Just on the substantive points:
First, as Jeff says the biggest danger is about self-replication. In biology, the simplest machines which can self-replicate are viruses. Each one is just the right key which fits in some DNA-generated lock. There couldn't be less intelligence, but purely mathematically there couldn't be more danger. A single virus could exist which destroys all complex life on Earth and sends us back 3 billion years. The second part of this idea is that you'd have people develop some kind of "breed" of self-replicating and self-improving AIs who decide that we're a waste of their resources and should be eradicated. This is a very unlikely scenario. Anything that was so much smarter than us would, as in my hero Iain M Banks' "Culture", most likely decide to keep us around as profound curiosities, just as they tolerate one another's oddness. After all (once we got through the 20th century), intelligences as dumb and biological as we have decided that diversity is something we regard as an ideal. The second issue is something less "scary" but perhaps more thorny. This is the shift we'll have to make in our economic and social structures when we have machines to replace almost everyone's job. We are looking at effectively 100% unemployment, if you measure that by people doing things they don't want to do in return for someone else's money (representing something we want that they have). This is not going to work when we can just build a machine to do a person's "job" so we're going to have to do everything in some new way. I have no clue how that will happen, but my hope is that it's like Star Trek, or (some of) the Culture. That's perhaps what these futurists should be concerned about. Fergal -- Fergal Byrne, Brenter IT Author, Real Machine Intelligence with Clortex and NuPIC https://leanpub.com/realsmartmachines Speaking on Clortex and HTM/CLA at euroClojure Krakow, June 2014: http://euroclojure.com/2014/ and at LambdaJam Chicago, July 2014: http://www.lambdajam.com http://inbits.com - Better Living through Thoughtful Technology http://ie.linkedin.com/in/fergbyrne/ - https://github.com/fergalbyrne e:[email protected] t:+353 83 4214179 Join the quest for Machine Intelligence at http://numenta.org Formerly of Adnet [email protected] http://www.adnet.ie On Mon, May 25, 2015 at 5:04 PM, cogmission (David Ray) <[email protected]> wrote: > This was someone's response to Jeff's interview (see here: > https://www.facebook.com/fareedzakaria/posts/10152703985901330) > Please read and comment if you feel the need... > Cheers, > David > -- > *With kind regards,* > David Ray > Java Solutions Architect > *Cortical.io <http://cortical.io/>* > Sponsor of: HTM.java <https://github.com/numenta/htm.java> > [email protected] > http://cortical.io
