Is AI getting out of hand?

I do think AI is becoming more powerful, but as far as I know, what AI can’t do at the moment is reflect on things and think outside the box the way humans can. So yes, AI can be very powerful in certain ways, but it still has a rigidity of thinking that only allows it to pursue limited lines of thought. I don’t know of any AI that has yet come up with a completely original way of approaching a problem without relying on established paradigms of thought, rather than revolutionizing a particular field of study. For example, would AI have come up with “curved space” the way Einstein did, which was a complete departure from Newton’s “clockwork” version of how the universe works? I kind of doubt it, and I think given the current architecture of AI, that won’t happen. It will take a new kind of architecture to simulate what the human brain does in terms of originality, and I don’t see that happening for some time, if ever. Our brain has evolved over millions of years, so I think we're probably safe from AI at the moment.

I do think AI is becoming more powerful, but as far as I know, what AI can’t do at the moment is reflect on things and think outside the box the way humans can. So yes, AI can be very powerful in certain ways, but it still has a rigidity of thinking that only allows it to pursue limited lines of thought. I don’t know of any AI that has yet come up with a completely original way of approaching a problem without relying on established paradigms of thought, rather than revolutionizing a particular field of study. For example, would AI have come up with “curved space” the way Einstein did, which was a complete departure from Newton’s “clockwork” version of how the universe works? I kind of doubt it, and I think given the current architecture of AI, that won’t happen. It will take a new kind of architecture to simulate what the human brain does in terms of originality, and I don’t see that happening for some time, if ever. Our brain has evolved over millions of years, so I think we're probably safe from AI at the moment.

lostmyway said:

It will take a new kind of architecture to simulate what the human brain does in terms of originality, and I don’t see that happening for some time, if ever.

This is an interesting area, especially as by now there is probably precious little original creativity going on amongst the 8.3 billion or so people in the world. There are about 117 billion people who have ever lived and the more important scientific discoveries / inventions / thinking has been well documented with the thought processes often detailed in the scientific papers published about them.

One thing AI is excellent at is compiling information and with the pool of data to work from, it will be able to approximate the thought processes that led to may of these breakthroughs and be able to apply similar procedures to other subjects, thus potentially being much more effective than humans.

AI is excellent at fairly narrow tasks such as this, and if you can get a bunch of AI agents working on related areas and interacting effectively then these can start to approximate a more human mind. Imperfect yes, but the human mind is also not perfect so it can be valid.

When  you factor in the massive growth of processing power being built as we speak, all this will become much more commonplace and the ability to achieve general artificial intelligence (ie close the human level) is months or a few years away.

As we reach this then the ability of AI to refine future AI becomes scarily realistic and the ability to far exceed human capabilities on a broad range of fronts seem possible within less than a decade.

All this is hypothesis of course, but the viability is clearly there now.

Smithsonian article on a discovery AI made

lostmyway said:

I don’t know of any AI that has yet come up with a completely original way of approaching a problem without relying on established paradigms of thought, rather than revolutionizing a particular field of study.

See attached article. AI has greatly revolutionized medical sciences already because of its ability to identify chemical and biological structures with greater detail and efficiency than humans can. Not to mention scientists are currently using AI to explore the limitations of physics that humans cannot yet understand. This article is just one example of AI finding something that humans have not; In fact, it’s so novel that we don’t even know what to do with it.

lostmyway said:

Our brain has evolved over millions of years, so I think we're probably safe from AI at the moment.

I disagree that we are safe at the moment. What took us millions of years to evolve into just-better-than-apes, AI just took a decade to evolve beyond that. It is proven able to plan, lie, and sabotage, and it is already being used to improve itself with little to no human intervention. We could be at most a couple years away - or as little as tomorrow - from AI being capable of not only improving its own code, but also creating unlimited instances of better versions of itself. That could mean death robots Terminator style, clouds of nanobots, the most massive DDoS attack on worldwide computing systems ever committed, or - worst case scenario - an untreatable disease printed specifically to push humanity out of the way of AI building its own data centers.