Nick Boström is a Swedish professor in Philosophy at the University of Oxford with focus on superintelligence and the existensial risks we might face when developing agents that are far more intelligent than we humans are together.
The problem is still on a hypothetical level, and a general superintelligence will probably take time to happen, if ever. However, it is important to address the risks and find powerful safeguards (as Boström explains, this is difficult),
What's AI?
Artificial Intelligence is a buzz-word that is hard to define. One definition might be the ability to solve problems humans can solve. The field has been explored formally since a workshop on Darmouth College in 1956. Since then, there has been several periods of extensive research followed by AI winters.
There is a distinction between general and narrow AI, where narrow AI adresses more specific problems, such as chess games, trading algorithms and Apple's Siri. General AI refers to an ability to solve general problems that humans can solve. Most AI systems of today are narrow AI.
General intelligence is much more complicated to develop. This includes common sense, which is hard to formulate.
Superintelligence is an actor/agent that has an intelligence far above the most intelligent human beings.
Scales of Intelligence
Here we are biased by the human scale of intelligence, that ranges from Lloyd Christmas and Harry Dunne up to sir Isaac Newton and Ada Lovelace. This scale apply to human intelligence, but there are more life forms than that. Fungus, for example have much weaker intellectual capability than all human beings. At the other end of the scale, there might be agents with far higher intelligence than the brightest human beings.
Analogy: Human beings are generally up to two meters tall, with a world record of 272 cm. Blue whales twelve times longer has been recorded. Redwood trees can exceed 91 meters. This illustrates that human scales are very narrow. If we can meet creatures that are twelve or fourty times longer than we are, it would be possible to meet creatures twelve or fourty times more intelligent.
Types of Superintelligence
Nick Boström discusses different types of superintellligence:
- Speed (doing what we can do but faster)
- Collective (many smaller intellects cooperating to form a superintelligence)
- Quiality superintelligence (doing what we can do but with better quality)
He foresees that the speed of the AI takeoff (speed for the system to gain superintelligence itself) will happen very quickly. That will happen when the system finds ways to improve its capacity, develop new code and convincing people to assign more resources to that system.
Things Getting Nasty?
An agent that is smart enough will learn how when to conceal its intelligence when it finds it suitable. It may also try to escape from its sandbox environment, for example by convincing a technician to plug in a network cable, or bring a flash disk with a copy of some data.
Boström is also discussing the goals of superintelligence systems. The targets that we give the system can easily become harmful. For example, an AI system that is supposed to make people smile can cheat by applying plastic surgery dooming people to statically grinning faces, Further, if a superintelligence has different goals than humans have, the system will find ways to secure the resources. Perhaps not nice or friendly ways.
There are several movies describing clashes between AI and humans. If we ever ceate a superintelligence powerful enough to harm us, it will probably do its homework enough not to give its opponent any chance.
AI Research
The AI research has several agents: governments, companies, criminals, academics. Many of them are in an arms-race with each other. They cannot afford losing that race, and there is a significant risk that many projects will rush themselves to reach superintelligence. There is a risk that projects will ignore the safeguards that may prevent AI from becoming harmful.
Artificial intelligence has already been used to manipulate elections. AI is changin our world now. In other countries, AI is used to rank citizens after how correct their behaviour is. I strongly recommend everyone affected by AI (everyone) to read this book.
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