Nine Misunderstandings About Artificial Intelligence
Posted on April 8, 2008
Filed Under General |
Whenever I mention the term “artificial intelligence” in public, it immediately causes a huge number of images, associations and fears to jump into the minds of the people hearing these words. Incredible though it may seem, I believe that one of the biggest problems facing the world today is that most of those images, associations and fears actually have nothing whatever to do with the real thing that is artificial intelligence. The easiest way to get an accurate picture of what real artificial intelligence will be like is to take every one of the ideas that are found in the standard public image of artificial intelligence and flip each one to its exact opposite.
So, for example:
1. Instead of being the most dangerous technology ever created, it will be the safest by a very wide margin. The degree of safety will go so far beyond that of any technology created before that it will redefine the very meaning of the word ‘safe’.
2. Many people assume that if a machine could ever be made to think, this would somehow devalue us and allow scientists to say that our own minds are nothing but machines. Quite the reverse: I believe that science is about to realize that there is, after all, something special and inexplicable about the human mind, and that when an intelligent machine is built it becomes another mind, just like our own, with its own special and inexplicable properties. Building an artificial mind does not devalue us, it just adds to the number of conscious minds in the universe.
3. A similar, but subtly different point: there are also many people who believe that it will never be possible to build a computer that can really think the way we do. According to this way of thinking, all future robots will be limited by their programming and will only mimic human thought, not actually do the real, creative, original thinking that we do. This idea is simply wrong, and is caused by a misunderstanding about the way artificial intelligence systems are built. We have every reason to believe that future AI systems will think in ways that are no less valid than our own.
4. Perhaps the most damaging misunderstanding is that AI systems will have the potential to be just as aggressive, selfish, greedy, jealous (etc.) as humans. People tend to assume that if someone builds an artificial intelligence then the mere fact that it is intelligent will mean that it could easily do what a human child can do: it can appear very innocent at first, but then later on develop into a psychopathic monster. This is completely false. An intelligent machine could (and almost certainly would) be built in such a way that it was incapable of feeling any of the destructive motives and emotions that humans feel. An AI of this sort could no more develop into a monster than you could spontaneously grow a new leg.
5. Another, similar assumption is that AIs would develop desires and aspirations that would bring them into conflict with us. For example, it is sometimes said that the “natural” desire of an AI would be to acquire more computing power, and that it would push us to one side in its quest to get what it wanted. This assumption is just as mistaken as the previous one, for exactly the same reasons: we who design the machine in the first place are the ones who decide what it “desires”, and we could choose to make the AI completely empathic with our own aspirations. In other words, such an AI would want to help us and would shudder at the thought of competing with us in any way.
6. The next mistaken assumption is that when AI systems are built, there will be large numbers of different individuals and different types, and that eventually these AIs will “evolve” in some way. The idea behind this assumption is that no matter how much trouble we take to ensure that the first AI is well behaved, the process will be out of our hands from that point on, so eventually there will be a time when some other, more dangerous type of AI is built. The problem with this assumption is that there is not the slightest reason why there should be more than one type of AI, or any competition between individual AIs, or any evolution of their design. So after the first safe AI is built, the situation will stabilize completely and any further change will always occur in a controlled way that is consistent with the original design.
7. It is worth noting another idea that is just a variant of the above mistake – that life could remain just the way it is now, but with robots going about their daily life alongside us humans and competing with us for food, energy and jobs. There is no reason why this would happen, for exactly the same reasons stated in the previous paragraph. It is important to emphasize that this means the AIs would not quietly push the human race to one side, behaving like a new species and relegating humanity to extinction. There is no parallel whatsoever between the human dominance of other animal and plant species, and the situation of these robots with respect to us.
8. It is often assumed that there will be large numbers of robots, but they will all be controlled by different governments or corporations, and used as instruments of power. The main argument against this idea is that it would require an extremely unlikely combination of circumstances for this kind of situation to become established. The first artificial intelligence would have to be both smart and designed to be aggressive, but this combination would be almost impossible to pull off, even for a military organization. The long version of the argument against this idea is too long to summarize in one paragraph, but the bottom line is that even though this seems like a reasonable and plausible possibility for the future, it turns out to be deeply implausible when examined carefully.
9. Even when people make the most charitable assumptions about the actual AIs themselves, there is still a tendency to assume that the future will in some sense be non-human and mechanized. There is no reason for this. In fact, quite the opposite: there would be every reason to expect that most of the world would become very much less technological and much more natural than it is now. The effect of artificial intelligence will be to green the planet, not mechanize it.
This is my list of the nine most glaring discrepancies between what people think AI is about and what it is really about. It is not supposed to be a comprehensive list, but it is does give some idea of the scale of the problem.
Of course, the above list is just a very brief declaration of the difference between assumption and reality, not a complete explanation of why each issue. I have not said exactly why each of the assumptions is wrong, I have really only declared that they are wrong. In the future I propose to take each of these issues and write a more expansive essay that gives a detailed explanation of what real artificial intelligence is and what it will do to the world.
Before I get around to undoing all the black propaganda about artificial intelligence, however, I will be moving on to something that I consider to be a much more important topic in my next post. This has to do with what I said in the opening words of this one: I claimed that the misunderstanding of AI was one of the biggest problems facing the world today, and I really meant that. My point is that if the street-level understanding of AI were not so tainted by these negative ideas, more effort would be made to build safe and friendly AI systems that could help the world out of the mess that it is in right now. The list of misunderstandings above is one of two immense blockages that stop the world from realizing how important it is to get all hands on deck and start figuring out how to build a SAFAI.
The other immense blockage is the question of what approach to take when trying to actually build a safe and friendly AI. When somebody looks back on this time from the vantage point of a few decades from now, I think the most significant event they will write about is the day when someone finally wakes up and realizes that artificial intelligence research is being done in a ridiculous way at the present time, and that there is an alternative.
That alternative will be the subject of tomorrow’s post.
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I look forward to tomorrow’s post, then, because it looks to me like the field is in need of a new paradigm or two. And now to get back to reading The Emotion Machine…