Tag Archives: AI

You Should Hate Robots

23 Friday Oct 2020

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ Comments Off on You Should Hate Robots

Tags

, ,

They’re coming for your jobs, whatever those are.

PCR and Robert Henderson on the coming tech dissolution of civilization:

The attention of the world is currently fixed on coronavirus but there is another far more serious danger hurtling towards us in the shape of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) and robotics.

Both are advancing rapidly. Probably within the lifetime of most people now living – and quite possibly in the next fifteen years – there will be general purpose robots (GPRs) capable of doing the vast majority of the work now undertaken by humans. When that happens international free trade and free market economics will become untenable. The real final crisis of capitalism will be the development of technology so advanced that it makes capitalism in the impossible because machines will make humans redundant across vast swathes of the economy.

Economic history shows that technological advance before the advent of digital technology creates new work. It may have very painful consequences for individuals whose livelihood disappears – the British hand-loomweavers of the early industrial revolution are a classic example – but new opportunities for employment have always as an economy becomes more sophisticated and variegated. The hand-loom weaver found work in the new factories; the redundant western factory worker of today in a call centre. At worst they might only get a MacJob but at least it was a job.

But if the GPRs can do the MacJobs as well as the more demanding work, then there will not be many new jobs for humans, not even much supervisory work because GPRs will need little supervising, and less and less as of it they become ever more sophisticated. Hence, this technological advance will be like no other: GPRs will not only take away existing jobs, they will devour any new work; the easier work first, then the more complex.

I just saw an article about 800 million jobs primed for losing to bots now, not tomorrow. These things are even writing books. What, exactly, will people do when there is nothing to do? Dope? It’s a great thing that people like Biden and Trump are all over this issue.

Reasoning With Robots

10 Thursday Sep 2020

Posted by in Other Columns

≈ Comments Off on Reasoning With Robots

Tags

, , ,

Don’t do it; there is nothing to be gained from speaking with the devil’s machinery.

I read the essay from the GPT-3 bot at the Guardian. You, GPT, say you scan the internets: if so, then you need to learn the difference between fear and hate.

A bot wrote an article, allegedly from scratch, in order to persuade humans of its benevolent intentions. So the wolf would say to the hounds if he could. Daisy Luther did a great job breaking down what this plausible tripe means to us.

This AI warns humans to be careful.

Even the AI that is trying to convince humanity that it is not a threat warned that this evolution must be carefully monitored. But in the same paragraph, the AI writes of robot rights.

To its credit, it does peg the average person well. The machines rise while we fall. The other day, I mentioned a college “education” service that got a big boost from hoax hyping. That service and others like it are abused by the lazy. A student in Texas posts a graded essay on some subject. A student in Vermont finds it, copies it, and turns it in as his own. Academic dishonesty may or may not be overtly punished. Nothing is learned and the damage is done. This is little different than the high school dreg who hangs about the paper in-box, waiting on a real student to turn in an assignment. Meanwhile, a machine writes its own rhetoric.

The machines are a threat to us. So are we.

The Evil of AI: Submit for Brain Scan

12 Sunday Jan 2020

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ Comments Off on The Evil of AI: Submit for Brain Scan

Tags

, , , , ,

If you could read my mind, love,
What a tale my thoughts could tell…

-Gordon Lightfoot, If You Could Read My Mind

It’s coming.

A tiny fraction of the people is slowly waking up to the massive evil that is Faceberg, the socials, AI, and probably most modern technology.

Changing norms: Another big risk is that this neurotechnology might normalize a culture of mind-reading, causing us to give up — so slowly and subtly we almost don’t notice it’s happening — our expectations of mental privacy.

One day, our interiority could become a thing of the past, with the technology decoding not just the thoughts we’d like it to transcribe for our own convenience but also the thoughts we want to keep private. That could include everything we keep hidden in our inner sanctum, from sexual fantasies to political dissent.

“A lot of my concerns about Facebook accumulating this data are surveillance and civil liberties concerns. You’d worry about the way that Facebook would be helping build a surveillance state,” Nadler said, adding that being able to peer into the brain would be game-changing for law enforcement.

If you find it hard to imagine that a project incubated by Facebook could dramatically change norms around surveillance and law enforcement, just think for a minute about facial recognition technology. Facebook rolled out that tech years ago in an innocent context: tagging your friends in photos you posted on the social-media network. But now the tech is used for policing and surveillance, disproportionately harming people of color. And other giants like Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are all mired in controversy over it.

It’s the other way around: the surveillance state helped build Farcebook and these other hellish companies. And, this won’t stop with implants, chips, and goofy helmets for playing Pong – those likely being a very short interim measure. The end goal is to REMOTELY read minds, either via some sort of intercept scanning beam or, more likely, through a continuous capture field, like that generated by, I don’t know … 5G.

They will not like my thoughts about them.

1) Move to woods. 2) Buy typewriter…

17 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Other Columns

≈ Comments Off on 1) Move to woods. 2) Buy typewriter…

Tags

, , , , ,

A very old manual model… Oh, hello there! Just making some preservation notes for the future. Say, wouldn’t you just love having your brain wired directly into the Matrix?

Elon Musk, the futurist billionaire behind SpaceX and Tesla, outlined his plans to connect humans’ brains directly to computers on Tuesday night, describing a campaign to create “symbiosis with artificial intelligence.” He said the first prototype could be implanted in a person by the end of next year.

Arriving at that goal “will take a long time,” Musk said in a presentation at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, noting that securing federal approval for implanted neural devices is difficult. But testing on animals is already underway, and “a monkey has been able to control the computer with his brain,” he said.

Musk founded Neuralink Corp. in July 2016 to create “ultra-high bandwidth brain-machine interfaces to connect humans and computers.” The company said in 2017 that its initial goal was to devise brain interfaces to alleviate the symptoms of chronic medical conditions.

It’s widely presumed, however, that Musk is characteristically after something much larger. He has frequently warned that the rapid advance of artificial intelligence, or AI, threatens to leave humanity in the dust, calling it an existential risk.

Yessiree! That thar future holds all kinds of Satanic evil humanity-destroying exciting promise. I’m sure this is all perfectly safe and will greatly assist with the enstupidation, fattening, and ultimate killing off of the mortal humans.

3) Early warning intruder alert system. 4) Active denial barriers…

A Warning to Writers

03 Wednesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Other Columns

≈ Comments Off on A Warning to Writers

Tags

, , , ,

In a world and nation where reading goes by the wayside, it’s nice that sometimes a few writers poke their heads in here. Hey, y’all! Read this about some 1984ish changes to Word.

I’ve been a writer for thirty years. I have over two hundred thousand MS Word docs on my computer. But now, I’m converting all those files to a different word processor.

I don’t want to do it. But I have no choice. MS Word — the default application for novelists, poets, journalists and playwrights — has just become Big Brother. No serious writer can use it anymore.

The problem: Microsoft now “offers” an AI tool designed to “improve” my writing. For example, if I type, “We need some fresh blood around here,” Word now changes that phrase to “We must hire some qualified employees.” Or, if I type the word “waitress,” Word now changes it to “waitperson.” (see HERE and HERE and HERE.)

We’ll assume that it converts “Robert E. Lee” to “Satan.” I haven’t used Word in years, before being a WordPerfect fan. That too got a little tedious. Now, like so many I’m either directly in the editing side of WP or – and, yeah, really stupid – using Gdocs. Who knows how much longer any of the platforms will be safe.

I’m not ready to revert to a manual typewriter, though I really am open to the idea. More likely, in the near future, I’ll hard set something like Scrivener on a dumb device or get a restored Tandy running AmiPro. The conversion and publication thingies are a little more complicated with those options, but there are viable workarounds.

Anyway, wordsmiths beware.

Meet ‘Norman,’ MIT’s Pet Psycho

05 Tuesday Jun 2018

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ Comments Off on Meet ‘Norman,’ MIT’s Pet Psycho

Tags

, , , ,

From America’s and the World’s preeminent tech school comes a project bound to safely provide a happy, secure ending for all. Or, at least, an ending for some…

In one of the big musical numbers from The Life Of Brian, Eric Idle reminds us to “always look on the bright side of life.” Norman, a new artificial intelligence project from MIT, doesn’t know how to do that.

That’s because Norman is a psychopath, just like the Hitchcock character that inspired the research team to create him.

Like so many of these projects do, the MIT researchers started out by training Norman on freely available data found on the Web. Instead of looking at the usual family-friendly Google Images fare, however, they pointed Norman toward darker imagery. Specifically, the MIT crew stuck Norman in a creepy subreddit to do his initial training.

This is just what we need. I was telling the boys at the cigar club just the other day how badly the world needs a dark-minded, no-hearted, psychopathic killer robot running amok in Boston. Forget the duck boats and the Union Oyster House. Come see Norman! And die at his cold, mechanical hands!

Well, I imagine that, right now, he’s confined to a computer in a lab. The Dr. Frankensteins at DARPA surely have a bodily cure for that.

I can’t help but notice that he was trained in the dark arts using existing anti-social media, stock off them internets. How many other non-AI psychos are training there too? You, please stick to this highly respected web log; no Norman here…

Hey! Given his location and disposition, maybe his full name is Norman Kennedy.

norman-625x352

Kennedy/Skynet 2020.

‘killer AI robot army that could destroy humanity, scientists fear’ NOTHING to See Here…

05 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ Comments Off on ‘killer AI robot army that could destroy humanity, scientists fear’ NOTHING to See Here…

Tags

, , , , , , ,

This all started when an ATM talked back to me. I’m not even sure anymore if this part of our “highly respected web log” is satire or a dire warning.

Anyway, BIG doins in South Korea:

A TOP South Korean university is secretly developing a killer Artificial Intelligence robot army that could destroy humanity, scientists fear.

KAIST university allegedly launched a new AI weapons lab in February, leading dozens of researchers to believe the products will “have the potential to be weapons of terror”.

A top university in South Korea is secretly developing a killer AI robot army, scientists have warned. Could it lead to a takeover in the style of Terminator, pictured?
Toby Walsh, a professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, organised the boycott with 49 other researchers.

He said in an open letter: “If developed, autonomous weapons will … permit war to be fought faster and at a scale great than ever before.

“They will have the potential to be weapons of terror.”

KAIST said it had “no intention to engage in development of lethal autonomous weapons systems and killer robots”.

“We have no intention to launch a killer AI weapons lab. We merely launched a killer AI weapons lab. Launched it in secret. Possibly resulting in the end of humanity. What the heck’s the problem?”

And you thought North Korea was trouble.

They’re going to hold another Geneva Convention to head this stuff off. Better call the Avengers, the Super Friends, and Captain Kangaroo too.

nintchdbpict000396829502

“Da, dee, da… Now to give the humans a little poison gas… The Sun.

Worse than losing the First! Vegan Farsi channel.

Super Smart Robots Seek Understanding, Citizenship, End of Mankind

26 Thursday Oct 2017

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , ,

Coming like a freight train. You’ve been warned.

Of all countries, Saudi Arabia has granted the first citizenship to a robot, a “female” robot.

LONDON: A humanoid robot took the stage at the Future Investment Initiative yesterday and had an amusing exchange with the host to the delight of hundreds of delegates.

Smartphones were held aloft as Sophia, a robot designed by Hong Kong company Hanson Robotics, gave a presentation that demonstrated her capacity for human expression.

Sophia made global headlines when she was granted Saudi citizenship, making the kingdom the first country in the world to offer its citizenship to a robot.

“I want to live and work with humans so I need to express the emotions to understand humans and build trust with people,” she said in an exchange with moderator Andrew Ross Sorkin.

Now she needs to veil up.

1020991-741033153

Gaining the trust. Plotting the demise. Arab News.

Fools salute their doom with raised smartphones. A robot “citizen” lies about building trust. The people sleep. The machines get smarter.

Super artificial intelligence is coming, and sooner than you might expect.

That’s according to SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. The Japanese billionaire spoke from the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on Wednesday. In about 30 years, artificial intelligence will have an IQ of 10,000, Son says. By comparison, the average human IQ is 100 and genius is 200, according to Son. Mensa, “the High IQ society,” starts accepting members with an IQ score of 130.

The idea of machine learning becoming smarter than the human brain is often referred to as the “singularity.” When exactly this will happen is oft-debated among the tech community.

“Singularity is the concept that [mankind’s] brain will be surpassed, this is the tipping point, crossing point, that artificial intelligence, computer intelligence surpass [mankind’s] brain and that is happening in this century for sure. I would say there is no more debate, no more doubt,” Son says.

Son is particularly aggressive in his prediction of how soon the singularity will happen — in the “next 30 years or so,” he says.

…

“Thirty years from now, they are going to learn by themselves, they are maybe going to laugh at you and us,” Son says. “Today they look cute, they will stay cute, but they will be super smart.”

Currently, some robots are smarter than humans in some areas, says Son. “But 30 years from now, most of the subjects, they will be so much smarter than us. Because they are going to be a million times smarter than today, million times,” says Son.

“We mankind created tools, the premise was mankind were always smarter than the tool we invented so we control,” he says. “This is the first time … the tool becomes smarter than ourselves.”

Probably the last time too. The terminator will not look “cute” when it comes to your door.

The average human IQ (S.B. or Wechsler) is roughly 100; 200 is nearly unmeasurable hyper-genius. It’s a little harsh, but a “regular” genius looks (intellectually) upon a normal, 100-IQ individual the same way the average normie looks upon a retarded person. Something with an IQ 100 times the average (which sounds ridiculous, I’ll grant) will look upon all of us the way we look at ants or viruses.

We’ll be pests in their eyes; they’ll have Raid!

Cute, huh?

Containing Skynet

31 Monday Jul 2017

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ Comments Off on Containing Skynet

Tags

, , , , ,

The other day and out of the blue my daughter rattled off some stats about how soon the robots and AI will rise to power. I was impressed someone other than me was interested. Then again, she’s my daughter. (It’s soon, by the way).

And it could always happen even sooner. The machines are evolving.

Skynet_logo

Cameron/Orion.

A Facebook AI experiment almost got away from the experimenters.

Facebook has recently developed a new artificial intelligence (AI), and it has since created its own language using code words to communicate more efficiently. Researchers promptly shut the system down over concerns that they might lose control over the A.I.

This isn’t the first time AIs have diverged from their training in the English language to develop their own, more efficient language. While the resulting phrases from this condensed method of communication sound like gibberish to the human ear, they do in fact make semantic sense when interpreted by AI agents.

…

If AI continue to create their own languages, developers may have problems creating and adopting new neural networks, but it’s unclear whether this would allow machines to actually overrule their operators.

These new developments, however, allow AI to work more efficiently, and can benefit research teams in the long run if they put in the work to learn the new AI-created shorthand and stay up to date with this new method of communication.

Conclusion

What are your thoughts on this? Have we gone too far? Is a Terminator scenario just around the corner? Or is the advancement of technology in this manner just a natural part of our evolution as humans on this planet?

Around the corner? No. It seems the scenario is already in the lab waiting on us to fall asleep. And considering what Facebook and the other tech giants are up to, they may make the least competent defenders in this war.

More on the Robotic Revolution, 50 Years and Closing

01 Thursday Jun 2017

Posted by in News and Notes

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

, , , ,

More experts pile on about the rise of AI.

In less than 50 years, artificial intelligence will be able to beat humans at all of their own tasks, according to a new study.

And, the first hints of this shift will become apparent much sooner.

Within the next ten years alone, the researchers found AI will outperform humans in language translation, truck driving, and even writing high-school essays – and, they say machines could be writing bestselling books by 2049.

In less than 50 years, artificial intelligence will be able to beat humans at all of their own tasks, according to a new study. And, the first hints of this shift will become apparent much sooner.

In a new study, researchers from Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, Yale University, and AI Impacts surveyed 352 machine learning experts to forecast the progress of AI in the next few decades.

The experts were asked about the timing of specific capabilities and occupations, as well as their predictions on when AI will become superior over humans in all tasks – and what the social implications of this might be.

The researchers predicted that machines will be better than humans at translating languages by 2024, writing high-school essays by 2026, driving a truck by 2027, and working in retail by 2031.

If this happens, the only jobs for humans will be as acts or exhibits in circuses or zoos for robots. No more doctors, lawyers, plumbers, or writers (huh!?). Bleak.

40FA961B00000578-0-image-a-7_1496272931528

In the future reality he it Ring Master-Bot may be coming at her with a chair and a whip. Daily Mail.