed AI would have many benefits to humanity—and could have just as many “bad things like weapons and cyber attacks.”

Keep reading