Press release from the Center for A.I. Safety San Francisco, CA – Distinguished AI scientists, including Turing Award winners Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, and leaders of the major AI labs, including Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, have signed a single-sentence statement from the Center for AI Safety that reads: “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.” This represents a historic coalition of AI experts. The coalition includes philosophers, legal scholars, economists, physicists, political scientists, pandemic scientists, nuclear scientists, and climate scientists. They are establishing the risk of extinction from advanced, future AI systems as one of the world’s most important problems. The statement affirms growing public sentiment: a recent poll found that 61 percent of Americans believe AI threatens humanity’s future. The increasing concern about the potential impacts of AI is reminiscent of early discussions about atomic energy. “We … [Read more...] about Top AI Scientists Warn: Risk of Extinction From AI on Scale with Nuclear War
Author Dale Bridges on Satirical Sci Fi and Deconstructing Culture
Dale Bridges writes wildly inventive fiction. I'm not just tossing that phrase around either. His new short story collection, Justice Inc, reads like Phillip K Dick on crack. The stories are iconoclastic and charming, peppered with diabolical uses of modern technology and characters poised on a knife's edge between humanity and monstrosity. Bridges takes the reader through a series of mind-bending realities where people are adopted by corporations, text their way through an apocalypse, build themselves robot girlfriends and warp patriotism into a barbaric ritual of unsurpassed cruelty. The prose is well-crafted and the stories explore themes of gender, ageism, the commodification of life and even death with wry humor and an empathic understanding of human frailty. The protagonist is often an everyman who reveals the mechanics of the world, but each character is deeply flawed, often taking a surprising turn into damnation or redemption. Some worlds are topsy-turvy and others so close to our reality that Dale's finely-tuned observations have a tendency to sting. And though … [Read more...] about Author Dale Bridges on Satirical Sci Fi and Deconstructing Culture
A Million Robot Army
"Whatever distinctly human qualities war calls upon—honor, courage, solidarity, cruelty, and so forth—it might be useful to stop thinking of war in exclusively human terms. After all, certain species of ants wage war and computers can simulate "wars" that play themselves out on-screen without any human involvement. More generally, then, we should define war as a self-replicating pattern of activity that may or may not require human participation— Barbara Ehrenreich I was watching TV pundit/editor of Mother Jones Magazine David Korn commenting on Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld's botched Iraq war when he said, "...it's almost like saying if we had an army of a million giant flying robots things would have turned out better. It's denying reality... it's all a giant experiment for them..." Those two ideas struck me; irresponsible, inexperienced leadership and a million robot army. A scary proposition, fast becoming a very real possibility. DARPA is slowly crafting robots around the art of war. What is DARPA? The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency . DARPA funds an … [Read more...] about A Million Robot Army
