A Huffington Post Definitive Tech Book of 2013 Artificial Intelligence helps choose what books you buy, what movies you see, and even who you date. It puts the “smart” in your smartphone and soon it will drive your car. It makes most of the trades on Wall Street, and controls vital energy, water, and transportation infrastructure. But Artificial Intelligence can also threaten our existence. In as little as a decade, AI could match and then surpass human intelligence. Corporations and government agencies are pouring billions into achieving AI’s Holy Grail—humanlevel intelligence. Once AI has attained it, scientists argue, it will have survival drives much like our own. We may be forced to compete with a rival more cunning, more powerful, and more alien than we can imagine. Through profiles of tech visionaries, industry watchdogs, and groundbreaking AI systems, Our Final Invention explores the perils of the heedless pursuit of advanced AI. Until now, human intelligence has had no rival. Can we coexist with beings whose intelligence dwarfs our own? And will they allow us to?
[...]... eating the environment The first replicator would make one copy of itself, and then there’d be two replicators making the third and fourth copies The next generation would make eight replicators total, the next sixteen, and so on If each replication took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the. .. soldiering, and exploring sea and space For the moment, forget the perils of selfimproving superintelligence AGI would be mankind’s most important and beneficial invention But what exactly are we talking about when we talk about the magical quality of these inventions, their human- level intelligence? What does our intelligence let us humans do that other animals cannot? Well, with your human- level... engineering the brain Reverse engineering seeks to first complete fine-grained learning about the human brain, then represent what the brain does in hardware and software At the end of the process you have a computer with human- level intelligence IBM’s Blue Brain project intends to accomplish this by the early 2020s On the other hand, mind-uploading, also called whole brain emulation, is the theory of modeling... extinction of the human race That’s one of the many downsides of the Singularity spectacle, one of many we don’t hear enough about That absence may be due to what I call the two-minute problem I’ve listened to dozens of scientists, inventors, and ethicists lecture about superintelligence Most consider it inevitable, and celebrate the bounty the ASI genie will grant us Then, often in the last two minutes of their... to machines The Machine Intelligence Research Institute was formed to ensure that whatever form our heirs take, our values will be preserved In his San Francisco high-rise apartment, Vassar told me, The stakes are the delivery of human value to humanity’s successors And through them to the universe.” To MIRI, the first AGI out of the box must be safe, and therefore carry human value to humanity’s successors... missing the less rosy, third perspective, and this book aims to make up for it The argument is that the endgame for first creating smart machines, then smarter-than -human machines, is not their integration into our lives, but their conquest of us In the quest for AGI, researchers will create a kind of intelligence that is stronger than their own and that they cannot control or adequately understand We’ve... stop the annihilating kind of AGI? Furthermore, were there holes in the dystopian hypothesis? Well, builders of AI and AGI could make it “friendly,” so that whatever evolves from the first AGI won’t destroy us and other creatures in the universe Or, we might be wrong about AGI’s abilities and “drives,” and fearing its conquest of the universe could be a false dilemma Maybe AI can never advance to AGI and. .. them They feed the software, semiconductor, and Internet firms that are the latest phase of a technology juggernaut that began here with radio in the first part of the twentieth century Silicon Valley attracts a third of all the venture capital in the United States It has the highest number of technology workers per capita of any U.S metropolitan area, and they’re the best paid, too The country’s greatest... neither the public nor the AI’s developers will see the danger coming until it’s too late “Here is this tendency to think that well-intentioned people create nice AIs, and badly intentioned people create evil AIs This is not the source of the problem The source of the problem is that even when well-intentioned people set out to create AIs they are not very concerned with Friendly AI issues They themselves... became the stuff of Internet legend The rumor went like this: a lone genius had engaged in a series of high-stakes bets in a scenario he called the AI-Box Experiment In the experiment, the genius role-played the part of the AI An assortment of dot-com millionaires each took a turn as the Gatekeeper—an AI maker confronted with the dilemma of guarding and containing smarter-than -human AI The AI and Gatekeeper . we talk about the magical quality of these inventions, their human- level intelligence? What does our intelligence let us humans do that other animals cannot? Well, with your human- level smarts. took a minute and a half to make, at the end of ten hours there’d be more than 68 billion replicators; and near the end of two days they would outweigh the earth. But before that stage the replicators. of No Return 9. The Law of Accelerating Returns 10. The Singularitarian 11. A Hard Takeoff 12. The Last Complication 13. Unknowable by Nature 14. The End of the Human Era 15. The Cyber Ecosystem 16.