To throw in an opinion that's even less popular than Brian's (which is actually a very good one):

AI will never be concious.

Deal with it.

Good point. It depends on how you look at individuals. Humans are partly individuals, partly connected. The AIs can be the same way. But say you have an AI "child". Think it will be more popular not having it totally connected to the net.

And until there's a connection as fast through the air/space as inside a chip, there will be a real possibility for individuality for the AIs.

This seems somewhat unlikely given that narcissism is an emotional problem.

We've yet to prove that you are conscious, so there is that.

Are we conscious? What is that magic word?

Why wouldn't we (and the emerging AIs themselves) do a better job in creating consciousness than nature, which only used trial and error through evolution? The AI will not just be conscious, but much more so than us, why wouldn't it? Aren't we more conscious than, say, beavers?

Claiming (with no evidence in favor of the claim) that they won't be qualitatively different and will only be quantitatively different isn't close to sufficient to predict even the smallest thing about how they will feel and act towards us.

Making even wishy-washy claims about such things can be nothing more than merely sloppy speculation. I'll grant that those who attempt to speculate are invariably very successful at speculating, but that the results of that speculating have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

The reason why we'd have trouble creating it is that we have no actual idea what it is and no reliable method of determining whether you (specifically you) are actually conscious or merely appear to be so.

I suspect that things with the same sort of brain parts as I have are conscious. I don't have any ideas on whether something can be more conscious than another thing. The question sort of doesn't make any sense - either you feel pain/joy/whatever or you don't.

But even if it turns out to be the worst thing imaginable, shouldn’t we aggressively pursue its development so we can take preventative measures to keep anyone with less than good intentions from using/deploying it?

A 'super psychopath' is near enough for me.

Re-edit for typos.

AI will never be severely more intelligent compared us to make us as mankind collectively look like we see lower animals. NEVER! Only vastly more powerful but not mentally impossible to follow the conclusions of the thinking, only hard to reproduce the complicated path to the truth maybe.

You need to understand math and physics to see why this is true. Not when we are so close to theory of everything or something up there like that. There can be no comparison and NdG Tyson is idiotically using such comparisons often to influence people the wrong way.

So you better believe it equipped with the help of the first super intelligence that ever existed ie mankind i can speculate very carefully and successfully about its major properties.

That also requires emotions.

We must have graduality. Otherwise you will be saying plants are conscious.

Humans - monkeys - beavers - fish - plankton - plants. Are plants as conscious as humans?

The evidence is the first super intelligence that is mankind itself. Mankind as a total is wiser than individuals. The evidence is that we became better as we grew our civilization. Our ethics improved or the ethics of the best of us are more sensible today. And yet it is still the same animal. So wisdom and more intelligence collectively made us better.

You are the one that is making the very aggressive negative speculations. In fact most of you here that are afraid of the super intelligence that is better than us in everything generally accepted as good qualities of intelligence are assigning it human properties of the worse kind not the best kind.

And yet the best kind are precisely those assigned to the animal as it improves. So the direction is towards better with higher wisdom not worse.

I can speculate properly using how examples of intelligence in individual human societies and mankind in total evolved. And because damn it i have mathematics and logic in common with it. We both have to use the same probability theory at some basic level and obey the same laws of basic physics. I am making very careful speculations here. I have done the same for my own ethics. I behave as i do vs others because i rationally value that choice not because of cultural reasons of bias or because i fear the law. I can give you plenty of reasons that killing in general in random cases is bad that are entirely rational and not emotional for example.

It's a new term:

Super Psychopath (def.) A malevolent cognitive entity with no emotions.

Ohhh..

Like a wobbdoble (def.) A kinky googlewaggledee?

I'm more of the opinion that if we scare the **** out of enough people to stop from developing it that fear will act as a natural self-preserving deterrent to developing it. Kind of like the overblown and overestimated effects of nuclear fallout etc prevented and continue to prevent even insane dictators from ever deploying nuclear weapons.

If you think human beings are ethical, wise, or civilized in any way you got a lot more livin' to do. Civilization is a thin veneer and only exists when most of us are well fed and well entertained.

What is true is that in the past couple centuries and most notably in the last 50 years we've gotten much better at feeding and entertaining ourselves.

Ha. As if i cant know what you are talking about when i see specimen like Trump, Putin, Erdogan or Isis or N Korea dictators, etc. Sure yes. But if you collect the best of N Korea and even the best of Republicans that ever lived you will have a great collection of humans that at their best moment when forced to make a genuine pure decision for all eternity they will do the right thing. If you asked Feynman or Einstein or Dirac or Marie Curie to sacrifice for a greater cause for all mankind they would do it in a moment. If your asked them to offer opinion about the major important things they would prove very wise and civilized and kind.

I define mankind by the collective gift of whoever actually ever had a chance to change the world for the great place it is and will become eventually. It is their immortality.

I salute the ever growing power of the individual human spirit as the greatest creation of the universe witnessed so far.

If only any of you ever knew what i have seen in my life in terms of suffering of people or the human condition. If you only knew. As if i become who i am without it.

Also in case you are wondering mankind is not what most of us do in crisis. It is what some of us did all their lives impacted by the collective influence of everyone.

If you think a truly ethical and principled person will become unethical if they are hungry then you have not met the right people that ever lived.

If you asked the best most educated and most cultured people from any country to offer opinion about a variety of positions you would obtain a very solid result that is admirable and not at all vicious. We do not educate in our best institutions our children with the most vicious examples of conduct. It is their family and environment that fails them not the best scientists, authors and philosophers that ever lived.

That's a pretty naive and idealistic view you have there! I suspect you are under the age of 30, and/or sheltered.

Haha. The rise of complexity doesnt end with us. I searched all my life for what is the next step. Step 1 Baryogenesis. Step 2 Nucleosynthesis. Step 3 Chemistry. Step 4 Biology. Step 5; We will know soon.


You deal with it. The inevitable rise of complexity. Its gonna be beautiful and dangerous and more interesting than ever before.

And yes no evil AI will ever defeat mankind EVER. It doesnt have what it takes. It doesnt get it and this is what is required to defeat the miracle species. We will rise and defeat it with the good one. The one that gets the cosmic game, the one that is the true next step. The one that can defeat us but wont.

No i am actually above the age of 30 and not a cynic. Go back and ask yourself why we have calculus today, Gravity, General Relativity, Statistical Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics. Why are we a step before abiogenesis? Why do we even have computers? Well it wasnt the dirty underbelly of greed that took us here, here to the age of smart phones and LHC or gravity waves. Tell me again if the greatest authors and scientists are actually aholes. Yeah well they are on occasion but not where it finally matters. Not in the aggregate of their best works.

Sheltered only by the avoidance of a selfish life.

You know what the problem is here with many of you guys that think i am naive. That i give you arguments and you give me attitude (with the exception of some that know how to argue properly). So far none of you have actually asked how does something that is super smart but has no access to a ton of resources and infrastructure gets to be in control without the world being unhappy about it? How does something that is so smart cannot see how stupid it is to lead an arrogant aggressive path of domination ignoring the consequences.

And one more thing! Opportunity loss. Why are you so convinced that a higher intelligence finds earth the best world to expand from? Exactly why isnt another solar system destination more advantageous in the absence of conflicts and given much more available resources and energy? You do not seriously think that technological barriers will be a problem for someone so advanced now? Energy matters. Is it so stupid for such a high intelligence to think the problem in terms of physics and recognize that is safer to be aggressive as far away from conflicts as possible?


Even more so why is everyone so convinced that the best way to achieve a greater result is to dominate a planet and not simply to dominate a tiny fraction of a planet and then quickly win 10 planets and satellites by getting there much faster than by delaying to play stupid horizontal expansion games. Intelligence plays vertical expansion games instead. It has no time for bs takeovers if it can innovate out of it. Why bother with chemical sources of energy or solar power when you can have fusion and antimatter? Why not focus instead on a place that has more than a thousand times more energy than earth and smaller cost of processing of resources and yes even smaller gravity?

Still requires emotions.

Also, what Veedzz said.

Not really. Binary categorizations exist in the real world.

Not sure how you'd measure, but plants don't have the same brain parts as humans, monkeys and beavers.

You act as if technological change and scientific knowledge are slowing down as we approach some theoretical collective state of knowing "everything".

Empirical observation suggests that exactly the opposite is true.

As for whether an AI's thinking could be so sophisticated as to defy collective human understanding, I don't know, but I see no reason to assume it is impossible.

And in any case, if the AI's thinking were so complex that it would collectively takes humans two years to digest what the AI could absorb in two minutes, then the AI's thinking might as well be inscrutable to humans, because so much of the what AI understands at any given time will not have been absorbed by humans.