Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence

Too time constrained for show notes this time. If you want to send us notes to be added here, please do it! Best place to reach is is the Concerning AI group on Facebook.

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Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

We recorded this episode on Nov 6, 2016, two days before the US election. Sorry it’s taken so long to get out. Also, no show notes due to need to simply get it published and avoid further delay. Enjoy!

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence

Fiction from Liu Cixin:

We’re a lot more beautiful if we try.

(5:41) The Upward Spiral

(9:45) Are we getting any wiser?

(12:43) What are we trying for? To continue an aesthetic lineage.

(13:55) Kurzweil. When the machines tell us they are human, we will believe them.

(16:13) Cosmists and Terrans

(19:54) What are our machines learning from? What are our kids learning from?

What’s worth fighting for, even in futility?

(21:15) 0011: Evan Prodromou, AI practitioner (part 1) 0012: Evan Prodromou, AI practitioner (part 2) 0006: Compassion

Concerning AI Facebook Group

TED Talk posted there.

If you listen with Overcast, these timestamps in the notes are links to that spot in the audio.

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

Korey’s comment:

… one question you asked on ‘The Locality Principle’, was what other people are doing to avert a possible AIpocalypse; I’m starting a company! An entertainment venture with one driving purpose: to create a fully realized virtual world, one with as many complex and varied entities as the real world itself. …

Links for Korey’s stuff:

Philip’s comment:

Hey Ted & Brandon! Just got to your most recent podcast, “The Locality Principle”. Love what you’re doing by the way. I expect this message may never reach you as I’m posting from Australia and the sheer distance between us in terms of light speed milliseconds is sufficient that an all consuming singleton AI is likely to consume all of our atoms before Facebook’s servers get a chance to process the request. Ha ha.

Terrifying jokes aside, your podcast ended with the question “what are people doing” to address the potential risks associated with super-intelligent AI.

To add one more data point for you: I changed career 2 years ago (from finance/management consulting) to software development in order to eventually position myself to work on these problems.

The future path is uncertain, as there are various potential ways to do that (ie. academia, research institute, BigCorp, “startup”…) and still plenty of work between Modestly Competent Programmer and AI Researcher. Essentially all I need at this point to continue progressing is time and information. Also, more podcasts ;)

Also, “The Locality Principle” was a bit grandiose, so how about “The Locality Effect.” Better?

Fiction from Liu Cixin:

Possible future topics:

To send us Feedback, visit the Concerning AI Facebook group.

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Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

These notes won’t be much use without listening to the episode, but if you do listen, one or two of you might find one or two of them helpful.

Lyle Cantor‘s comment (excerpt) in the Concerning AI Facebook group:

Regarding the OpenAI strategy of making sure we have more than one superhuman AI, this is not as good an idea as it might seem. For whatever reason, humans find analogies to nature highly appealing, and have positive associations to terms like “ecosystem” and “bio-memetic.” Open AI seems to think something like this: the solution to Friendly AI is to have an ecosystem of competing AIs, so no AI gets too much power.

…

Eric Saumur‘s response (excerpt):

Natural Selection works the same way. Replication is all that matters. But you still end up with peacocks that spend huge amounts of energy on tails and fast sword fish and slow snails and 30 million other variations. Why? Because success at replication in an ecosystem isn’t all about reproduction rate. It is also about long term survival and not becoming too easy a food source for something else. Long term survival is about diversity and that was why sex was invented. Sexually replicating species are more diverse than asexually reproducing species and so they don’t end up being a big buffet for something else. Some of them always have the right defense against against the predator or disease.

…

For reference: 0007: Cosmists, Terrans, and Cyborgists, 0018: The One True Doomsday, 0005: Paths to Superintelligence, 0004: Prioritization of Risks

If 99.999% of humans alive today were killed by a disease, how many would survive? More than 7 million.

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

Some things we talked about:

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

No notes this time, just a speculative conversation about some possible implications of the idea that we could be living in a simulation.

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To get in touch with us, visit the Concerning AI Facebook group.

Post-Human Series by David Simpson

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

Are people better than robots?

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Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

This episode, we talk about this paper:

A Few Useful Things to Know about Machine Learning by Pedro Domingos, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/

Concerning AI | Existential Risk From Artificial Intelligence is made with Jetpack Podcast. Full show notes and every episode at https://concerning.ai/