Apparently not, and i'm somewhat dismayed at the lack of opposition to this point of view ... so i'll try to make a case against it.
Creating smarter than human AI would be humanity giving up its dominion, and who can say what will happen as a result of this. It is not being melodramatic to say that there is a major chance that it will be the end of humanity, the end of history and the end of everything that most humans value.
I would submit that our values, what we find wise, beautiful, kind, humurous or otherwise virtuous, our appreciation of the natural world and our legacies, they are all relative to our human condition, and that jeopardising this - for everyone - is wrecklessness without comparison. Yet enough of us would do it
Were is this complicity in our own demise coming from. Are supporters of ai and the singularity misguided - by their own values - or do we have irreconcileable philosophies on the matter.
My suspicion is that a lot of support for the singularity comes from death anxiety - the way things are, in the long run i'm dead anyway so may as well have a punt (50-50?) on immortality, with humanity as the stakes. That is the singularity is a plausible alternative to an after life. Call me a wanker, but i think that one should take fatality like a man (i.e and die), and not be so selfish.
For me, one good, or at least indisputable reason, is disillusionment with humanity... i would not be able to argue against someone who lived through the trenches in WWI and had such an opinion, that this world as we know it is just not worth it. However I would not agree.
Finally I think a lot of support for the singularity comes down to pure hair-brained optimism and reading too much sci-fi. It actually made me a bit sad to watch the recent star trek movie and its clumsy attempts to make the characters relevant (a sword fight? come on!). Traditional, speculative, science fiction used to be about final frontiers and buckaneering captains, now its struggling to reconcile the future and anything that we might want from a narrative.
Smarter than human AI may be our story is coming to an end ...
The technology to end humanity is already here (nuclear and soon biological weapons). In the long run superhuman AI may be the only thing that can prevent us from destroying ourselves.
Even if it were desirable, stopping the advance of technology is impractical. If superhuman AI is possible, it will be built. A more practical argument would be that superhuman AI should be strictly controlled, though advancing technology will eventually make that difficult too. The only solution in the long (really long) term is for us to become superhuman ourselves and attempt to preserve the things we find important in the transition.
> Were is this complicity in our own demise coming from. Are supporters of ai and the singularity misguided - by their own values - or do we have irreconcileable philosophies on the matter.
This reminds me of an (unintentionally?) hilarious LW post:
"For example, most existential-risks activists (scientists doing networking and research about risks like unFriendly AI) are male, and I plan a top-level post to assert that not having reliable access to sex with the kind of sexual partners who can most improve the life of an existential-risks activist should be considered a large disability in a male prospective existential-risks activist -- in the same way that, e.g., an inability to stop rationalizing one's own personal agenda should be considered a large disability."
So there you go. When skynet gets invented, blame it on sexual frustration :).
It sounds like you're equating "AI" with "sentient intelligence with its own values and goals which will only arbitrarily coincide with ours." Certainly, that's a possibility--and one AI researchers would do well to avoid.
But the possible intelligences we can observe on this planet have more variety than that, and the useful intelligences we've created have even more. There's no reason a smarter-than-human AI couldn't simply be a general-purpose tool in the way that a faster-than-human spam classifier is a special-purpose tool.
Creating smarter than human AI would be humanity giving up its dominion, and who can say what will happen as a result of this. It is not being melodramatic to say that there is a major chance that it will be the end of humanity, the end of history and the end of everything that most humans value.
I would submit that our values, what we find wise, beautiful, kind, humurous or otherwise virtuous, our appreciation of the natural world and our legacies, they are all relative to our human condition, and that jeopardising this - for everyone - is wrecklessness without comparison. Yet enough of us would do it
Were is this complicity in our own demise coming from. Are supporters of ai and the singularity misguided - by their own values - or do we have irreconcileable philosophies on the matter.
My suspicion is that a lot of support for the singularity comes from death anxiety - the way things are, in the long run i'm dead anyway so may as well have a punt (50-50?) on immortality, with humanity as the stakes. That is the singularity is a plausible alternative to an after life. Call me a wanker, but i think that one should take fatality like a man (i.e and die), and not be so selfish.
For me, one good, or at least indisputable reason, is disillusionment with humanity... i would not be able to argue against someone who lived through the trenches in WWI and had such an opinion, that this world as we know it is just not worth it. However I would not agree.
Finally I think a lot of support for the singularity comes down to pure hair-brained optimism and reading too much sci-fi. It actually made me a bit sad to watch the recent star trek movie and its clumsy attempts to make the characters relevant (a sword fight? come on!). Traditional, speculative, science fiction used to be about final frontiers and buckaneering captains, now its struggling to reconcile the future and anything that we might want from a narrative.
Smarter than human AI may be our story is coming to an end ...