Internet coming alive and killing us all

[MsMarvelDuckie]

I will second that, Machias. It's one of the primary reasons I gave it up after over three years of doing it myself. It was just too time-consuming and too much of a headache to try to keep up with. And a thankless job, at that.

[Refractive Reflections]

You're thinking of the concept of the technological singularity where it's a hypothetical moment in time when artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence. But there are a lot of criticisms if that will even happen (with so much work being automated it could lead to massive unemployment before the singularity), or it will achieve what we think it will do (accelerated processing power doesn't necessarily mean solving the world's problems).

If you read the Wikipedia article it gives a very deep explanation about the societal, technological, and philosophical ramifications of this technological singularity. So buckle yourself down if anyone wants to read it all because it goes into far-reaching hypothetical possibilities.

If any of you wondered how the dystopian worlds of The Matrix and the future world of The Terminator is created, here's a small trailer of Transcendence which gives a prequel of sorts of how that transition could be possible:

...But the trailer is FAR more entertaining than the movie itself, despite the intriguing premise according to my opinion after viewing it.


But I think this section from Wikipedia pinpoints your worries electric sheep:

Berglas (2008 ) notes that there is no direct evolutionary motivation for an AI to be friendly to humans. Evolution has no inherent tendency to produce outcomes valued by humans, and there is little reason to expect an arbitrary optimisation process to promote an outcome desired by mankind, rather than inadvertently leading to an AI behaving in a way not intended by its creators (such as Nick Bostrom's whimsical example of an AI which was originally programmed with the goal of manufacturing paper clips, so that when it achieves superintelligence it decides to convert the entire planet into a paper clip manufacturing facility).[70][71][72] Anders Sandberg has also elaborated on this scenario, addressing various common counter-arguments.[73] AI researcher Hugo de Garis suggests that artificial intelligences may simply eliminate the human race for access to scarce resources,[64][74] and humans would be powerless to stop them.[75] Alternatively, AIs developed under evolutionary pressure to promote their own survival could outcompete humanity.[67]

Bostrom (2002) discusses human extinction scenarios, and lists superintelligence as a possible cause:

When we create the first superintelligent entity, we might make a mistake and give it goals that lead it to annihilate humankind, assuming its enormous intellectual advantage gives it the power to do so. For example, we could mistakenly elevate a subgoal to the status of a supergoal. We tell it to solve a mathematical problem, and it complies by turning all the matter in the solar system into a giant calculating device, in the process killing the person who asked the question.

A significant problem is that unfriendly artificial intelligence is likely to be much easier to create than friendly AI. While both require large advances in recursive optimisation process design, friendly AI also requires the ability to make goal structures invariant under self-improvement (or the AI could transform itself into something unfriendly) and a goal structure that aligns with human values and does not automatically destroy the human race. An unfriendly AI, on the other hand, can optimize for an arbitrary goal structure, which does not need to be invariant under self-modification.[76]

Eliezer Yudkowsky proposed that research be undertaken to produce friendly artificial intelligence in order to address the dangers. He noted that the first real AI would have a head start on self-improvement and, if friendly, could prevent unfriendly AIs from developing, as well as providing enormous benefits to mankind.[66]

Bill Hibbard also addresses issues of AI safety and morality in his book Super-Intelligent Machines. These ideas were refined in 2008[77] and revised in 2012.[78][79][80]

One hypothetical approach towards attempting to control an artificial intelligence is an AI box, where the artificial intelligence is kept constrained inside a simulated world and not allowed to affect the external world. However, a sufficiently intelligent AI may simply be able to escape by outsmarting its less intelligent human captors.[29][81][82]

Stephen Hawking said in 2014 that "Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks." Hawking believes that in the coming decades, AI could offer "incalculable benefits and risks" such as "technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand."[83]

But I think the bigger question here, if we are talking about whether an independent AI can be friendly or not, is can supercomputers actually and fully comprehend love at all? ...The most innate trait and most highly motivating desire of humanity; when its concept and expression is primarily through self-sacrifice. ...And I don't think a machine could fully grasp a human emotion that leads others to benefit without any of its own benefit, or even to its own detriment, when computers have been designed to outwit through learning algorithms in which it could easily foresee its success without our influence/presence.