Defenseless Against AI: Supercomputers More Powerful Than the Human Mind by 1kiki

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Defenseless Against AI: Supercomputers More Powerful Than the Human Mind

POSTED BY: 1KIKI
UPDATED: Monday, April 4, 2016 14:27
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Sunday, March 27, 2016 9:31 PM

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Defenseless Against AI: Supercomputers More Powerful Than the Human Mind

http://www.scientificcomputing.com/news/2016/03/defenseless-against-ai
-supercomputers-more-powerful-human-mind

Artificial intelligence must be kept under human control or we may become defenseless against its capabilities, warn two University of Sydney machine-learning experts. ...

Professor Xu believes it is crucial for companies, such as Google and Facebook, to set up “moral and ethics committees” to take control to ensure scientific research won’t head in the wrong direction and create machines that act maliciously.

Dr. Michael Harre, a senior lecturer in complex systems who spent several years studying the AI behind the ancient Chinese board game, says: “Go is probably the most complicated game that is commonly played today. Even when compared to chess, which has a very large number of possible patterns, Go has more possible patterns than there are atoms in the universe.

“The technology has developed to a point that it can now outsmart a human in both simple and complex tasks. This is a concern, because artificial intelligence technology may reach a point in a few years where it is feasible that it could be adapted to areas of defense where a human may no longer be needed in the control loop: truly autonomous AI."

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Sunday, March 27, 2016 10:48 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

H-bombs are not intelligent but are very dangerous to humans. I need to mention that so you recognize that a supercomputer need not be intelligent to be very dangerous. I do believe we've already had supercomputer assistance in making bond market decisions that crashed the world economy.

Let's confront some harsh realities about our AI technology:

https://aeon.co/essays/intelligent-machines-might-want-to-become-biolo
gical-again
One such reality is the issue of energetics – a topic discussed by Von Neumann, but often ignored in the futurist conversations. In computer design, a key factor is computational capacity versus energy use, sometimes quoted as computations-per-joule. As microprocessors get more complex, and silicon-based architectures get smaller and smaller (these days, to the tens-of-nanometre scales), efficiency is still improving. As a result, the computations-per-joule ratio has been getting better and better with each passing year.

Except, that ratio has been getting better by less and less with each passing year. In fact, some researchers have stated that there might be an upcoming ‘wall’ of energy efficiency for conventional processing architectures, somewhere around 10 giga-computations-per-joule for operations such as basic multiplication.

That’s a big potential roadblock for any quest for true artificial intelligence or brain-uploading machinery. Estimates of what you’d need in terms of computing power to approach the oomph of a human brain (measured by speed and complexity of operations) come with an energy efficiency budget that needs to be about a billion times better than that wall.

To put that in a different context, our brains use energy at a rate of about 20 watts. If you wanted to upload yourself intact into a machine using current computing technology, you’d need a power supply roughly the same as that generated by the Three Gorges Dam hydroelectric plant in China, the biggest in the world. To take our species, all 7.3 billion living minds, to machine form would require an energy flow of at least 140,000 petawatts. That’s about 800 times the total solar power hitting the top of Earth’s atmosphere. Clearly human transcendence might be a way off.

One possible solution is to turn to so-called neuromorphic architectures, silicon designs that mimic aspects of real biological neurons and their connectivity. Researchers such as Jennifer Hasler at the Georgia Institute of Technology have suggested that, if done right, a neuromorphic system could reduce the energy requirements of a brain-like artificial system by at least four orders of magnitude. Unfortunately, that big leap would still leave a gaping hole in efficiency of a factor of 100,000 before reaching the level of a human brain.

Of course, the history of computer technology is replete with supposedly impenetrable barriers that collapse year by year, so optimism has not yet left the room. But the critical point is that none of this is a given. It might well be that, to capture the complexity, density and extraordinary efficiency of a modern human brain, silicon and its cousins are simply not the answer, no matter how they’re sculpted or stacked together.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, March 27, 2016 11:17 PM

JO753

rezident owtsidr

A few thingz rong with that perspectiv, 2nd.

The biggest being: look wut we do with our suppozedly awesum human computing power. We are goofballz! Gonad gided misslz, hardly better than mice breeding till we overun our food supply. Idiots on an individual basis and completely wakt out self distructiv imbisilez az a group. Reaverz!

The next biggest thing: quantum computing. Even tho I think an ordinary PC coud be an AI if it had good software and its likely there are supercomputer AIz alredy in existens alredy, quantum computerz will be just plain scary.

----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

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Monday, March 28, 2016 1:55 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.

Drat if I can remember where I read it, but quantum computing is supposed to use 1/ 1,000 the power of current computers.

SAGAN: We are releasing vast quantities of carbon dioxide, increasing the greenhouse effect. It may not take much to destabilize the Earth's climate, to convert this heaven, our only home in the cosmos, into a kind of hell.

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Monday, March 28, 2016 7:55 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Drat if I can remember where I read it, but quantum computing is supposed to use 1/ 1,000 the power of current computers.

The problem of energy efficiency rears its head here, too. Manipulating the central currency of quantum computation, the qubit – be it a cold atom or other quantum object – might require very little energy. But holding the components of a quantum computer in a state of coherence (with all those delicate quantum states delicately preserved) is enormously taxing, and can always rely on a host of support systems and engineering that will gobble up power. It’s not clear that we know even roughly what the real-world computation-to-energy function for quantum computing will be.

Other factors are equally worrisome. A quantum computer of ‘n’ qubits can carry out 2 to the n power number of computations in one cycle, but setting up those computations could also be a huge task of data flow. Simulating our entire Universe of about 10 to the 89th power number of particles and photons might take only 296 qubits, by some calculations, but how on earth do you enter all 10 to the 89th power initial conditions? Even more daunting, how do you pick the correct solutions from the quantum simulation? Simulating a human brain might be a bit easier, but you still have to quantify and initiate at least 10 to the 14th power number of neural connections (the approximate number found in your head) to set up the computation. Presumably we would also want that quantum brain to have a very high throughput, a high-fidelity sensory interface with the surrounding world. That’s another unknown, possibly insurmountable challenge.
https://aeon.co/essays/intelligent-machines-might-want-to-become-biolo
gical-again

And, in the Firefly 'Verse, the quantum computing AI: Supercomputers have not taken over. Obviously, I cannot be absolutely certain that Blue Sun is not an AI owned corporation causing endless trouble for Mal.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, March 28, 2016 1:41 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

In terms of energy, humans may be efficient, but in terms of outcome the human brain is a very inefficient. (all you have to do is look at the people here on the board to realize that!)

The human brain is capable of both native learning, calculation, and also of being programmed (taught).

Computers can calculate faster and better than people, and computers can be programmed better than people, but can computers LEARN? i.e. Can computers derive meaningful patterns from events, and then predict outcomes?

The human brain is a limited learning machine. Part of the problem is our memory: In order to make meaningful connections between data points (learn) one must be able to remember the data to begin with. And then, one must remember the outcome. And then discern which ones are important. And then predict based on what will happen next.

What the human brain relies on is "fuzzy logic" and pattern recognition: only those patterns which are repeated multiple times, even if only approximately, are responded to, and linked with an outcome, which is either tagged with an emotional component marking it as good or bad, or NOT tagged and put into the background. For example, the sensation of fabric on your skin is usually ignored but the sensation of a sharp edge slicing into your skin is responded to.

Because we can't possibly remember all of the details - and even if we could, we couldn't index and retrieve them quickly enough - our brain relies on shortcuts and approximations. It's that approximation which allows us to abstract essential features, because the details that don't overlap are discarded. But some of those details may be critical details which, when linked with OTHER details, would make meaningful patterns .... if only our brains weren't limited in capacity and geared towards mental shortcuts.

Also, certain patterns will always elude us: we can only create models which "make sense" to us in some fashion: there are interactions which will always elude us because we can't mentally map them to our experience. For example, there is a computer which can spit out equations that it discovers from data (it discovered F= ma) but although IT can create very complex equations to describe and predict complex phenomena, the equations are meaningless to us. Beyond a certain level of complexity, our mental models fail.

In addition, human thought is conditioned by our physical status: if we're hungry, scared, tired, distracted, sick or any other number of conditions, our thought processes will be degraded. Humans brains operate in very limited environments, computers are much more robust. (By the way, even the necessity of a BIOS is similar to biological "instincts" which are bootstrap programs for organisms.)

Anyway, to make a long story short, there is no "essential" feature of human thought that can't be done - and done better- by computers. The limiting factor in computer learning is software, not hardware, and that limitation is being overcome, as demonstrated by Deep Blue the chess champ, Watson the Jeopardy champ, and Deep Mind the Go champ.

--------

Humans have a way of making tools that exceed their own capabilities.

We made machines that could outwork us. But we discarded the notion of physical labor being a defining feature of humanity because donkeys work, and ants work. What's work? Not important.

We made machines that could out-kill us. So what? Lions kill, spiders kill. Not important.

Then we made a machine that could out-compute us. So we discarded the notion of computation being the defining feature of humanity because we could learn.

Now, we're making machines that can out-learn us.

What, then, is the "purpose" of humanity? Do we represent a pinnacle of evolutionary development? Or are we just side-effects of the universe?

And do we have any reasonable survival instincts?

--------------
You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

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Monday, March 28, 2016 5:24 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
In terms of energy, humans may be efficient, but in terms of outcome the human brain is a very inefficient. (all you have to do is look at the people here on the board to realize that!)

If an AI takes a human's phony-baloney job, the humans retaliate. I saw a business story today about humans attacking AIs. Humans won.

Quote:
Sedasys was never welcomed by human anesthesiologists. Before it even hit the market, the American Society of Anesthesiologists campaigned against it, backing down only once the machine’s potential uses were limited to routine procedures such as colonoscopies.

The Post's story back in May 2015 provoked an outpouring of messages from anesthesiologists and nurse anesthetist who claimed a machine could never replicate a human’s care or diligence. Many sounded offended at the notion that a machine could do their job.

No longer did you need a trained anesthesiologist. And sedation with the Sedasys machine cost $150 to $200 for each procedure, compared to $2,000 for an anesthesiologist, one of healthcare’s best-paid specialties. The machine was seen as the leading lip of an automation wave transforming hospitals.

But Johnson & Johnson recently announced it was pulling the plug on Sedasys because of poor sales.

www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/03/28/its-game-over-for
-the-robot-intended-to-replace-anesthesiologists/

The story didn't say why sales were poor, but you know the anesthesiologists did make their hatred of AIs known to hospitals and gastroenterologists. More advanced machines are in the works. Researchers at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, are testing a device that can fully automate anesthesia for complicated brain and heart surgeries, even in children. The war between AIs and humans will continue, some day.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, March 29, 2016 2:43 PM

BYTEMITE

I actually think a well designed AI could be an asset, rather than something to fear, and a legacy of humanity that will endure long past the time we've changed into something unrecognizable or we are gone completely.

That said:

http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/24/microsoft-silences-its-new-a-i-bot-ta
y-after-twitter-users-teach-it-racism/

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Tuesday, March 29, 2016 5:18 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

. . . a legacy of humanity that will endure long . . .

AIs designed by humans? Then I'd bet on WALL-E future. Seemly endless futility until, of course, the sun burns out or replacement parts are unavailable.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, March 30, 2016 10:46 AM

JAYNEZTOWN

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Monday, April 4, 2016 2:27 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Steven Hawking warned us against this back in December of 2014...

Yanno... The guy who not only beat the shit out of ALS, but somehow has managed to live Decades with it while it continues to kill most people within a year or two...

"Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded."

Think about that for a second...

How many times does iTunes update a new version? Or the software controlling your phone?

Honestly, do you really know the answer to that even? Maybe you're only aware of the updates that the software wants you to be aware of?

That would essentially be the equivalent of me growing fur during the winter and then shedding it all during the summer time with another Update.

There is no "stopping it" though...

Welcome to the Future.

Like it or not, AI will be controlling everything in the very near future.

As much as my 20 year old self was afraid of such centralism and control, my near 40 year old self can't deny that as human beings we collectively seem to turn everything we touch into shit on our own.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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