Literally every argument about AI risk is entirely made up from exactly nothing. All the terminology is fart-huffing. It has the same evidentiary basis as a story about floopflorps on Gavitron9 outcompeting nuubidons.
I can make up shit that's never happened about things that don't exist using language I invented to describe concepts without form about events I imagined that are important because everybody is going to die unless they listen to me.
Except that HAS happened. It's called a cult.
Look I get it watching Terminator 2 was a formative yet incredibly destructive childhood event for you.
@SwiftOnSecurity And 2001: A Space Odyssey. And War Games. And I Robot. And Superman 3. And Tron. And...
And the reason writers keep turning to evil AIs is that writers are focused on the inherent flaws in *humanity*, and every single complex algorithm ever written not only carries humanity's flaws embedded in it, but *amplifies* them.
You're right: the problem isn't AIs. But you're also wrong, because the problem IS how people create, program, train, and use AIs, and both distant and recent history tell me that humans are not gonna get it right.
So, yeah, I'm terrified of AI.
@msbellows I wish more people had actually read “I, Robot.”
The last story in the book is how the robots are in control. They set the global economy, they move resources, and if someone’s bad at their job, they quietly arrange systems to isolate the damage that person can do (essentially “the net interprets incompetence as damage and routes around it”). And the (human) President of the World gives a pretty good argument that we put them in control because we were never (nor would we ever be) a smart enough species to control our own destiny in an inherently complex and apathetic universe without amplifying ourselves, because at a fundamental level we just aren’t big enough.
It was an interesting take on the topic, but then the conceit of all the short stories in that book is “What if robots but humans don’t, like, fuck it up?”
@mtomczak I was thinking of the film, which of course has almost nothing to do with the book, But yeah, I agree, the I, Robot short story collection is wonderful and should be read more.
I wish Asimov were around to see how algorithms absorb and amplify human biases. He probably would have had some helpful thoughts. In the end, though, it's not the machine I'm scared of, it's the ghost in the machine -- and therefore, I'm scared of how the machine empowers the ghost.