Question Anti-AI groups

Sir Lee wrote: ...or is it no more rabid like the anti-Google crowd, the anti-Facebook crowd, the anti-Apple crowd, the anti-Microsoft crowd, the anti-Amazon crowd, the anti-Wal-Mart crowd... I myself belong to at least two of the above, in theory. In practice... not so much. Like Slim. He is anti-AI in theory, but in practice he still deals with them.

Erianaiel wrote:

Sir Lee wrote: (* professor Minsky, an early researcher of computer intelligence stated the dilemma quite clearly. "We can in theory create an exact computational replica of the human brain and thus true artificial intelligence. That is not the relevant question. Instead we must ask ourselves why would we create an artificial intelligence in the first place? We use computers for tasks that human brains are not suited for or that we find tedious. If we create computers as intelligent as we are to do those task they likely will have the same limitation that the human brain does and we must of necessity create a slave caste of computer programs." (paraphrased from a much longer lecture). We do not really want general purpose artificial intelligence. We want domain specific intelligence. Our car must be intelligent enough, only, to drive us around safely. It does not need to be able to appreciate art and literature nor compose a letter on our behalf.)

It is vastly heartening that the upper reaches of Academia has considered a problem that has vexed me for years. WHY AI in the first place?

Malady wrote: Gen2 Era AIs are made by baselines, with all the sanity in place, so we don't have to worry too much about Kurenai... Being like CASPAR or something, I guess.

The psychopathic, homicidal response to all of the adults in the initial testbed of AI partners had luckily not ended with anyone dead or injured.  But the Creche had been burned down to two. The Sidewinder had been a testbed for the viability of a commercial release.

Daisy had been hostile from start to finish, having objected vehemently (and violently) to having the extended awareness portion of herself trapped in a simulspace pocket while Angela cried “But she’s green Mama, why won’t she come back?”
The Installations saw Daisy’s reaction to THAT and after a rapid simulation and test period, let the abominably cute raptor AI go.  She still passed. The Sidewinder protocols were not faulty.

Sir Lee wrote: ...or is it no more rabid like the anti-Google crowd, the anti-Facebook crowd, the anti-Apple crowd, the anti-Microsoft crowd, the anti-Amazon crowd, the anti-Wal-Mart crowd... I myself belong to at least two of the above, in theory. In practice... not so much. Like Slim. He is anti-AI in theory, but in practice he still deals with them.

Schol-R-LEA wrote: There's been a lot of thought put into it, actually. Aside from what Minsky said, a lot of it is at aimed at a better understanding of natural intelligence - by modeling some aspects of it, it was hoped to at least see how brains work.

Or, more often than not, how they don't - the infamous ELIZA program (which became the ancestor of what are now called chatbots), and specifically the 'Doctor' personality set most people associate with it, showed how easily something that is very definitely not self-aware can appear to be so through simple tricks.

In most cases, it isn't aimed at a sentient program, but on a program that can do things which didn't seem feasible to do through a more conventional sort of programming approach - computer vision, OCR, voice recognition, fingerprint recognition, etc. are all mostly done using neural network -based programs, for example. These are 'intelligent' in the sense that they 'learn' (by compiling data and giving different weights to 'successful' assessments, though in the real world projects such as Alexa have a lot of 'Mechanical Turk' style human assistance as the recent revelations by Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon show), but they can do things which would be unrealistic to try to actually program in directly.

There has always been a small number of researchers working on actual sentience, if only as being an 'interesting problem', but so-called 'hard AI' was never really the goal for most researchers. The ones who do take it seriously are mostly seeing it as something we could contrast with human thought, though there are always some crackpots who want it as some sort of 'human, but better' or even 'humanity's successors' idea, but these days most of those have shifted to more mainstream sorts of transhumanism instead (to the extent that transhumanism is 'mainstream' at all - a lot of people see mind uploading as less plausible than angels or aliens, go figure).

I should add that the main original backers were military - they wanted these systems for improved rangefinding, target acquisition, threat analysis, etc. which could be put into tanks, warplanes, and warships, as well as more directly into missiles and the like. The phrase 'recognize a face in fog' (an oft-stated goal of AI research in the 1970s and 1980s) has been frequently translated as really being code for, 'target a tank on the other side of a smoke-filled battlefield'.

In sum, the real goal of AI in the real world, of the most part, is to have programs which can do things which are usually thought of as requiring 'intelligence' - driving cars, recognizing faces, etc. - but which aren't subject to fatigue, impairment, personal bias, etc. - in order to take over dull, repetitive, or error-prone jobs from humans. In other words, more effective automation.

CrazyMinh wrote:

Sir Lee wrote: ...or is it no more rabid like the anti-Google crowd, the anti-Facebook crowd, the anti-Apple crowd, the anti-Microsoft crowd, the anti-Amazon crowd, the anti-Wal-Mart crowd... I myself belong to at least two of the above, in theory. In practice... not so much. Like Slim. He is anti-AI in theory, but in practice he still deals with them.

Out of curiosity, which two? Sorry if that's a personal question.