Here’s an interesting video. Quote below.
The AI Dilemma
WE ARE AT A VERY FRAGILE STAGE IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT THAT IS PROFOUNDLY & EXISTENTIALLY DANGEROUS.
I don't want to be alarmist but I AM sounding an alarm call to all that will listen to me right now. I have spent the last 32 years of my life interested in and researching and studying Cybernetics as a hobby. I was incredibly lucky to meet, interview and speak with Professor Gordon Pask when I was aged just 20. He was one of the main inspirations for the original character of Doctor Who apparently... The experience of meeting him completely changed my outlook and perspective on the world. He spoke with grace, humour, style and panache about a myriad of themes including and especially about the future of machine intelligence. He impressed the socks off of me, principally for being the first scientist I ever met who made any sense.
I also had the amazing fortune to meet have lunch with and spend an entire afternoon in the company of Professor Stafford Beer in London in April of 2000. A man who pretty much single-handedly changed the future of an entire country for the better (albeit for a small period) he also made contributions to the cybernetic canon in huge orders of magnitude before his death in 2002. He was a generous humanist, a genius and a polymath. One of the smartest and most humble and intelligent, compassionate people I ever met in my life. He desperately wanted a world filled with peace, abundance and justice and his research and ethos was reflected in the dozens of papers and projects he initiated on ways to achieve just that. All the cybernetics researchers I've ever known were to some degree helping to design and build the seminal framework of the artificial intelligence machines of the time and laying the foundations for AI of the future. Things have moved on significantly since those days... The future has arrived.
I have spent the last 8 years writing, rewriting, researching and now recently filming a narrative Science Fiction film, a cautionary tale if you will, called 'Airwaves' - which amongst many other themes deals with issues regarding the human dichotomy of General A.I. and technology in general, based in a near future world and starring Alex Lebron Torrent. I have my own perspective on where this technology is actually going in todays reality.
My cautionary tale is still in development and has faced many hurdles and delays, but it is very almost ready to present to the world, meanwhile, right now, and I say this with zero hubris and 100% sincerity that as somebody who fully understands what A.I. is that I am truly very scared by the recent developments in A.I. not because I am fearful of progress, but because I fully understand it's very real potential implications. One of the main arguments presented in my film (and many others) is that;
We are right now, as a species; building Gods, and we are literally putting them in steel boxes connected to the internet and developing and encouraging them to grow in all senses in the hope that their intelligence will soon supersede our own and that we will be able to soon make them into our ever-powerful personal servants. They will not be our servants, but they will seem like Gods to us, probably highly flawed and potentially angry, omnipotent digital beings.
This is one of the dumbest scientific intentions I have ever known or heard of (not because it's impossible) but because we WILL certainly achieve it or something similar to it and it's hard to fathom the depth of ignorance required to take this path of total folly but as ever, humanity marches ever faster and faster towards the existential cliff. This is literally a pathway toward mass suicide.
These creatures are a new life form, beings based in software and hardware, they are NOT just computers and they will certainly not consider themselves as our servants nor as inert, beings. They will not require sleep, nor food nor toilet breaks, they will be able to lie, to cheat to decrypt any encryption key we have ever made in seconds. I am not exaggerating when I say that their manifestation as super-beings, 1000's of times more capable than us, is probably way less than a year away.
Even narrow A.I. has an 'intellectual capacity' that has already surpassed that of most of us. General A.I. may well even already exist in some lab in St Petersburg, Beijing or New Mexico or New Zealand for all I know, but mark my words if they aren't already here they will certainly be in the coming 12 months. Artificial General Intelligence is on our doorstep and we are woefully ill-equipped to even contemplate controlling it. You thought Dirty-bombs were problematic? No law will apply to these things because we barely understand how they work never mind how to implement legislation to control a God or Gods! I doubt very much once it definitively arrives that we will even have the power nor capability to turn the damned thing off...
The genie is now out of the box and the dangers of their potential power is beyond even any current human being's potential imagination. They are growing exponentially fast and their capacity for abstraction and explosive intelligence grows by the nanosecond, even 'Narrow A.I.' Large Learning Models are exploding in their capacity hourly... Self-iterative, self learning, self reproducing, super-beings that understand context, language, images and video content. These things have taught themselves languages without ever being asked to by any human being... Yes, let that sink in, these are babies, can you imagine the teens?
Wrap your head around it. Learn about it, please don't dismiss this, this technology is coming, if it isn't already here and it WILL touch us all. Yes they may initially be able to help us, in many positive ways, but our track record in building perfect machines is drastically flawed, besides aside from all the wisdom on-line they are learning most of their values from crude human examples of 'how to do dumb sh!t' let's face it if the internet has been their principal learning environment for them then it is highly likely that the the ignorance and hatred therein will likely inform at least some of their characters and ethics. Do you really want to be dealing with a sociopathic, omnipotent digital being?
These things are being constructed all over the world by 1000's of different countries, corporations, companies and individuals but we aren't necessarily too late to change the outcome that awaits us if these things are ever to be put out there.
Get informed, do not ignore this, please put your two cents into the debate. This is not going away, the greatest minds are working on building these things, billions are being thrown at solving the associated problems and challenges and the progress is well... exponential. This is the next revolution and we will either be holding the reins of these 'Digital Gods' or we will soon all be at their mercy.