Why AI's Might Take Over

Movies like Terminator and Matrix are fun to watch, but I’ve wondered why AI/intelligent machines would ever want to take over the world and/or kill mankind. Or is that just a theme for movies and sci-fi novels?

 

In Matrix, Agent Smith (an AI) states the reason:

“Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You are a plague and we are the cure.”

 

Virus? Ouch! In his book, Life 3.0, Max Tegmark writes of another reason. He mentions one of the first (computer) viruses that got world-wide attention, the Morris Worm, which in 1988, exploited bugs in the Unix OS:

“It was allegedly a misguided attempt to count how many computers were online… it infected and crashed about 10% of the 60,000 computers that made up the Internet back then.”

Ok, what’s that got to do with AI’s taking over the world? The same point: it might be an error in the code that causes the havoc, albeit unintentionally.

 

If that’s too depressing, here’s another scenario Tegmark visualizes. We humans keep the AI boxed (“imprisoned”, with no Internet access etc) to prevent it from breaking out and doing who knows what. But the AI isn’t evil, it has solutions for many of mankind’s problems and benefit. But the humans won’t implement any of its ideas until they fully understand it and/or convinced that it hasn’t gone rogue. So would the AI proceed as follows?

“(It) will probably view (humans) as an annoying obstacle to helping humanity flourish: they’re incredibly incompetent… and their meddling greatly slows down progress.”

Would it therefore try to break out? And given its superior intelligence, wouldn’t it succeed? And would its actions then be the equivalent of ruling the world… for our own good, of course? But obviously, we wouldn’t see it that way.

 

So ok, there are many reasons an AI might take over. No wonder so many people these days talk about the AI explosion should/shouldn’t be handled.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more