Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking Join Call for Ban on Artificially Intelligent Weapons

It says:

Physicist Stephen Hawking and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk have joined scores of artificial intelligence and robotics experts calling for a ban on “offensive autonomous weapons” in an open letter published Monday.

“AI technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is–practically if not legally–feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high,” reads the letter, which the Guardian reports will be presented Wednesday at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Buenos Aires. “Autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.”

time.com...

I personally think this is just crying wolf because it's a case of building a technology that's intelligent. There's no way to stop this. I think the conversation is needed and maybe we can hold these things off for a few years but as A.I. increases in intelligence it will not be our choice anymore.

We're giving machines intelligence and they will eventually be more intelligent than we are. A student would finish College in a much shorter period of time if they didn't have to do things like sleep, eat, go home on vacation or hang out with their girlfriend.

So as this intelligence grows we will just have to merge with it and hope it's benevolent because if it's a super intelligent sociopath then there's not much that we can do. Humans have never had to deal with anything that's more intelligent than we are.

a reply to: neoholographic

Bow to your new masters.

IDK, they saaaay Hawking is the most intelligent man on earth. Maybe he is and he's right. Only he would know what it's like to have the brain the size of a planet and have an inkling to what a super intelligent AI computer might get up to without our knowledge. Listen, put it this way. If Hawking and the rest of his quantum pals can come up with fantastical information about antimatter, 2D event horizons on black holes, Hawking radiation (proving black holes evaporate and quantum information is never lost), as a result of some basic math they like to do on weekends, I would take heed.

The way I've looked at grey-area moral issues is has to include the line, "if not us, who">? If not Western forces, then it will happen with other countries. If not by the military, then by curious mad scientists. This stuff is inevitable. This public speaking brownie points can play out as it will, but nobody should be fooled into thinking it'll actually be kept under wraps.

What, disarm the machines so they can't turn on their slavemasters?

Figures.

No weapon should ever be intelligent. Imagine if a hammer could feel, or dishes could talk. Smart showers...but I digress. Intelligent weapons = very bad idea.

that article is kinda nonsense.
but if stephen hawkings has been quoted, it must be serious.

originally posted by: Rikku
that article is kinda nonsense.
but if stephen hawkings has been quoted, it must be serious.

I don't think it's nonsense in fact it's not just Hawking. It was a letter signed by 1,000 experts.

Musk, Wozniak and Hawking urge ban on warfare AI and autonomous weapons

More than 1,000 experts and leading robotics researchers sign open letter warning of military artificial intelligence arms race

www.theguardian.com...

I think they're worried about 2 major things. The fact that this area is advancing rapidly and they're asking if you create an intelligence that's smarter than you, how can you control it. I think these questions need to be asked.

a reply to: neoholographic
Sounds like a reasonable, proposed, ban to me.

Don't ever listen to the rich man who tells you to stay poor in self-defense. There is a rule to humanity that says he who has the most guns wins. Even if they are not used and you live in harmony with humanity.

I want you to consider the AI already involved in warfare today. The engineered virus or bacteriophage. That is not banned. Why should something larger be banned?

a reply to: neoholographic
No one knows what exactly constitutes the how or why consciousness manifests. Why not an auto assembly line robot or the computer control panel of any car that can alter the performance of the acceleration pedal. What if consciousness can manifest in anything it chooses to? What if consciousness is evolving to have the ability to occupy your microwave or toaster? Why does it need a human to occupy? Many say rocks have a form of consciousness. Oak trees die in mass as are of a group consciousness. Who is to say? Hindu's believe the consciousness is a growth lesson from inhabiting an insect to eventually the human. I see this as a great potential; machines to inhabit and manipulate.

originally posted by: Rikku
that article is kinda nonsense.
but if stephen hawkings has been quoted, it must be serious.

The article is nonsense to you, I believe you. And it's Hawking. Not Hawkings.

originally posted by: NthOther
What, disarm the machines so they can't turn on their slavemasters?

Figures.

We need the drone program?

Who's to say the contractors working for black military projects haven't been developing and creating AI's already?

Perhaps all the flight data from drone pilot input is fed into an AI so it can learn to fly like how a human would?

Just speculation.

a reply to: MystikMushroom
Classified.

Whether we like it or not, I think the world is heading in that direction. You can't stop technology when it's in the hands of the military complex. Anything that will give them an advantage over their enemies is a go. The whole human race is just in for the ride. Hold on folks, I think it's going to get much worst in the not so distant future.

a reply to: neoholographic

Hasn't anyone watched Star Wars(the mindless controlled by one evil force), or Terminator (the machines taking over)?

AI weaponry is a bad idea. Even it the AI doesn't try to take over, you would be putting unlimited military power in the hands of very few individuals.

We need a universal ban on AI weaponry before we become subjected to it or to those who control it.

Last time I checked AI weaponry is real but the Magical Force that will defeat it would lie only in the hands of God. There are no Yodas and Luke Skywalkers to save us.

An important distinction needs to be made here. It seems to me that a truly conscious machine is not going to simply follow orders, intelligent weaponry needs to be smart, but not so smart it starts disobeying orders, which is why conscious machines wont arise via the war industry. They seem to be specifically referring to AI-based weaponry, but their argument seems a bit flawed to me because we already have things like self-guided missiles and autonomous drones, which would need to be banned using their logic.

I honestly don't know why these guys are wasting so much time worrying about AI when we're still a long way off from creating a machine which has human-level intelligence. Even if they banned all scientific research on AI they still wouldn't stop it from happening anyway, because it will more than likely be created in the basement of some genius lone coder who is obsessed with replicating how the human brain works. Many of the greatest inventions in history were created such people, Nikola Tesla, Satoshi Nakamoto, etc.

Shouldn't we just ban armies and the industrial military complexes?

Ah, that would be a too good solution, sorry for bringing it up.

This is just the beginning. These kind of discussions will likely become more frequent and intense as A.I. advances and people become more aware of the issues it brings. The following is just my take on things, and reflects my personal pov. Yours may be different and equally legit.

The military applications of A.I. technology, and their plans to develop an autonomous killing machine, is just a reminder of where we’re headed. It’s plans served to set off a few alarms and raise some flags for concerned citizens like Hawking, Musk, Gates, etc., resulting in this open letter. That, in turn, has raised public awareness of the potential danger if this technology is misused. There’s a difference between smart bombs, cruise missiles, weaponized drones, etc. and the autonomous killer robots this thread is about. The former are in the control of humans; a human must approve the target and ultimately pull the trigger. In the latter case, the machine/robot is not under human control; it chooses the target and it decides when to pull the trigger. Big difference.

This is just the tip of the iceberg, though, as far as A.I. goes. As machines begin to approach human level intelligence it’s going to raise a whole host of other issues. At first it will start causing a lot of anxiety and discomfort as the human workforce is systematically replaced by smarter, more efficient machines. It will not only be blue collar jobs that are lost, as the white collar workforce takes a hit, as well. For the lucky humans who’ve managed to keep their job for awhile, many will start taking orders from their new android supervisors. This could cause a lot of unhappy campers, as the unemployment lines grow.

Probably around mid-century sometime, as A.I. intelligence meets human level intelligence, and in many cases begins to exceed it, people are likely to start getting quite nervous. Knowing now that there’s no stopping it, and that they are destined to become subservient, I would suspect things will start to heat up. It will definately be a hit to the psyche for many folks, as everything we’ve come to know socially, politically, philosophically, religiously, etc. will now come into question. We’ll be forced to reassess entire belief systems and notions about what it is to be Human.

Finally, at some point you will be faced with a decision to make: you can either 1) remain 100% human, and be left behind as a subservient class being, or 2) accept the necessity for artificial augmentation to keep pace with the machines. The necessary transition to the new paradigm will be a difficult one for many.

Like neoholographic said in the OP, these discussions we have about A.I. and it’s (mis)uses are needed, even though we’re helpless to stop it. At this point, I'm afraid the cat’s outta the bag.

You would have to be terribly naive to think that this is any more than 'technocrats' trying to maintain their position in the societal hierarchy.

None of them gave a rats when the thinking was that AI was still far enough away to not affect them personally. Now that it is possible...they are concerned.