Sunday 24 September 2017

CUE THE HORROR THEME MUSIC - Rogue AIs WILL destroy the world.

Real Life can be much more interesting than fiction... and some real life events sound like the first 10 minutes of horror films.


You've read the sci-fi stories and seen the films.  There's a project to create an AI.  Or an android or robot which will "mimic" human intelligence.  Or someone's mind gets put into a machine.

You know what's going to happen next.  Because the same thing always happens in these films (and because the trailer and synopsis gave it away:

The AI/Robot/Ghost in the Machine will try to take over the world and kill all humans.


It happens.  Every.  Damn  Time.

HAL-9000, Proteus IV, Skynet, the Matrix, The Red Queen,

The Gunslinger, Ash, rogue replicants, Eve VIII, David, Ava, BB-8, Morgan,

The Master Control Program, the Lawnmower Man, Will Caster.

(Although to be fair, who'd watch a film where they just made a really good AI that work well within the parameters.)

But what happens first?  Someone, an expert, usually an outsider, a POV character new to the project or investigating it brings up the horrible possibility that:

The AI/Robot/Ghost in the Machine will try to take over the world and kill all humans.

But the head of the project will, in a show of hubris, deny that anything could go wrong.  It's not powerful enough, there are safe guards, that's not even possible with the current technology... he is, of course, wrong and:

The AI/Robot/Ghost in the Machine will try to take over the world and kill all humans.


But that's the movies.  And real life isn't movies (shut up, entire point of this blog).

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When Elon Musk says "Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WWIII [in my opinion]" it's easy to dismiss.  He's smart.  He's a futurist.  He says some interesting things.  He's a bit of an expert on technology and what might happen.  But he's an outsider to the national projects that are going on.  The media loves these sort of stories: famous person who gets clicks if you mention them in the headline makes doomsday prediction.  Shareable.  But ignorable, because real life isn't movies

Then this happens:

CUE THE HORROR THEME MUSIC...

John Giannandrea, Google's AI chief dismisses it as impossible... he's the project head from the movie.  We're doomed, this is real, guys:

 The AI/Robot/Ghost in the Machine will try to take over the world and kill all humans.

~ DUG.


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