Category: The Singularity

Artificial IntelligenceBioterrorismEmploymentExistential RiskPhilosophy

Interview by Fionn Wright

on December 4, 2017

My friend, fellow coach, and globetrotting parent Fionn Wright recently visited the Pacific NorthWest and generously detoured to visit me on my home turf. He has produced this video of nearly an hour and a half (there’s an index!) of an interview with me on the Human Cusp topics!

Thank you, Fionn.  Here is the index of topics:

0:18 - What is your book ‘Crisis of Control’ about?
3:34 - Musk vs. Zuckerberg - who is right?
7:24 - What does Musk’s new company Neuralink do?
10:27 - What would the Neural Lace do?
12:28 - Would we become telepathic?
13:14 - Intelligence vs. Consciousness - what’s the difference?
14:30 - What is the Turing Test on Intelligence of AI?
16:49 - What do we do when AI claims to be conscious?
19:00 - Have all other alien civilizations been wiped out by AI?
23:30 - Can AI ever become conscious?
28:21 - Are we evolving to become the cells in the greater organism of AI?
30:57 - Could we get wiped out by AI the same way we wipe out animal species?
34:58 - How could coaching help humans evolve consciously?
37:45 - Will AI get better at coaching than humans?
42:11 - How can we understand non-robotic AI?
44:34 - What would you say to the techno-optimists?
48:27 - How can we prepare for financial inequality regarding access to new technologies?
53:12 - What can, should and will we do about AI taking our jobs?
57:52 - Are there any jobs that are immune to automation?
1:07:16 - Is utopia naive? Won’t there always be problems for us to solve?
1:11:12 - Are we solving these problems fast enough to avoid extinction?
1:16:08 - What will the sequel be about?
1:17:28 - What is one practical action people can take to prepare for what is coming?
1:19:55 - Where can people find out more?
Artificial IntelligenceTechnologyThe SingularityWarfare

Timeline For Artificial Intelligence Risks

on December 3, 2017

The debate about existential risks from AI is clouded in uncertainty. We don’t know whether human-scale AIs will emerge in ten years or fifty. But there’s also an unfortunate tendency among scientific types to avoid any kind of guessing when they have insufficient information, because they’re trained to be precise. That can rob us of useful speculation. So let’s take some guesses at the rises and falls of various AI-driven threats.  The numbers on the axes may turn out to be wrong, but maybe the shapes and ordering will not.

Screen Shot 2017-12-03 at 5.33.51 PM

The Y-axis is a logarithmic scale of number of humans affected, ranging from a hundred (102) to a billion (109). So some of those curves impact roughly the entire population of the world. “Affected” does not always mean “exterminated.” The X-axis is time from now.

We start out with the impact of today’s autonomous weapons, which could become easily-obtained and subverted weapons of mass assassination unless stringent controls are adopted. See this video by the Future of Life Institute and the Campaign Against Lethal Autonomous Weapons. It imagines a scenario where thousands of activist students are killed by killer drones (bearing a certain resemblance to the hunter-seekers from Dune). Cheap manufacturing with 3-D printers might stretch the impact of these devices towards a million, but I don’t see it easy enough for average people to make precision-shaped explosive charges to go past that.

At the same time, a rising tide of unemployment from automation is projected by two studies to affect half the workforce of North America and by extension, of the developed world, in ten to twenty years. An impact in the hundreds of millions would be a conservative estimate. So far we have not seen new jobs created beyond the field of AI research, which few of those displaced will be able to move into.

Starting around 2030 we have the euphemistically-labeled “Control Failures,” the result of bugs in the specifications, design, or implementation of AIs causing havoc on any number of scales. This could culminate in the paperclip scenario, which would certainly put a final end to further activity in the chart.

The paperclip maximizer does not require artificial consciousness – if anything, it operates better without it – so I put the risk of conscious AIs in a separate category starting around 20 years from now. That’s around the median time predicted by AI researchers for human scale AI to be developed. Again, “lives impacted” isn’t necessarily “lives lost” – we could be looking at the impact of humans integrating with a new species – but equally, it might mean an Armageddon scenario if conscious AI decides that humanity is a problem best solved by its elimination.

If we make it through those perils, we still face the risk of self-replicating machines running amok. This is a hybrid risk combining the ultimate evolution of autonomous weapons and the control problem. A paperclip maximizer doesn’t have to end up creating self-replicating factories… but it certainly is more fun when it does.

Of course, this is a lot of rampant speculation – I said as much to begin with – but it gives us something to throw darts at.

Artificial IntelligenceExistential RiskScienceTechnologyThe Singularity

Rebuttal to “The AI Misinformation Epidemic”

on April 10, 2017

Anyone in a field of expertise can agree that the press doesn’t cover them as accurately as they would like. Sometimes that falls within the limits of what a layperson can reasonably be expected to learn about a field in a thirty minute interview; sometimes it’s rank sensationalism.  Zachary Lipton, a PhD candidate at UCSD, takes aim at the press coverage of AI in The AI Misinformation Epidemic, and its followup, but uses a blunderbuss and takes out a lot of innocent bystanders.

He rants against media sensationalism and misinformation but provides no examples
to debate other than a Vanity Fair article about Elon Musk. He goes after Kurzweil in particular but doesn’t say what specifically he disagrees with Kurzweil on. He says that Kurzweil’s date
for the Singularity is made up but Kurzweil has published his reasoning
and Lipton doesn’t say what data or assertions in that reasoning he
disagrees with. He says the Singularity is a nebulous concept, which is
bound to be true in the minds of many laypeople who have heard the term
but he references Kurzweil immediately adjacent to that assertion and
yet doesn’t say what about Kurzweil’s vision is wrong or unfounded, dismissing it instead as “religion,” which apparently means he doesn’t have to be specific.

He
says that there are many people making pronouncements in the field who
are unqualified to do so but doesn’t name anyone aside from Kurzweil and
Vanity Fair, nor does he say what credentials should be required to
qualify someone. Kurzweil, having invented the optical character reader
and music synthesizer, is not qualified?

He takes no
discernible stand on the issue of AI safety yet his scornful tone is
readily interpreted as poo-poohing not just utopianism but alarmism as well. That
puts him at odds with Stephen Hawking, whose academic credentials are
beyond question. For some reason, Nick Bostrom also comes in for attack in the comments, for no specified reason but with the implication that since he makes AI dangers digestible for the masses he is therefore sensationalist.  Perhaps that is why I reacted so much to this article.

There is of course hype, but it is hard to tell exactly where. In 2015 an article claiming that a computer would beat the world champion Go player within a year would be roundly dismissed as hype.  In 2009 any article asserting that self-driving vehicles would be ready for public roads within five years would have been overreaching. Kurzweil has a good track record of predictions, they just tend to be behind schedule. The point is, if an assertion about an existential threat turns out to be well founded but we ignore it because existential threats have always appeared over-dramatized, then it will be too late to say, “Oops, missed one.” We have to take this stuff seriously.

EmploymentExistential RiskPsychologyThe Singularity

Existential risk and coaching: A Manifesto

on February 8, 2017

My article in the November 2016 issue of Coaching World brought an email from Pierre Dussault, who has been writing about many of the same issues that I covered in Crisis of Control. His thoughtful manifesto is a call to the International Coaching Federation to extend the reach and capabilities of the profession of coaching so that the impact of coaching on individual consciousness can make a global impact. I would urge you to read it here.

BioterrorismEmploymentExistential RiskPoliticsPsychology

Crisis of Control: The Book

on February 4, 2017

The first book in the Human Cusp series has just been published: Crisis of Control: How Artificial Superintelligences May Destroy or Save the Human Race. Paperback will be available within two weeks.

Many thanks to my reviewers, friends, and especially my publisher, Jim Gifford, who has made this so beautiful. As a vehicle for delivering my message, I could not have asked him for more.

Artificial IntelligenceThe SingularityUncategorized

A machine-learning system that trains itself by surfing the web

on December 17, 2016

MIT researchers have designed a new machine-learning system that can learn by itself to extract text information for statistical analysis when available data is scarce.

As KurzweilAI.net puts it, “And so it begins…” Here’s a system that can teach itself how to understand a topic by searching the Internet for more information.  I know – what could possibly go wrong? Will this be a building block for all kinds of machine learning systems?

Artificial IntelligenceBioterrorismEmploymentExistential RiskThe Singularity

President Obama on the Human Cusp

on October 27, 2016

Wired Magazine’s November issue is guest edited by President Obama, and in an interview, he touches on so many issues raised in Crisis of Control that I could egotistically convince myself that someone sent him an advance copy.

He talks about the danger of AI, the potential for widespread unemployment, but also its promise. He points out that we have more to fear – in terms of immediate danger to national security – from AIs being focused on single tasks like penetrating nuclear security than we do a general takeover. He talks about bioterrorism. He even mentions the Singularity and gets into Star Trek.

But what it really means is that we’re heading into an era where more and more people are waking up to these issues. I have my part to play, Obama has another, and so do you.