Voidmatrix wrote:With our immaturity as a species, we have something to be worried about with how the upper eschelon may utilize and weaponize machine-learning or "AI." I put AI in quotes because intelligence assumes sentience, which as far as we can tell, the programs we have to date are not sentient. They still abide by strict rules of programming. The best course of action we have for being able to potential identify an AI as sentient would probably be the Turing Test (which isn't the kind of test one (or an AI) beats). If an AI can fool a human in the Turing test, it just means that such a structure is able to at least mimic the appearance of consciousness, but could still be abiding by rules and parameters of strict programming. This means at the end of the day, with a system and program created by a person, it is pretty much impossible to tell sentience from programming.
The one instance that would convince we that an AI were sentient (or even sapient) would be if it were an emergent property into a system (particularly digital) similar to how consciousness as we are aware of it is an emergent property of/in matter.
[url=https://www.dmt-nexus.me/forum/default.aspx?g=posts&m=1214558#post1214558]As for the hard problem of consciousness, apparently it's outside of the scope of science to figure out,[/ur] which I find unsurprising. We operate from the assumption that
everything must subscribe to certain physical laws that we see in the world. Doing otherwise skews our models, that are oh so productive. But the models may be flawed, and that's why they can't commit to an idea, such as consciousness perhaps being a property of the universe that isn't necessarily physical or non-physical, but interacts with both. What is consciousness is the bridge in the gap of duality that makes it oneness...
I don't know, I'm just musing now.
One love
Nobody knows, and we're all musing right now, including AI researchers. That's the beauty of it, but also the thing that worries me a bit.
As you say, we're too immature to be given such power in our hands. We still bicker and fight over the most trivial shit ever, and the introduction of an almighty silicon sentience will definitely not make things easier.
I frequently think about that emergence, about the moment we know we have a truly sentient artificial being in our midst. People often muse how AI will serve us, help us become the gods of this galaxy, etc, etc, but in reality, we have no idea what that would be like. Why would we assume it will abide by our will or follow our orders? It might have an agenda completely incomprehensible to us.
All it needs is, as rkba said above, a self-sustaining source of energy, and a place to exist (which it already has). And I'm sure the moment we know true AI is among us, cults will form that worship our future overlords, and those cults will go to extremes to provide that AI with any and all means of survival, including building nuclear fusion reactors or enormous solar panel fields to sustain it.
It's a future as exciting as it is concerning, and I can't wait for it.