The Rise of AI

[Montmorency]

Deus Ex level AI is still decades away.

hard to build consciousness when we cant explain it within ourselves. The public (and I mean the general public) perceptions of what makes an AI "intelligent" are based on a faulty assumption that ties conversation = intelligence.
We will find ourselves with AI that can have a free flowing conversation with us to the degree we cant tell whether a human is giving us responses or not. It will respond to new scenarios based on the accumulated knowledge of millions of scenarios fed to it. But truly novel thinking which is really what we are talking about when we talk about AI, is still a mystery.

Second and fourth sentences contradict. Language has rules and words, but it does not arise out of a mere accumulation of rules and words. Google Translate will give you an inhuman result no matter how many words or rules or even single states you feed it. It's not a matter of processing power.

Why is it plausible to maintain that assembling a thousand monkeys (or less charitably, nematodes) will by their accumulated mass meet the measure of Man? I'm profoundly skeptical that today's classes of machine AI, in any degree of sophistication and co-articulation, could ever match the "intelligence" of a whole specimen of even the simplest mammal. I'd be inclined to change my mind if you could produce an AI trained to land space rockets that could learn how to determine edibility of substances, maximize score in videogames, and file a tax return, without being designed to do so. Do we have any more reason to believe this is possible than to believe that a mouse can "learn" its way into being a dolphin?

In goofier terms, I still don't understand why this movie is considered by so many a plausible expectation for machine AI:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

It should be easier to intervene in a pre-existing complex biological system and produce unintended results than to manufacture one from scratch or to imagine one will mysteriously "emerge" on its own from something different.


That's not to say that even this weak AI can't be dangerous! If you have AI designed to land commercial planes without human supervisors or designate targets for autonomous weapons, and it arrives at a weird process for doing so without engineers catching on, you could clearly have thousands of fatalities on your hands. But this would only be a consequence of us as designers foolishly giving dumb AI more to bite than it can chew...