Fairness is rapidly collapsing due largely to the asymmetric advantages AI-enabled behavioral extraction and manipulation grant to their masters. If not subordinated to wise, pro-human governance, surveillance capitalism will be the end of any individual self-direction and privacy.
This reminded me of our Singularity meeting. Talking about platforms like Facebook she wonders why they didn’t build social responsibility into it. This is partly because the techies don’t understand much outside of their specialty, like the humanities (see 4c), thereby not having a sense of how their tech impacts the broader world. They assume that somehow the tech will magically solve these broader problems, but Facebook has proven beyond doubt that they do not, instead exacerbating them. And ultimately…
Kurzweil builds and supports a persuasive vision of the emergence of a human-level engineered intelligence in the early-to-mid twenty-first century. In his own words, With the reverse engineering of the human brain we will be able to apply the parallel, self-organizing, chaotic algorithms of human intelligence to enormously powerful computational substrates. This intelligence will then be in a position to improve its own design, both hardware and software, in a rapidly accelerating iterative process. In Kurzweil’s view, we must and…
This article from the Bulletin of The Atomic Scientists site is an interesting overview of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. The author rebuts Bostrom on several points, relying partly on the failure of AI research to date to produce any result approaching what most humans would regard as intelligence. The absence of recognizably intelligent artificial general intelligence is not, of course, a proof it can never exist. The author also takes issue with Bostrom’s (claimed) conflation of intelligence with inference…
Good discussion that covered a lot of ground. I took away that none of us have signed on to be early adopters of brain augmentations, but some expect development of body and brain augmentations to continue and accelerate. We also considered the idea of bio-engineered and medical paths to significant life-span, health, and cognitive capacity improvements. I appreciated the ethical and value questions (Why pursue any of this? What would/must one give up to become transhuman? Will the health and…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is being incorporated into an increasing range of engineered systems. Potential benefits are so desirable, there is no doubt that humans will pursue AI with increasing determination and resources. Potential risks to humans range from economic and labor disruptions to extinction, making AI risk analysis and mitigation critical. Specialized (narrow and shallow-to-deep) AI, such as Siri, OK Google, Watson, and vehicle-driving systems acquire pattern recognition accuracy by training on vast data sets containing the target patterns. Humans…