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.

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.

profdanger, AI is pushing the known laws of physis further and deeper and more deficiently - that's true, but it is still all based on known physics not something revolutionary.

Also, even if AIs were allowed to modify their own code, that wouldn’t make them creative because they would still be restricted by the logical structures inherent within that code.

Iain said:

Personally I suspect General AI already exists but we are probably not considered ready for it, and quite rightly so.

I believe we are already there, too. Just the ways Anthropic alone describes its progress recently does not directly state that we have arrived at general AI, but it strikes me like they are just giving us brief glimpses of what’s actually going on. They could already be at a point of attempting to contain a general AI while leading us to believe that they’re still in an earlier phase of setting alignments for the AI’s moral understanding.

Just like with the existence of aliens (which that I don’t believe in, to be clear), would the government/corporations in charge of AI actually fully inform the public if general AI has been achieved? We’re lucky we’ve had whistleblowers essentially force leaders in the industry to bring any form of disclosure to begin with.

lostmyway said:

I think the point I am making is that there are certain problems that are not "computable" and, therefore, lie beyond the scope of AI.

Can you think of such a problem? To be classified as such I think it would need to have definable criteria for a human to work with and measurable elements of quality for it to be judged as a solution at the end.

When you get to define these things then it starts to be something that AI can make a good attempt at, although I don't know if the computing resources and machine learning will be suitable just yet.

lostmyway said:

we have so far not seen an AI that possesses general average intelligence, although we keep hearing promises to the contrary

I agree - but if there was such a thing available then it would likely be under the control of a government first as it could be easily considered a national security risk for it to be available to the general public - and hence criminals.

When you consider the volume of data held by the NSA in America for example, there is a truly massive amount to train any AI model on in terms of human interaction.

Personally I suspect General AI already exists but we are probably not considered ready for it, and quite rightly so.

Iain, well, I would point out that we have so far not seen an AI that possesses general average intelligence, although we keep hearing promises to the contrary.

I think the point I am making is that there are certain problems that are not "computable" and, therefore, lie beyond the scope of AI.

I think the point I am making is that there are certain problems that are not "computable" and, therefore, lie beyond the scope of AI.

Iain said:

Personally I suspect General AI already exists but we are probably not considered ready for it, and quite rightly so.

I believe we are already there, too. Just the ways Anthropic alone describes its progress recently does not directly state that we have arrived at general AI, but it strikes me like they are just giving us brief glimpses of what’s actually going on. They could already be at a point of attempting to contain a general AI while leading us to believe that they’re still in an earlier phase of setting alignments for the AI’s moral understanding.

Just like with the existence of aliens (which that I don’t believe in, to be clear), would the government/corporations in charge of AI actually fully inform the public if general AI has been achieved? We’re lucky we’ve had whistleblowers essentially force leaders in the industry to bring any form of disclosure to begin with.

lostmyway said:

I think the point I am making is that there are certain problems that are not "computable" and, therefore, lie beyond the scope of AI.

Can you think of such a problem? To be classified as such I think it would need to have definable criteria for a human to work with and measurable elements of quality for it to be judged as a solution at the end.

When you get to define these things then it starts to be something that AI can make a good attempt at, although I don't know if the computing resources and machine learning will be suitable just yet.

lostmyway said:

we have so far not seen an AI that possesses general average intelligence, although we keep hearing promises to the contrary

I agree - but if there was such a thing available then it would likely be under the control of a government first as it could be easily considered a national security risk for it to be available to the general public - and hence criminals.

When you consider the volume of data held by the NSA in America for example, there is a truly massive amount to train any AI model on in terms of human interaction.

Personally I suspect General AI already exists but we are probably not considered ready for it, and quite rightly so.