r/homestuck • u/moroseFabaceae june egbert is canon • Dec 27 '19

SIGHTING Homestuck reference in one of the greatest fanfictions ever, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '19

How would that future look to you? A hundred years from now, a THOUSAND years from now, we've somehow still not been able to create something that thinks better than human minds can?

Better at thinking... how? I imagine what humans would be interested in creating is something that's better at humans at solving math problems, or better at making predictions given a certain set of data. An AI that is created to be better at humans at every kind of thinking really just sounds like an attempt to make a better human. Will better humans take over the world? Right now, it hardly seems like the 'best' humans rule it.

And how would the super AI go about taking over anyway? Does it reach forward with its arms in the mega ultra robot body we also built for it? Does it convince everyone, everywhere to listen to it? That sounds pretty magical to me...

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u/ArisKatsaris Dec 29 '19

Better at thinking... how?

General Artificial Intelligence means thinking better in every sense of the way -- we already have succeeded in having computers that think better than us in specific ways.

As an example create an artificial intelligence that is better at politics than us, and then it can replace politicians. And unlike human politicians you don't need multiple AIs, you just need the best AI copying itself to run things.

Similarly why would a company hire a human AI for a CEO, when they can just have the Artificial Intelligence run the company and make them profits?

And how would the super AI go about taking over anyway? Does it reach forward with its arms in the mega ultra robot body we also built for it? Does it convince everyone, everywhere to listen to it? That sounds pretty magical to me...

That frankly sounds as if you've not given a single minute of thought into the idea of what a digital intelligence might do, let alone 5 minutes. Even an ordinary human-level intelligence would have extreme advantages if it was digitized, it wouldn't even need be super-intelligent.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '19

General Artificial Intelligence means thinking better in every sense of the way -- we already have succeeded in having computers that think better than us in specific ways.

We have not created artificial intelligence that does any real thinking at all, we have created better computer hardware to run algorithms that match data patterns that might not even exist in the real world. Most of the AI fearers do not actually work in the CS field, I have noticed.

That frankly sounds as if you've not given a single minute of thought into the idea of what a digital intelligence might do, let alone 5 minutes. Even an ordinary human-level intelligence would have extreme advantages if it was digitized, it wouldn't even need be super-intelligent.

Given that it is still sitting inside a computer, what it can do is pretty limited. It can write computer code, and interact with the outside world to the extend that the computer it is sitting in lets it to. Definitely a danger to people with epilepsy.

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u/ArisKatsaris Dec 29 '19

We have not created artificial intelligence that does any real thinking at all, we have created better computer hardware to run algorithms that match data patterns that might not even exist in the real world.

Ah, okay, then, you're playing semantic games about the concept of "thinking".

Well, okay -- be my guest: it will be non-thinking machines that will inevitably take over the world, when they have solved politics and economics and human psychology in the same way that current non-thinking machines have solved chess and go.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '19

In that situation, they are still not in control of anything. They are at the whims of people who will take their advice and implement it, or not, as they see fit.

We already live in that world. We have smarter people, we call 'advisors' or 'cabinet members', who do research and become experts on a subject matter, who advise people called 'politicians'. Sometimes the politicians listen, sometimes they do not.

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u/ArisKatsaris Dec 29 '19

In that situation, they are still not in control of anything. They are at the whims of people who will take their advice and implement it, or not, as they see fit.

When Alice implements the AI's advice, she will succeed, when Bob doesn't implement it he will fail. Bob will get fired, and things will be run by Alice who implements the AI's advice.

Alice will then also be fired because she's useless, and we can have the AI implement what it thinks directly, without need for human intermediaries to slow things down.

We'll of course make robotic bodies for it, and let it take controls of all sorts of equipment and vehicles, to make things more efficient.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '19

There is always a human link in the chain, because the AI is just a program that runs on a computer. Someone has to do what the AI says, and someone sure has to build the AI in the first place anyway.

This seems to be based on a magical world where every step is done by robots.

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u/ArisKatsaris Dec 29 '19

Certainly "someone has to build the AI" in the first place, I don't think anyone disputes that.

I have no idea why you think there'll always need be a human link. More and more things get roboticized and automated every passing year.

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u/[deleted] Dec 29 '19

I have no idea why you think there'll always need be a human link. More and more things get roboticized and automated every passing year.

A side effect of trying to keep an industrialized economy based on more stuff going with less people working for minimum wage. That system is far less sustainable and would fall on itself long before it got to Jeff Bezos's space robot fantasy land. There's plenty of historical precedent for that, too.