Here’s my vision of this, as a short scene from a movie. Off my blog: The Future of AI
Michael3
Karma: 9
Perhaps you’ve covered this, but what exactly does “friendly” mean? Do what I say? Including enslave my fellow humans?
Make me do what I should? Including forcing me to exercise regularly, and preventing me from eating what I want?
Support human improvement? Including reengineering my body/mind into whatever I want?
Make me happy? Including just inventing a really great drug?
I don’t know what I want AI to do for me, so I have no idea how you would build a system that knows. And no idea how to resolve differences in opinion between myself and other humans.
Actually, we need an artists contribution. We need a vision of what we’re trying to accomplish with the Singularity. Right now, I picture the community as some nerd, absorbed in a Rubik’s cube of technology, walking oblivious towards the edge of a cliff. We will explore AI, nanotech or biotech until it blows up in our faces.
Way back when, written science fiction was some kind of vision of the future. A limited one, but at least an attempt to say what we wanted, or what technology would do to us. Now, there’s almost nothing. Go into the SF section of a bookstore and it’s alt-history, various type of war stories, thrillers and lots of fantasy novels.
The only two “near-term” SF things I’ve read recently are Accellerando by Charles Stross, and Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge. We need a lot more of that. I’d even like to see someone make a decent SF movie based on this kind of material. It’s hopeless to get that through a studio, but perhaps you could open-source produce it and distribute it over the net. Seems like it’s time for that kind of thing to start happening.
So I’d welcome all the artists! Please come and dream for us.
Isn’t this the movie Groundhog Day, but with certain knowledge that the world will reset daily forever? No happy ending.
I’d just get really, really bored. Studying something (learning the piano, as he does in the movie) would be the only open-ended thing you could do. Otherwise, you’d be living forever with the same set of people, and the same more-or-less limited set of possibilities.