Andrew Ng dismisses UFAI concerns

OphilaDros

http://fusion.net/story/54583/the-case-against-killer-robots-from-a-guy-actually-building-ai/

“I don’t work on preventing AI from turning evil for the same reason that I don’t work on combating overpopulation on the planet Mars,” he said. “Hundreds of years from now when hopefully we’ve colonized Mars, overpopulation might be a serious problem and we’ll have to deal with it. It’ll be a pressing issue. There’s tons of pollution and people are dying and so you might say, ‘How can you not care about all these people dying of pollution on Mars?’ Well, it’s just not productive to work on that right now.”

Current AI systems, Ng contends, are basic relative to human intelligence, even if there are things they can do that exceed the capabilities of any human. “Maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe thousands of years from now—I don’t know—maybe there will be some AI that turn evil,” he said, “but that’s just so far away that I don’t know how to productively work on that.”

The bigger worry, he noted, was the effect that increasingly smart machines might have on the job market, displacing workers in all kinds of fields much faster than even industrialization displaced agricultural workers or automation displaced factory workers.

(An earlier version of this article was titled 'Andrew Ng disses UFAI concerns" which is the phrasing many of the commenters are responding to).

http://fusion.net/story/54583/the-case-against-killer-robots-from-a-guy-actually-building-ai/

“I don’t work on preventing AI from turning evil for the same reason that I don’t work on combating overpopulation on the planet Mars,” he said. “Hundreds of years from now when hopefully we’ve colonized Mars, overpopulation might be a serious problem and we’ll have to deal with it. It’ll be a pressing issue. There’s tons of pollution and people are dying and so you might say, ‘How can you not care about all these people dying of pollution on Mars?’ Well, it’s just not productive to work on that right now.”

Current AI systems, Ng contends, are basic relative to human intelligence, even if there are things they can do that exceed the capabilities of any human. “Maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe thousands of years from now—I don’t know—maybe there will be some AI that turn evil,” he said, “but that’s just so far away that I don’t know how to productively work on that.”

The bigger worry, he noted, was the effect that increasingly smart machines might have on the job market, displacing workers in all kinds of fields much faster than even industrialization displaced agricultural workers or automation displaced factory workers.

(An earlier version of this article was titled 'Andrew Ng disses UFAI concerns" which is the phrasing many of the commenters are responding to).

He doesn't "diss UFAI concerns", he says "I don’t know how to productively work on that", which seems accurate for the conventional meaning of "productive" even after looking into the issue. He doesn't address the question of whether it's worthwhile to work on the issue unproductively, illustrating his point with the analogy (overpopulation on Mars) where it's clearly not.

His article commentary on G+ seems to get more into the "dissing" territory:

Enough thoughtful AI researchers (including Yoshua Bengio, Yann LeCun) have criticized the hype about evil killer robots or "superintelligence," that I hope we can finally lay that argument to rest. This article summarizes why I don't currently spend my time working on preventing AI from turning evil.

9OphilaDros11y

I think since he draws an analogy to a problem it would be actually absurd to work on (no point working on overpopulation on Mars unless several other events happen first), he does seem to be suggesting that it's ridiculous worrying about things like UFAI now rather than "hundreds, maybe thousands of years from now". Anyway, I only thought the post was interesting from a PR point of view. The AI problem has been getting good press lately with Musk/Gates et al suggesting that it is something worth worrying about. Ng hasn't said anything that will move the larger discussion in an interesting direction, but it does have the ability to move the whole problem back very slightly in the direction of 'weird problem only weird people will spend time worrying about' in the minds of the general public.

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Andrew Ng dismisses UFAI concerns

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Andrew Ng dismisses UFAI concerns

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