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Ask HN: Are you looking forward to AI?

by wmnwmn on 3/21/14, 10:28 PM with 3 comments

I find myself intensely interested in understanding the mechanisms behind intelligence, but also incredibly ambivalent about the likely results, making it impossible for me to work in the field (hence, I don't). I wonder if other people feel the same way.

It seems to me that AI will displace not just the drudge work that we dislike, but also much of what makes us value ourselves as humans distinct from animals. It will create complex, rights-possessing entities for us to deal with, when we already can't deal with each other.

Some, like Kurzweil, believe AI will facilitate scientific advances allowing us to colonize the universe. This is an irrational belief because it depends on the underlying laws of the universe, and those laws don't derive from our desire to spread through space.

Kurzweil also believes that once there is an AI, we will all want to merge with it in some way. The first big question here is why it would want to merge with us. Another is whether that would mean the ultimate end of the race, given that our race evolved by definition for survival on this planet, whereas an AI, however brilliant, did not.

  • by tlb on 3/21/14, 11:47 PM

    There's too much to say, so I'll just pick one thing that's not often talked about.

    While AIs will eventually get clever, the early versions will be dull conversationalists. We'll go through a phase where people spend a lot of time interacting with dull AIs. People tend to become like the people they interact with, so it will cause a cultural downswing. You can already see it among people who spend more time interacting with video game NPCs than their peers. Their conversation is full of repetitive gaming memes rather than novel insights.

  • by RollAHardSix on 3/22/14, 1:50 AM

    The sooner one can wash my dishes and clean my house, the happier I will be. I'm serious on this, what I look forward to the most about AI isn't the leaps and bounds in health-care, it isn't I don't know the scientific advances we'll make as a civilization, it isn't even the thought of a war with the machines for humanities future, it's stuff like a robot maximizing my personal time to pursue other activities.

    Yes one could argue the robot and AI could outgrow the chores and mundane tasks of human life but even that is questionable. If an AI see's itself as my partner, and an AI doesn't mind doing these things as it can handle an almost infinite amount of things at once, then people need to realize that eventually this could be a very plausible scenario for us.

  • by njyx on 3/21/14, 10:49 PM

    AI is already here - the interfaces may be messy (Siri's speech interface or typing, but humans are using intelligent systems of varying degrees all the time. The real question is how people can adapt to that quickly changing world.

    Brynjolfsson and McAfee's new book "The Second Machine Age"is awesome on the general effect of AI on society: http://www.amazon.com/Second-Machine-Age-Prosperity-Technolo...