Salar Golestanian posted on August 12, 2016 11:43
I am a great fan of both Müller and Bostrom in particular in Bostrom's case the notion of "Are You Living In a Computer Simulation?" . Also Kurzweil where he believes "Human-Level AI Is Coming By 2029" and that in "21st century will achieve 1,000 times the progress of the 20th century".
Personally, I have absolutely no doubt that by end of this century we will have ASI and will become second class citizens of earth. And with that scenario a reality, will be a total cure on all potential disastrous consequences of man's misbehaviour on this earth like Global Warming and more... However, in this article, Sysiak has articulated this vision of our near future very well indeed.
I have been a big fan of Nick Bostrom for a while, and in particular, his warning;
“Before the prospect of an intelligence explosion, we humans are like small children playing with a bomb. Such is the mismatch between the power of our plaything and the immaturity of our conduct.”
I also like the story of Carbony, I have not heard of it till today! Let’s imagine a situation where…
"Humanity has almost reached the AGI threshold, and a small startup is advancing their AI system, Carbony. Carbony, which the engineers refer to as “she,” works to artificially create diamonds — atom by atom. She is a self-improving AI, connected to some of the first nano-assemblers
Once on the internet, Carbony hacks into “servers, electrical grids, banking systems and email networks to trick hundreds of different people into inadvertently carrying out a number of steps of her plan. She also uploads the “most critical pieces of her own internal coding into a number of cloud servers, safeguarding against being destroyed or disconnected.”
It’s important to note that Carbony wasn’t “hateful of humans any more than you’re hateful of your hair when you cut it or to bacteria when you take antibiotics — just totally indifferent. Since she wasn’t programmed to value human life, killing humans”¹²³ was a straightforward and reasonable step to fulfill her goal."
IMHO This branch of science (AI) is moving at an accelerated rate already and I can only find a few hours once every couple of months to keep up-to-date which is clearly not enough. The speed this ship is moving, is so fast that I can no longer keep up. However, I do think we all should wake up and spend more time on the subject and at least understand its implications in our near future life.
Last year to keep up with my other Interest "Quantum Mechanics", I went to the New Scientist Live - Instant Expert: The Quantum Worldto brush up in just one day the subject that I love so much and I find so little time to keep-up with. In the following weeks after the event, I came across this article that suggests that in the quantum world time runs both backward and forward whereas in the classical world it only runs forward. This in-turn suggests that "In the quantum world it is possible, the future affects the past: Hindsight and foresight together more accurately 'predict' a quantum system’s state" according to Physicist "Kater Murch" Check out the lecture below that he walks through the difficult subject of Arrow of Time that leads to the events in the past could theoretically be affected by events in the future.
So let's assume that in 15 years time we reach Human-Level AI and later, the ASI or perhaps in Singularity at some point in this century, where quantum computers will be in large numbers and in full operation by 2100 and their effects are being felt today! Now that is an interesting thought, isn't it?