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| Image Source: Singularity Institute |
| One of the founders Skype and Kazaa wants to sound a warning to the human race: machines are becoming so intelligent that they could pose an existential threat. Jaan Tallinn, speaking in Australia, argues human-driven technological progress has largely replaced evolution as the dominant force shaping our future. |
"It really sucks to be the number two intelligent species on this planet; you can just ask gorillas, they will go extinct."
"My core main message is actually that this thing is not science fiction, this thing is not apocalyptic religion - this thing is something that needs serious consideration," said Tallinn, who gave a talk on his theory at the University of Sydney recently.
The Estonian-born Tallinn is a board member of the Lifeboat Foundation an organization with the tagline "safeguarding humanity" and at university he majored in theoretical physics. His thesis looked at travelling interstellar distances using warps in space-time.
He argues we are witnessing an "intelligence explosion" - with neuroscience advancing in leaps and bounds to the point where scientists could replicate the human brain by the middle of this century. The event when machines surpass human levels of intelligence and ability has been dubbed "the Singularity".
"In my view the fact that computers caught up to humans and completely dominate humans in chess and some other domains already that says there's evidence that yes in principle they can be better programmers than humans," said Tallinn, 40. Citing Google's driverless car and IBM's Watson as examples.
"Once computers can program they basically take over technological progress because already today the majority of technological progress is run by software, by programming."
The question then is, how can you control something that can actually reprogram itself?
"Once you acknowledge that human brains are basically made of atoms and acknowledge that atoms are governed by simple laws of physics then there is no reasoning principle why computers couldn't do anything that people are doing and we don't really see any evidence that this is not the case," said Tallinn.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what could happen to us humans if we're no longer the most advanced, technologically aware species.
"It really sucks to be the number two intelligent species on this planet; you can just ask gorillas," said Tallinn.
"They will go extinct, and the reason why the will go extinct is not that humans are actively conspiring against the gorillas, it's that we as the dominant species are rearranging the environment; the planet used to produce forests but now it's producing cities."
The key, he says, is to make sure that once we have systems that can rearrange the environment like we can, we need to ensure that those changes are beneficial to us.
"If you build machines that understand what humans are and they really have some distorted view of what we want, then we might end up being alive but not controlling the future," he said. "For example if the skill is to make sure that people are happy and the way the super intelligence is supposed to measure that is how many smiles are on the planet, the easiest way to achieve that is to sedate everyone and make sure their faces are stuck in a cramp or smiling." Thankfully for us, there is an alternative to this existential risk. We can harness super intelligence to work for us. "Once you have something that is smarter than you and is actively on your side, you can basically solve any problems really quickly."
"Once you have something that is smarter than you and is actively on your side, you can basically solve any problems really quickly."
SOURCE Sydney Morning Herald
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Tech innovators and scientists are clearly not reading enough cultural theory.
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