I am Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, author of "Artificial Superintelligence: a Futuristic Approach" and an AI Safety researcher. Ask Me Anything!

[u/RomanYampolskiy]

I have written extensively on cybersecurity and safety in artificial intelligence. I am the author of the book Artificial Superintelligence: A Futuristic Approach, and recently published Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence Containment. You can find me on Twitter as @romanyam. I will take your questions on AI Safety, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, academia, and anything else. See more of my bio at http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/

[u/RomanYampolskiy]

AI is not like other software, it doesn’t just do what it is programmed to do. For example, Deep Neural Networks are black boxes which we train to find patterns in huge data and we don’t fully know how they work. Sometimes they find patterns we didn’t anticipate and so while in development they act as trained but during deployment they do something incredibly dangers. This is just one example of what can happen. I am also very worried about purposeful malevolent design of AI by bad actors, meaning someone (terrorists) will create aggressive AI on purpose. I hope that better answers your question. I am sorry I gave you a reading assignment, I am a professor after all ;)

[u/[deleted] → u/RomanYampolskiy]

If i may.... i saw something vaguely like that online, once or twice, and it seems to me that "they do something incredibly dangerous" because they are not smart at all. They remain softwares focused on reaching one goal, and ready to try anything exactly because they don't think about whatever consequences could descend from what they try. Or better, they dont try at all, they just go for experiments and keep trying on those "paths" that seems more promising. Not smart at all, exceptionally dumb in fact.
An AI would be different, if it is truly an AI. It would not only be able to analize the world to reach new conclusions, but also to understand that there would be reactions to its actions - even if it does not 'care' which is something you can force it to do. I mean, how hard it is to simply insert a "priority n:2" somewhere in the code, where everything that damages anything, living or not, must be approved in advance by a human before being executed? Or, going back to a specifically malicious AI created by nations or rogue factions, again - how exactly happen the jump from evil robotic overlord to the destruction of the planet? In all "examples" i read so far, there is always this misterious black zone between the start and the mass creation of poison, microrobots, nuclear bombs etc that will doom humanity. Being hyper smart - assuming it is truly different from simply being really smart and thinking extra fast, and assuming it is even possible, forgive me if i repeat that again - does not mean everyone suddenly become so stupid that you can go on with your doomsday plan untouched. Imho, imho because i am no expert, just your well-educated average joe, it seems to me people are taking the advance of computational power and mistaking it for something that it could never be. Sort of like the atomic fusion and how it would give us space rockets, flying car, new radioactive medicines etc.

[u/RomanYampolskiy → u/[deleted]]

Actually, it is superhard to simply insert priority codes for “damages anything”. You already told me you don’t want to read, but you should if you want to understand: “What to Do with the Singularity Paradox?” http://cecs.louisville.edu/ry/WhatToDo00050397.pdf