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.

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.

One thing I’d point out, Iain, is that nobody can truly define what consciousness is. So, unless and until we know what a conscious mind has access to, how can we fully describe the way it processes information? Does quantum mechanics play a role, for example, an idea Roger Penrose has explored? If so, it might be that humans have some degree of access to vast amounts of processing on a non-local basis. Where does creativity and inspiration come from? Simply from the physical brain? Not everyone necessarily thinks this, and as I mentioned earlier, we don’t know the full resources the human brain has evolved to tap into over the course of evolution.

profdanger said:

I guess we’ll just have to see if humanity is doomed to eventually suffer a dark age without tech

John Wyndham's 'The Chrysalids' come to mind.

profdanger said:

I guess we’ll just have to see if humanity is doomed to eventually suffer a dark age without tech

John Wyndham's 'The Chrysalids' come to mind.