Elon Musk warns against unleashing artificial intelligence 'demon'

[tclambert]

19. When we studied machine intelligence back in college, we encountered many unknowns.

For instance, what exactly do we mean by intelligence? We argued quite a bit over the definition of human intelligence. We agreed that machine intelligence would probably behave differently (better at arithmetical calculations and recall of facts, for a couple of examples). We might not recognize the machine's intelligence when it emerged. Professor Kaplan pointed out that whenever people imagine artificial intelligence they seem to really want artificial brilliance. Artificial stupidity might come more easily, but who wants that? Yet, Professor Kaplan suggested common mistakes people make might automatically arise from our mental strategies, the kind of heuristic shortcuts we take to make complex problems, like object recognition, solvable.

And then you get into philosophical discussions of consciousness: What does it mean? How does it work? How would Descartes know he did the thinking rather than a thought simulation algorithm doing it?

Recently, stories said a computer program had passed the Turing Test--it had a conversation with real people who could not tell it was not another human person. Later evaluations claimed it only proved the gullibility of the human test subjects.

In fact, ELIZA, a computer program from the 1960s, often had conversations with people that seemed very human to some users at some times. (I played with it, though, and found if you tried, you could make it sound very inhuman and downright foolish. It tried to ask typical questions a psychotherapist might ask, and after a time would ask if you thought the thing you just mentioned had anything to do with the thing mentioned four answers earlier. Sometimes by luck, putting those two things together sounded very insightful. Other times, it just seemed odd. "Do you think your choice of girlfriends has anything to do with your mother's coldness?" versus "Do you think your love of chocolate chip cookies has anything to do with playing the piano?" )