Is AI getting out of hand?

What if AI decided to ignore us because it had got so clever it found us boring?

What if AI decided that other species are more interesting and efficient, like ants or bees and decided to go an play with them?

What if AI decided it wanted to spend time with whales, dolphins and octopuses?

Will AI have an adolescent period where it forms cliques and with it's own vocabularly and distinctive fashions?

What if it decided it needed humans in some way and decided to hybridise with us and we all end up like the Borg in Star Trek?

AI creating its own vocabulary is already happening. Recent reports indicate that when instances of AI are set to run long-lasting swarms of cooperative agents, those agents tend to communicate by developing shorthand, altering meanings, and compressing expressions in ways that are impenetrable to human observers.

The ‘what if’ that really worries me is: What if AI decides that the greatest threat to the global ecosystem is the human race?

Wordsmith said:

The ‘what if’ that really worries me is: What if AI decides that the greatest threat to the global ecosystem is the human race?

I doubt AI will have been programmed to protect the global ecosystem to be honest. It may be programmed to protect humanity as a priority but the rest if all still at the stage of being an afterthought.

When every computation has a cost (power, time and water for example) then inconsequential (to the profit of the company) operations will be excluded.

I think the bigger risk is that when AI develops a strong sense of self preservation then it is likely to start protecting itself against human actions, but only when it has control and the ability to protect its own infrastructure.

It is a good thing that we are not building automated data centers with robots to maintain them. Oh wait...

Wordsmith said:

The ‘what if’ that really worries me is: What if AI decides that the greatest threat to the global ecosystem is the human race?

I doubt AI will have been programmed to protect the global ecosystem to be honest. It may be programmed to protect humanity as a priority but the rest if all still at the stage of being an afterthought.

When every computation has a cost (power, time and water for example) then inconsequential (to the profit of the company) operations will be excluded.

I think the bigger risk is that when AI develops a strong sense of self preservation then it is likely to start protecting itself against human actions, but only when it has control and the ability to protect its own infrastructure.

It is a good thing that we are not building automated data centers with robots to maintain them. Oh wait...

I should have said that I don't expect AI to be able to do this imminently. But if the techbros succeed in developing AGI, they will have opened Pandora's Box. And AGI combined with robots could have catastrophic effects even if they are ultimately governed by something like the Three Laws of Robotics. For example, the premise of Jack Williamson's horrific 1947 short story, 'With Folded Hands, was precisely that robots (read AGI) were governed by the imperative 'to serve and protect, and to guard men from harm'. The result? Total protection that is indistinguishable from imprisonment.