How do we prevent an AI apocalypse?
The Dutch philosopher Spinoza, once said that peace is not an absence of war it is a virtue a state of mind a
disposition for benevolence confidence justice. All the great systems we have in our lives
exist only because people who had a vision of a more beautiful world willed them into reality through hard work.
We've created layers and layers of these systems. Systems of law of transportation of social interaction of healthcare.
And they've been entirely reliant on human intelligence for thousands of years. In the past few decades though,
we've begun the process of creating machine intelligence to improve them. The first phase involved rule based intelligence.
A series of if-then
statements
Whether using a traffic light instead of a human traffic controller or an automatic fare calculator instead of trusting a driver for a fair price.
We've collectively put our trust into machine intelligence whereas before we had to trust humans.
It was scary at first. Initially
we didn't understand how the technology worked
But eventually it became the norm we found that it made the system better if we trusted the machine to do the job.
We then moved on to using heuristics in the next phase. Our machines started making educated guesses.
Whether that be finding the shortest path between two points or predicting the most likely weather for tomorrow.
We again learned to trust them to do those jobs well.
Now, we're in the last phase... the learning phase. We've begun teaching our machines how to learn for themselves
Eventually our cars will learn to drive themselves.
Chemists will be able to teach their machines to discover new drugs for themselves. Every single system
we built up until now will eventually be able to learn for itself.
Just like we do. But, should we trust our learning systems? What happens when we solve intelligence entirely and what does a benevolent
super intelligence look like? The famous dutch painter Rembrandt used to roam the streets of Amsterdam
finding inspiration in these canal walkways for some of his greatest pieces. In his studio,
he would ask you students to try and emulate his work.
Work that took him decades of training to create. We can now condense all that training time machine intelligence
So that a novice can emulate his style
Instantly and that goes for any skill. We'll all be able to master any skill
instantly by augmenting our own intelligence with machines. Our world in its current state though is filled with suffering.
Life is hard even for the most well-off. The ultra rich purchased material possessions to account for the loss of what really matters.
The loss of connection. The loss of
intimacy. The loss of community. AI can change that. It can end suffering as we know it's entirely,
enabling utopia on Earth.
Ending all war and disease using insights that only a super intelligent machine could give us in a matter of seconds.
Van Gogh once said for my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.
He actualized his dreams using a canvas and soon we'll be able to actualize our own using AI as our canvas.
Whether that means generating entirely new realities to live out our wildest fantasies in or
creating a universal problem solver who are given any objective function it can optimize for it by minimizing an error value.
But who gets to decide what that objective function is for all the good that AI could bring us,
there's also the possibility of it being used for evil. All in this world renowned for its tolerant attitude and open-minded spirit
but just a few decades ago, its own police and civil service forces were used to transport tens of thousands of Jews to
extermination camps in Germany. Including Anne Frank and her family. Adolf Hitler was able to manipulate
Hundreds of thousands of people into believing. his own twisted ideology. If Hitler was able to get his hands on super intelligence
we'd all be living in a nightmarish reality. As generative models improve the ability to manipulate people is becoming easier.
Moneyed interests have already begun conducting surveillance of our actions and analyzing our data to build weaponized AI.
Propaganda machines, and these machines are used to [manipulate] our opinions and behavior in order to Advance political agendas in a way
That's never before been
Possible an AI could even come up with an objective of its own, and that objective could [be] to annihilate our species entirely
could happen directly because it desires to end human life or
Indirectly in the way that we build canals to make transport more efficient for us and in the process destroyed countless ecosystems of insects
So how do we ensure that the AI we created beneficial and safe super intelligence is by its very definition
Smarter than us able [to] reason at a level so different from us that it's literally
Unimaginable we could try and contain it to block it from internet access
But eventually it will learn to escape and if one person doesn't let there
They is stays another one will we shouldn't try to stop progress in AI instead
We need to ensure that it's aligned with our own values
We need to understand exactly how these algorithms work, so they produce the results that we want
but who's to say what good values are should we be allowed to pay for sex or
Consume any drugs. We want we can't even collectively decide on what good and evil is
Philosophers have been debating what constitutes those for thousands of years and Ai lives on both sides of that [debate]
Viruses will use AI to learn how to best break into security systems
But at the same time security systems will use AI to learn how best to defend against threats
AI will increasingly be used to create fake but realistic looking news
But at the same time a I will also get better at detecting what's real and what's fake?
We're in the midst of a new arms race an AI is the nuclear power of our time as soon as any
Institution [viet] government or Corporation learns the power of AI they will race to use it to Fulfill their own
Interests, we can learn a lot from our past the European enlightenment, Era writer
Lord Acton had words that still ring true today. He said that freedom consists of the distribution of power and
Despotism in its concentration. We must democratize [the] [AI] power
We must make it as accessible to as [many] people as we can that way the will of the collective will override anyone by vacuum
And only by educating ourselves on how exactly this intelligence works
but we be able to better align it with our intended goals whether up to us to [ensure] that our AI
Bounces all the things that we do that a cherishes laughter and connection that it preserves
Friendship and love in our quest to understand intelligence
We'll learn more about who we [are] and what it means to be human and together
We'll finally be able to take that most sublime process guided by Nature into our own hands
evolution
