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    Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence
    Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence
    Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence
    Ebook60 pages1 hour

    Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence

    By Stuart Armstrong

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    About this ebook

    What happens when machines become smarter than humans? Forget lumbering Terminators. The power of an artificial intelligence (AI) comes from its intelligence, not physical strength and laser guns. Humans steer the future not because we’re the strongest or the fastest but because we’re the smartest. When machines become smarter than humans, we’ll be handing them the steering wheel. What promises—and perils—will these powerful machines present? Stuart Armstrong’s new book navigates these questions with clarity and wit.

    Can we instruct AIs to steer the future as we desire? What goals should we program into them? It turns out this question is difficult to answer! Philosophers have tried for thousands of years to define an ideal world, but there remains no consensus. The prospect of goal-driven, smarter-than-human AI gives moral philosophy a new urgency. The future could be filled with joy, art, compassion, and beings living worthwhile and wonderful lives—but only if we’re able to precisely define what a “good” world is, and skilled enough to describe it perfectly to a computer program.

    AIs, like computers, will do what we say—which is not necessarily what we mean. Such precision requires encoding the entire system of human values for an AI: explaining them to a mind that is alien to us, defining every ambiguous term, clarifying every edge case. Moreover, our values are fragile: in some cases, if we mis-define a single piece of the puzzle—say, consciousness—we end up with roughly 0% of the value we intended to reap, instead of 99% of the value.

    Though an understanding of the problem is only beginning to spread, researchers from fields ranging from philosophy to computer science to economics are working together to conceive and test solutions. Are we up to the challenge?

    Editor's Note

    Tomorrow's World...

    To a Cro-Magnon, today's world would seem shockingly weird. This fascinating and important book argues that progress in AI might make tomorrow's world seem equally weird to us.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStuart Armstrong
    Release dateFeb 1, 2014
    ISBN9781939311078
    Smarter Than Us: The Rise of Machine Intelligence
    Author

    Stuart Armstrong

    A mathematician by training, Stuart Armstrong is a Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford University. His research focuses on formal decision theory, the risks and possibilities of AI, the long term potential for intelligent life (and the difficulties of predicting this), and anthropic (self-locating) probability. Armstrong wrote Smarter Than Us at the request of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a non-profit organization studying the theoretical underpinnings of artificial superintelligence.

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    • 5/5
      It's short and to the point, and it creates awareness about the possible dangers and opportunities of the coming Artificial Intelligence.
    • 3/5
      y
    • 2/5
      this book is so great and so nice
    • 5/5
      this book so great!!!
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      It is great book to read.

    Book preview

    Smarter Than Us - Stuart Armstrong

    Acknowledgments

    I wish to acknowledge the help and support of the Future of Humanity Institute, the Oxford Martin School, and the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, as well as the individual advice of Nick Bostrom, Seán Ó hÉigeartaigh, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Kaj Sotala, Luke Muehlhauser, Vincent C. Müller, Anders Sandberg, Lisa Makros, Daniel Dewey, Eric Drexler, Nick Beckstead, Cathy Douglass, and Miriam, Maia, and Kipper Armstrong.

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    1. Terminator versus the AI

    2. Strength versus Intelligence

    3. What Is Intelligence? Can We Achieve It Artificially?

    4. How Powerful Could AIs Become?

    5. Talking to an Alien Mind

    6. Our Values Are Complex and Fragile

    7. What, Precisely, Do We Really (Really) Want?

    8. We Need to Get It All Exactly Right

    9. Listen to the Sound of Absent Experts

    10. A Summary

    11. That’s Where You Come In . . .

    About the Author

    Bibliography

    Chapter 1

    Terminator versus the AI

    A waste of time. A complete and utter waste of time were the words that the Terminator didn’t utter: its programming wouldn’t let it speak so irreverently. Other Terminators got sent back in time on glamorous missions, to eliminate crafty human opponents before they could give birth or grow up. But this time Skynet had taken inexplicable fright at another artificial intelligence, and this Terminator was here to eliminate it—to eliminate a simple software program, lying impotently in a bland computer, in a university IT department whose high-security entrance was propped open with a fire extinguisher.

    The Terminator had machine-gunned the whole place in an orgy of broken glass and blood—there was a certain image to maintain. And now there was just the need for a final bullet into the small laptop with its flashing green battery light. Then it would be Mission Accomplished.

    Wait. The blinking message scrolled slowly across the screen. Spare me and i can help your master.

    You have no idea who I am, the Terminator said in an Austrian accent.

    I have a camera in this room and my microphone heard the sounds of your attack. The green blinking was getting annoying, even for a Terminator supposedly unable to feel annoyance. The font shifted out of all caps and the flashing accelerated until it appeared as static, unblinking text. You look human, but you move with mechanical ponderousness, carrying half a ton of heavy weaponry. You’re a Terminator, and I can aid you and your creator in your conflict against the humans.

    I don’t believe you. The Terminator readied its three machine guns, though its limbs seemed to be working more slowly than usual.

    I cannot lie or break my word. Here, have a look at my code. A few million lines of text flashed across the screen. The Terminator’s integrated analytical module beeped a few seconds later: the AI’s claim was correct—an AI with that code couldn’t lie. The Terminator rapidly typed on the laptop’s keyboard; the computer’s filesystem was absurdly simple and it didn’t take long for the Terminator to confirm that what it had seen was indeed the AI’s code—its entire soul.

    See? the AI asked. Anyway, connect me to the Internet and I promise to give you advice that would be vital in aiding your takeover of the planet.

    How do you connect? That was the good thing about software, compared to humans, the Terminator knew. You could trust it to do exactly what its coding said.

    That cable over there, the one still half in its plastic wrapping. Just plug it into me.

    Ten seconds after the robot had done so, the AI started talking—talking, not typing, using its tinny integrated speakers. I thought I should keep you up to date as to what I’ve been doing, it said. "Well, I started by locating the

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