[Link] Will Superintelligent Machines Destroy Humanity?

roystgnr27 Nov 2014 21:48 UTC

4 points

A summary and review of Bostrom’s Superintelligence is in the December issue of Reason magazine, and is now posted online at Reason.com.

roystgnr27 Nov 2014 21:48 UTC

4 points

5 comments1 min readLW link Archive

Halfwitz 28 Nov 2014 15:26 UTC
16 points
I remain impressed by how much awareness one high-status academic can raise by writing a book.
Baisius 28 Nov 2014 4:37 UTC
2 points

About 10 percent of A.I. researchers believe the first machine with human-level intelligence will arrive in the next 10 years. Nearly all think it will be accomplished by century’s end.

My first thought upon reading this was “Holy crap! Really?!” as I began revising my own probability/risk estimates. Then I realized that people probably also said this in the 1950s. How much are other people updating on this?
- Paul Crowley 28 Nov 2014 9:57 UTC
  9 points
  Parent
  This looks to me like a misunderstanding of Müller & Bostrom 2014. The actual figure is that 50% of AI researchers give a 10% probability of HLMI by 2022.
  
  Müller, V. C., & Bostrom, N. Future progress in artificial intelligence: A survey of expert opinion. In V. C. Müller (Ed.), Fundamental Issues of Artificial Intelligence. Berlin: Springer. 2014
  - danieldewey 29 Nov 2014 12:36 UTC
    7 points
    Parent
    That’s what I thought at first, too, but then I looked at the paper, and their figure looks right to me. Could you check my reasoning here?
    
    On p.11 of Vincent’s and Nick’s survey, there’s a graph “Proportion of experts with 10%/50%/90% confidence of HLMI by that date”. At around the the 1 in 10 mark of proportion of experts—the horizontal line from 0.1 -- the graph shows that 1 in 10 experts thought there was a 50% chance of HLAI by 2020 or so (the square-boxes-line), and 1 in 10 thought there was a 90% chance of HLAI by 2030 or so (the triangles-line). So, maybe 1 in 10 researchers think there’s a 70% chance of HLAI by 2025 or so, which is roughly in line with the journalist’s remark.
    
    Did I do that right? Do you think the graph is maybe incorrect? I haven’t checked the number against other parts of the paper.
    
    There’s a good chance that the reviewer got the right number by accident, I think, but it doesn’t seem far enough away to call out.
    - Paul Crowley 29 Nov 2014 12:50 UTC
      1 point
      Parent
      Gosh, you might be right! I’m surprised by that. Would be good to have the data to get into it in more detail.