ziramehr
commented
3 years ago In this interview The WikiLeaks founder, Julian Assange, details some of the threats that AI advancements are creating: https://youtu.be/Qnsj9MIInlQ
I have transcribed parts of it:
... Algorithmic processing of knowledge is moving into artificial intelligence... I think the scale changes that have occurred in the last seven years are significant enough to classify it as a qualitative change. And that qualitative change might be a very serious threat to the stability of human civilizations (not that they need to be stable); and the ability of human beings to organize their fate, in an intelligent manner. So, I think you guys, in these two dimensions, are able to do something.
... At the time of Los Alamos Project, Western Physics became harmonized, because you brought the different Physics traditions from across Europe, the leading figures, to the United States, and to Los Alamos, and they had a harmonization of nomenclature and understanding, and those people then spread out. One of those people was Enrico Fermi, and Italian Physicist, a very interesting man. One night, Enrico Fermi was out walking in Los Alamos, with some of his Physicist buddies and he looked up at the stars and said: Where is everyone? ... His question is very deep that they don't appear to be any, and by "appear" I mean there are no physical signs that we can detect, in terms of what happens to stars, the energy seems to be constantly boiling off, being wasted to space, we don't get radio signals, we don't see anything of civilized life. And yet, in the last 10 years, Planetary Astrophysics has shown that there is tens of thousands of extrasolar planets that we have actually detected on an individual basis, and from that, you can assemble the probabilities of there being earth appoximating planets. And there is hundreds of millions (maybe billions) just in this galaxy. So, the question then becomes: Well, where is the civilized life? Why don't we see it? Why don't we see any signs of it anywhere? So, the answeres to that are: Well, it could be that the reasons we don't see any civilized life with our increasigly powerful measurement apparatus is because life simply doesn't evolve - life itself. That's why we don't see civilized life. That there is something very rare about the Earth as a mean of life here evolved. And when we look at the Earth and we look at extrasolar planets, we don't see any reason why that should be true. In fact we see organic amino acids in the space dust and asteroids and so on. And we know that asteroids cross-pollinate. For example, there're asteroids here from Mars. Bits of Earth are going to Mars etc, when we get hit by asteroids and stuff flies off. So, there is quite a lot of reason to believe that the basic building blocks of life have spread widely. So, my view, and I think it is the only view you can take so far, until more data comes in, is that: there is sth very unstable about civilizations. There's something very unstable about technologically-advanced civilizations that means it doesn't go on for long and I think the answer to that is the very rapid competition, if you like, the light speed competition, that occurs when you wire up the world to itself. And that very rapid competition can have two fates: Number 1, it can produce very robust artificial intelligences that are then coupled with their states, you can see that panning out in the US and China as they each are up. Those two forces are going to take essentially all the market and the rapid competition between them, with the backing and support of the states behind them and the exacerbation of the commercial competition through geopolitical competition will lead to an uncontrollable desire to growth in Artificial Intelligence capacity, leading to a very strong conflict or a stultification. You can take these trajectories in different ways. It takes too long to describe. So, I think that's our biggest threat. It is geopolitical competition removing what otherwise might be sensible human controls on the development of artificial intelligence. That geopolitical competition harnessed by, and itself harnessing, the largest artificial intelligence companies to ratchet up a process, which human beings can no longer control...
The situation with how the big-tech companies are profiteering from their users data is very depressing and will only get worse if people don't fight back. Probably, one reason that we don't receive targeted Ads based on the conversations that we have in Persian language has to do with the concept of Security through Obscurity. How we talk (colloquial language) is different from how we write (formal language); and perhaps more importantly, what we write is hard to decipher for machines as a result of all the unwritten data that we actively interpolate when reading a Persian text. We should be absolutely certain that in the process of Pârstin's development and deployment we stay protective of this privilege and don't compromise the security and privacy of Persian speakers.
Some approaches that come to mind: