But what good is a box without any IO? You can just plug it to power and watch it heat up. You don't need an AI for that, you can achieve the same effect with a rock.
OTOH, if you want to do anything useful with an AI, you need to provide it with data (input) and a way to show result (output). And with sufficiently smart AI, per [1] and [2], at this point you're fair game.
I already said: The only IO is video camera and screen. But no ability to talk to anything outside of the room - there are no wires going into the room, and the machine has no IO ports for anything else.
With this you can do the equivalent of AI-box. Moreover, using a screen you could be able to - among other things - induce epileptic seizure in some people, and you could definitely start broadcasting radio transmissions (as demonstrated with http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/, which turns a CRT screen into AM radio playing arbitrary MP3s). I'll leave it to your imagination what an AI could do with that.
Basically you need to assume that (superhuman) AI will utilize any available side channel to further its goals. And there's a lot it could do with even a simplest of them. The lesson of today's technology that many miss is that you can do pretty much everything and every system can be exploited in thousands of more or less elaborate ways. We don't see them often because there is usually an easy and cheap method we stick to. We don't see "pretty much everything" being done, because it's usually too expensive to care. But if someone needs it, it can be done.
See also: side-channel attacks, hacker-style practical jokes.
I'll leave it to your imagination what an AI could do with that.
Why think about AI? Why not imagine what I can do with that? Which is almost nothing because the range of those transmissions is measured in inches.
All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.
So all you have is a first generation AI and if we're lucky it might just possibly approach human intelligence.
All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.
Err... that was the assumption that started the debate--that someone will be both smart enough to code an AI, and clever enough to code it with the ability to self-modify, and stupid enough to do that without adding any guides for what it should be self-modifying toward.
If you don't assume that the ratchet-effect of Positivist scientific progress allows for the existence of such a person (in that they'd only be taking the current literature of their time and adding one last little insight, so they don't have to be superintelligent enough to catch their error in advance), then we're having different arguments here.
> All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI
I think this is a very reasonable assumption. It would be very difficult to just flat-out write a human-level AI, but it might be a little less difficult to start with a somewhat dumb AI with an ability to improve itself.
Comments
Please read [0], [1], and [2] (good story with very relevant ending), and let's talk about it again:
[0] - http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/power
[1] - http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/aibox
[2] - http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/
I read #2, and I'll read the others later.
But all of this assumes there is someplace to let the AI out to! But first you would have to build it a hand, or get it a network card or something.
Make a box without any IO. Even if you wanted to, there is no place to connect anything (unless you rebuilt it).
But what good is a box without any IO? You can just plug it to power and watch it heat up. You don't need an AI for that, you can achieve the same effect with a rock.
OTOH, if you want to do anything useful with an AI, you need to provide it with data (input) and a way to show result (output). And with sufficiently smart AI, per [1] and [2], at this point you're fair game.
I already said: The only IO is video camera and screen. But no ability to talk to anything outside of the room - there are no wires going into the room, and the machine has no IO ports for anything else.
With this you can do the equivalent of AI-box. Moreover, using a screen you could be able to - among other things - induce epileptic seizure in some people, and you could definitely start broadcasting radio transmissions (as demonstrated with http://www.erikyyy.de/tempest/, which turns a CRT screen into AM radio playing arbitrary MP3s). I'll leave it to your imagination what an AI could do with that.
Basically you need to assume that (superhuman) AI will utilize any available side channel to further its goals. And there's a lot it could do with even a simplest of them. The lesson of today's technology that many miss is that you can do pretty much everything and every system can be exploited in thousands of more or less elaborate ways. We don't see them often because there is usually an easy and cheap method we stick to. We don't see "pretty much everything" being done, because it's usually too expensive to care. But if someone needs it, it can be done.
See also: side-channel attacks, hacker-style practical jokes.
Yes, and then what?
Why think about AI? Why not imagine what I can do with that? Which is almost nothing because the range of those transmissions is measured in inches.
All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.
So all you have is a first generation AI and if we're lucky it might just possibly approach human intelligence.
Err... that was the assumption that started the debate--that someone will be both smart enough to code an AI, and clever enough to code it with the ability to self-modify, and stupid enough to do that without adding any guides for what it should be self-modifying toward.
If you don't assume that the ratchet-effect of Positivist scientific progress allows for the existence of such a person (in that they'd only be taking the current literature of their time and adding one last little insight, so they don't have to be superintelligent enough to catch their error in advance), then we're having different arguments here.
I think this is a very reasonable assumption. It would be very difficult to just flat-out write a human-level AI, but it might be a little less difficult to start with a somewhat dumb AI with an ability to improve itself.
"That alien message" was pretty much spot on. I started with that, but will certainly be reading the others. Thanks for linking!