Artificial intelligence... Many experts on the subject are saying that the evolution of A.I. is happening so fast that most of us will live to see the day that the computer will indeed beat the human mind in almost every way.
The only thing they disagree on, is when exactly this will happen.

I find that a bit scary, to be honest.

Much will ofcourse depend on how A.I. is going to be used. I can see a lot of potential for both very positive as well as very negative stuff.

Personally, i don't think that the frightening 'terminater' prospect of A.I being used for military purposes is very fetched at all. People are already working on surveillance drones that can operate independantly, and i figure that for a missile defence shield to work, a lot of computing power comes in handy.
And there is the neuromarketing thing...oh, i realy hate the idea that one day, we will be manipulated 24/7 in such a clever way that we won't even notice.

But there are positive things, like if we no longer had to test new med's on animals. Or just the idea that we could gain understanding of realy complex things. That maybe A.I. could be a powerfull mind-extending tool in that we could gain insights in issues that are just too complex for a human mind to put the pieces together. Just in the way science has broadened the horizon of modern man significantly.

I don't know. What do you people think? Should we fear A.I.?

I think that people make a mistake when they talk as if human beings/biology and technology will continue to be discrete things. Instead of building massive AIs that live in boxes, I think instead, what we'll start augmenting our own biologies.

Blessings
~ND

I'm fascinated by the whole thing honestly.

What I find interesting evolutionary programming on basic neural networks with ~10 inputs, 10 outputs, and a single hidden layer can generate incredibly realistic basic animal-like behavior. 10,10,10 and you have things wandering around looking for food, avoiding bad things, and mating in a virtual environment.


It only gets more complicated from there, more inputs and outputs, more hidden layers, multiples levels of hidden layers and the capacity for complexity just explodes. I've only dabbled in some very very basic evolutionary programming models and the power of them astounds me the more I learn.

We're already being beaten at Go by these things. The single most complex game that human beings have produced and neural networks are kicking our rear ends.

They're designing warehouses, store layouts, and watching your purchasing history with such accuracy that amazon can predict with a high level of certainty what items are likely to be in your next purchase.

The fact is that artificial intelligence already plays a significant role in our day to day lives, its just not GENERAL intelligence, which is the distinction. The accuracy and power of these highly sophisticated algorithms has me incredibly excited for the advent of general AI.

My only hope is that when it happens, its allowed to go all the way. Not in the sense of "oh, hey Mr. AI, here's the nuclear control codes." or something like that. I mean in the sense that it is informed as to it's inner-workings, is able to understand itself, and make improvements upon itself so that unlike us, it is unbounded.

I think artificial is natural

We already have machines that can compute faster than the human brain.

But we will never have an AI that will surpass us in every way.
We are limited. We can only make an AI that is an Image of our mind. But what we can do is give this image more power than our brain has.

AI will only surpass us when the AI makes a better AI.

That amazon thing is one of the scary parts. If they can predict your next purchase, they're only a few steps away from manipulating you into buying something, or voting for something/someone.
I realy resent that idea, i must say.