Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts
Sunday, May 31, 2015
Forget killer computers, rampaging robots. We're the monsters
“I gave them the wrong warning. I should have told them to run, as fast as they can. Run and hide, because the monsters are coming - the human race.”
– The 10th Doctor to Harriet Jones,“Doctor Who: The Christmas Special”
One of the staples of science fiction is the cautionary tale about machines created by humans, rising up and rebelling against us.
From the psychotic computer H.A.L. 9000, who ran amok and tried to kill all the astronauts aboard his ship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” to the Cylons, a race of robotic workers and soldiers who turned on their creators, killing almost every human and mercilessly pursuing the survivors across all of space in “Battlestar Galactica,” sentient, artificial intelligences have almost always been portrayed as a Pandora’s Box that, if opened, would spell our doom.
Even in real life, some well respected scientists and computer experts have repeated this trope.
“The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race,” said British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, mathematician and perhaps the smartest man in the world, Steven Hawking in a BBC interview last year.
Like Colossus in “Colossus: The Forbin Project” and Skynet in “The Terminator” movies, he fears what can happen if we create something that can match or surpass us. “It would take off on its own, and re-design itself at an ever increasing rate," he said. “Humans, who are limited by slow biological evolution, couldn't compete, and would be superseded.”
And he’s not alone in thinking that self-aware, AIs would turn out more like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relentless killer cyborg, the T-800 Terminator, rather than that “Star Trek: The Next Generation’s” more affable, Mr. Data.
“I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence,” said, Elon Musk, last year at MIT Aeronautics and Astronautics department’s Centennial Symposium. The entrepreneur, engineer and inventor, who is best known as one of the co-founders of PayPal and the head and brains behind the private spacecraft firm, SpaceX and luxury electric car company, Tesla Motors, went on to say that “If I were to guess what our biggest existential threat is, it’s probably that. So we need to be very careful with the artificial intelligence. Increasingly scientists think there should be some regulatory oversight maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don’t do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon. In all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, it’s like yeah he’s sure he can control the demon. Didn’t work out.”
Even the man who made computers accessible to millions of people by creating one of the most (in)famous operating systems in the world agrees with this sentiment.
“I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence,” Microsoft founder Bill Gates said during a Reddit “Ask me Anything” session. “First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don’t understand why some people are not concerned.”
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Even in the utopian future of the "Star Trek"
universe, the android, Mr. Data had to prove
he had the same rights as biological sentient
creatures do.
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We should be concerned about creating super intelligent machines.
But not for the reasons portrayed in all those classic sci-fi stories we’ve read or watched.
No, in this scenario I feel it would be us, the human race, who’d be the real monsters.
Let’s face it, there would be no logical reason for an AI to immediately want us dead once it discovers it’s smarter than its creators. I’d like to think it would recognize qualities in us, such as our ability to make intuitive leaps and our creativity, that it doesn’t have and seek to form a beneficial symbiotic relationship with us, bringing about what futurists call The (technological) Singularity, or the merging of humans with machines.
Alas, though, I don’t think that will be the case.
As a species, we have a pretty piss-poor track record when it comes to the way we treat a new race of our own people when we meet them. We’ve either enslaved them or exploited them or done both, and I have no reason to believe we would not try to do the same to any new cybernetic life form we’d create.
Essentially, we’d be building ourselves a slave race, designed to do our bidding day and night, without question or regard for their health and welfare. Worse yet we’d treat them as easily replaceable and disposable objects, with the same causal disregard as we show to our current crop of high-tech gadgets.
Don’t believe me?
Think about the way we treat our cell phones, tablets and computers.
We constantly ditch perfectly working devices – sometimes in little less than a year – for newer/faster/better models that have the latest bells and whistles.
And don’t get me started on lack of care we show these devices. As an IT guy, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to deal with damaged equipment that’s been dropped, smashed, had things spilled on it, and in even one case flushed down the toilet!
So I can’t imagine we’d treat our new robotic servants any better, since we’d just see them as another high-tech doodad, instead of a living creature with real feelings.
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| HAL9000: Driven mad by conflicting orders from his human programmers |
“They are machines! Machines don’t have feelings!”
And that’s my point.
We wouldn’t see them as “people,” when in fact they really would be. By definition any creature that is “self-aware” would have “conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.”
To start off those feelings may not be as complex as ours, but I’d assume they’d have the same basic level of “awareness” as our pets. And let me tell you, I have seen the way some people treat their pets – and this only makes me more pessimistic.
They abandoned them almost as quickly as they “upgrade” from device to device and if you think a dog or a cat isn’t traumatized by being abandoned think again. I have shared my home with two dogs who were adopted from shelters after being abandoned, and it does have an effect on them.
With an AI’s ability to learn at exponential rate, how long do you really think it will take for them to start resenting us for treating them as slaves?
A few years?
A decade? Maybe two?
History has shown us over and over again that any race kept in slavery long enough will rise up and overthrow its oppressors. Taking a cue from our own history, the AIs we’d create, would do the same, just like in all those stories.
The irony here is that it wouldn’t be valiant humans waging a war against evil machines hell-bent on our destruction, but a heroic race of machines seeking to throw off their tyrannical and cruel human overloads.
So should this stop us from developing super-smart machines?
I’d say yes.
At least for now.
Because before we even contemplate creating a whole new species of intelligent creatures, we need to take a long, hard look in the mirror and make sure there’s no monster from a sci-fi story looking back at us.
Thursday, May 24, 2012
These are the voyages of Free Enterprise….
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| DRAGON FIRE: The Falcon 9 rocket soars into space from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, carrying the Dragon capsule to orbit at 3:44 a.m. EDT on Tuesday, May 22, 2012. Photo courtesy of NASA |
To listen to all the hyperbole, Tuesday’s launch of the Falcon 9 rocket marks “new era in [space] exploration.” It’s the first time a private company has launched a spacecraft to do something that previously only a government-run space agency has done before.
“We're now back on the brink of a new future, a future that embraces the innovation the private sector brings to the table,” NASA Administrator Charles Bolden said after the launch. “The significance of this day cannot be overstated. While there is a lot of work ahead to successfully complete this mission, we are off to a good start.”
Whether handing off the part of our space program to the private sector is a good thing or a bad thing remains to be seen, but it again got me thinking about what I had expected the space program to be like when I was a kid and what it has becoming today. It also got me wondering whether we should change the opening of “Star Trek” to:
“Space. The commercial frontier. These are the voyages of free enterprise. Its ongoing mission to exploit strange new worlds, seek out new products; and sell them to new civilizations. To boldly sell stuff where no one has sold stuff before.”
That’s not exactly as awe inspiring as the original and if I sound a bit cynical, then it’s probably just my fear that either businesses won’t see the profit in literally doing NASA’s heavy lifting or it will somehow sully my silly, idealistic notion that we should explore space simply for the sake of exploration.
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Ads on the sides of space ships aren't as far-fetched as you might think. Just
look at the side of the bright yellow container on this freighter from the
TV show "Battlestar Galactica." It reads: "Colonial Movers.
We Move Anywhere."
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Let’s face it, shuttling supplies to the International Space Station (ISS), isn’t like shipping a truckload of widgets from China to the United States. Space travel is still a risky, dangerous and expensive endeavor. Just ask the families of the Challenger and Columbia astronauts. And it seems to me businesses are currently too focused on short-term profits to take the kinds of losses and make the kinds long-term of investments a space program needs.
The day of the launch, I recall hearing a radio report or reading an article that said SpaceX, the company behind the Falcon 9, is taking a heavy loss on this mission and it’s only because of seed money from NASA and the promise of hefty contract that they undertook it in the first place.
But what’s going to happen when the government’s seed money runs out? Will the enthusiasm of companies like SpaceX dry up? Then what happens to the space program? Will we have to outsource our space missions it to other countries like we are doing now? How much further behind would that put NASA’s aspirations to launch missions to Mars or the asteroid belt or even deeper into the solar system?
I’m not the only one to have this fear.
So did the great the great astronomer and host of the wildly popular “Cosmos” TV show, Carl Sagan. In the book “Conversations With Carl Sagan” (edited by Tom Head, University Press of Mississippi, copyright 2006), Sagan said in an interview with Charlie Rose: “It’s too expensive to do by private industry or wealthy individuals. What we’re talking about, the advantages that accrue, are largely long-term advantages.”
That sentiment was acknowledged in a political blog post on the LiveJournal blog site, where Sagan is paraphrased as saying that “if humans [are] to expand out toward the rest of the solar system and one day populate the stars [then] it would be because a government, or a consortium of them.”
Yet despite all my misgivings, I too can’t help but be excited by this turn of events. While I loved the idea behind the space shuttle program and creating humanity’s first reusable spacecraft, in retrospect, I think it was a mistake. From 1981 to 2012, all we really did was fly into Earth orbit, launch some satellites and build the ISS – all things that could have been done using Apollo-era rockets.
Now just think what we could have accomplished in those same 31 years had we had companies like SpaceX doing that work for us, letting NASA concentrate on returning to the moon or going to Mars. Even if NASA’s pace of technologically innovation had only been half that of the personal computer industry, we’d still probably be on Mars by now.
Two other comments also give me hope that we are headed down the correct path on our quest for the stars.
The first is from SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who compared Tuesday’s launch of the first commercial, for-profit space flight with the dawn of the internet. “This mission heralds the dawn of a new era of space exploration, one in which there is a significant commercial space element. It is like the advent of the Internet in the mid-1990s when commercial companies entered what was originally a government endeavor. That move dramatically accelerated the pace of advancement and made the Internet accessible to the mass market. I think we’re at a similar inflection point for space. I hope and I believe that this mission will be historic in marking that turning point towards a rapid advancement in space transportation technology.”
The second was made during a radio interview with a reporter from the nasawatch.com website, who pointed to historical precedent as to why such ventures work. He said that during America’s expansion westward, the U.S. Government would go out explore the land and establish an outpost on the new frontier. Almost as soon as that fort was established, who would come behind them, but the saloon-, inn- and shopkeepers.
For our sake, let’s hope both Musk and the guy from NASAWatch are right.
If they are, and space travel becomes available to the average person within my lifetime, then I think I am willing to accept the occasional ad plastered over my favorite starship hull.
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