Shades of Blade Runner

"Success in creating effective AI could be the biggest event in the history of our civilization. Or the worst."
"We just don't know."
"So, we cannot know if we will be infinitely helped by AI, or ignored by it and sidelined, or conceivably destroyed by it."
Stephen Hawking, 2017

Russia’s T-14 Armata tank is being worked on to make it completely unmanned and autonomous. Photograph: Grigory Dukor/Reuters

How humanity adores its new, newer and newest technological toys...! And looks forward to the genius that provokes inventors and technical nerds to keep on creating newer technology, cutting-edge and beyond expectation, creating new excitement on an ongoing basis. Science is built upon human curiosity, the urge to find new discoveries, new devices, new techniques, spurred on by the increasing rewards that fall into human hands, through human ingenuity.

So, what happens when human ingenuity succeeds in building systems that will ultimately be more clever than the human mind can conceive? When the grasp of control over human destiny is lost to a superior technology itself capable of emulating and superseding human thought and invention? It's on the horizon, after all, and human invention is enabling it.

One of our future robot overlords?  Quartz

Artificial intelligence capable of matching human capability is now envisioned by 2029. It will have its immediate benefits in science, medicine and technological innovations. When General AI, machines fully capable of designing machines begin their work, who will audit what they do, and who will be capable -- a human agency -- of controlling what results? The devil, as always, is in the details.

Salon Eurosatory 2018  Christophe Morin/IP3Getty Images

Genetic engineering, synthetic biology, and androids or AIs with personalities, do they all presage a brave new world, or a world of unforeseen horrors for humankind? When will we know? When we can no longer put on the brakes? Think nuclear weapons, as an uncomfortable example. Now mostly in the possession of responsible states, but increasingly threatening to be possessed by rogue states and those with malevolent ambitions.

Humanity has attempted in the past to use its authority to impose ethical restrains on science, technology and engineering, with divided results. A grouping of responsible states may issue their declarations, high-minded and global-protection uppermost, but how to exert control to the extent that those with less concern for the welfare of humanity will not come into possession of destructive weapons they will have little compunction in using?

In the era of the Internet, knowledge and research capabilities have been disseminated as never before, leaving governments helpless to exert control when the most powerful among them fail to agree on standards and opt instead to practice their own levels of control, most frequently not in synchronization with those they view as seeking to impede their progress.

In 2015, over a thousand luminaries, representing governments and founders of high-tech, finance, business leaders, signed an open letter focusing on the convergence of AI with nuclear weapons, calling for a ban on AI warfare and autonomous weapons. This led in time to a United Nations initiative. To the present time the UN secretary general continues to urge all member nations to agree to the ban. Of the 193 member nations, 125 had signed.

Tomorrow’s wars will be faster, more high-tech, and less human than ever before. Welcome to a new era of machine-driven warfare   The Atlantic

Labels: Artificial Intelligence, Science, Technology, Warfare

posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, February 05, 2020