Why Superintelligent AI Could Be The Last Human Invention

Via ValueWalk.com,

When we create something more intelligent than we could ever be, what happens after that? We have to teach it.

MAX TEGMARK: Hollywood movies make people worry about the wrong things in terms of super intelligence. What we should really worry about is not malice but competence, where we have machines that are smarter than us whose goals just aren’t aligned with ours. For example, I don’t hate ants, I don’t go out of my way to stomp an ant if I see one on the sidewalk, but if I’m in charge of this hydroelectric dam construction and just as I’m going to flood this valley with water I see an ant hill there, tough luck for the ants. Their goals weren’t aligned with mine and because I’m smarter it’s going to be my goals, not the ant’s goals, that get fulfilled. We never want to put humanity in the role of those ants.

On the other hand it doesn’t have to be bad if you solve the goal alignment problem. Little babies tend to be in a household surrounded by human level intelligence as they’re smarter than the babies, namely their parents. And that works out fine because the goals of the parents are wonderfully aligned with the goals of the child’s so it’s all good. And this is one vision that a lot of AI researchers have, the friendly AI vision that we will succeed in not just making machines that are smarter than us, but also machines that then learn, adopt and retain our goals as they get ever smarter.

It might sound easy to get machines to learn, adopt and retain our goals, but these are all very tough problems. First of all, if you take a self-driving taxi and tell it in the future to take you to the airport as fast as possible and then you get there covered in vomit and chased by helicopters and you say, “No, no, no! That’s not what I wanted!” and it replies, “That is exactly what you asked for,” then you’ve appreciated how hard it is to get a machine to understand your goals, your actual goals.

A human cabdriver would have realized that you also had other goals that were unstated because she was also a human and has all this shared reference frame, but a machine doesn’t have that unless we explicitly teach it that. And then once the machine understands our goals there’s a separate problem of getting them to adopt the goals. Anyone who has had kids knows how big the difference is between making the kids understand what you want and actually adopt your goals to do what you want.

And finally, even if you can get your kids to adopt your goals that doesn’t mean they’re going to retain them for life. My kids are a lot less excited about Lego now than they were when they were little, and we don’t want machines as they get ever-smarter to gradually change their goals away from being excited about protecting us and thinking of this thing about taking care of humanity as this little childhood thing (like Legos) that they get bored with eventually.

If we can solve all three of these challenges, getting machines to understand our goals, adopt them and retain them then we can create an awesome future. Because everything I love about civilization is a product of intelligence. Then if we can use machines to amplify our intelligence then we have this potential to solve all the problems that are stumping us today and create a better future than we even dare to dream of.

If machines ever surpass us and can outsmart us at all tasks that’s going to be a really big deal because intelligence is power.

The reason that we humans have more power on this planet than tigers is not because we have larger muscles or sharper claws, it’s because we’re smarter than the tigers. And in the exact same way if machines are smarter than us it becomes perfectly plausible for them to control us and become the rulers of this planet and beyond.

When I. J. Good made this famous analysis of how you could get an intelligence explosion, or intelligence just kept creating greater and greater intelligence leaving us far behind, he also mentioned that this super intelligence would be the last invention that man need ever make. And what he meant by that, of course, was that so far the most intelligent being on this planet that’s been doing all the inventing - it’s been us.

But once we make machines that are better than us at inventing, all future technology that we ever need can be created by those machines if we can make sure that they do things for us that we want and help us create an awesome future where humanity can flourish like never before.

Stephen Hawking: Earth Will Become A Flaming Ball Of Fire By 2600

Authored by Mac Slavo via SHTFplan.com,

Physicist and professor Stephen Hawking is warning that earth will become a flaming ball of fire by the year 2600.

He also warns that if humans want to avoid permanent extinction, we should be making plans to evacuate the earth.

Hawking claims that mankind will destroy the earth making it a fireball within the next 600 years. The renowned physicist believes soaring population sizes and consequential increasing demands for energy and food will lead to the catastrophe. Hawking also says that humanity should begin looking to the stars to avoid this fate, with our nearest neighbor Alpha Centauri the best candidate for our escape. Hawking also urged financial backers to put funds behind a project that would send probes to the star system.

The Alpha Centauri system is the closest star system to our sun and consists of three stars. Of those three stars, Proxima is the closest to our sun. At a mere 4.367 light years away, on our sky’s dome, we see this multiple star system as a single star – the third-brightest star visible from Earth. And it’s this system that Hawking has his eye on.

Stephen Hawking

Hawking made the comments while speaking via video link at the Tencent Web Summit, held in Beijing. The British cosmologist, who was diagnosed with motor neuron disease at age 21, is backing the Breakthrough Starshot project. That project will likely see a probe sent to Alpha Centauri in the very near future; 20 years or so.

“The idea behind this innovation is to have the nano craft on the light beam. Such a system could reach Mars in less than an hour, or reach Pluto in days, pass Voyager in under a week and reach Alpha Centauri in just over 20 years,” Hawking said praising the Breakthrough Starshot project. Astronomers feel that there is a reasonable chance that an Earth-like planet exists in one of the habitable zones within the star system too.

Right now, the fastest spacecraft would take 30,000 years to reach Alpha Centauri. But Hawking also threw another doomsday prediction on the table.  At the 2017 Web Summit, held in Lisbon and attended by around 60,000 people, he warns that AI (artificial intelligence) is on the verge of replacing people.

 According to Hawking, humanity must be prepared to tackle artificial intelligence to stop robots replacing people. Hawking said the technology could transform every aspect of life in some good ways, but cautioned that intelligent machines pose new challenges. He said robots are already threatening millions of jobs but that this new revolution could be used to help society and for the good of the world, including alleviating poverty and disease.

“The rise of AI could be the worst or the best thing that has happened for humanity,” Hawking said via video link at the opening night of the summit on Monday.

 

“We simply need to be aware of the dangers, identify them, employ the best possible practice and management and prepare for its consequences well in advance.”

To Find Leakers, Jeff Sessions Wants To Put Entire National Security Council Through Lie Detector Test: Axios

Having warned previously that the DOJ would crack down brutally on any current and future leakers, Attorney General Jeff Sessions appears ready to follow through with this threat, and according to Axios, he has told co-workers he is seeking to put the entire National Security Council staff through a lie detector test "to root out leakers."

While it is unclear if Sessions will follow through, the AG reportedly floated the idea to multiple people, as recently as last month.

As Axios details the upcoming crackdown, Sessions" idea is to do a one-time, one-issue, polygraph test of everyone on the NSC staff. Interrogators would sit down with every single NSC staffer (there"s more than 100 of them), and ask them, individually, what they know about the leaks of transcripts of the president"s phone calls with foreign leaders. Sessions suspects those leaks came from within the NSC, and thinks that a polygraph test — at the very least — would scare them out of leaking again.

Sessions has told associates he likes the idea of targeting the foreign leader phone calls because there"s a small enough universe of people who would have had access to these transcripts. Also, the idea that the President of the United States can"t have private conversations with foreign leaders was a bridge too far, even for Democrats.

Perhaps more than anything, such a dramatic turn of events by the DOJ, would demonstrate how frustrated he"s become about the rampant leaking of classified information. Then again, as Axios observes, Sessions seems to understand that it"s extremely tough to successfully prosecute leakers, especially when they are career intelligence professionals who are skilled at covering their digital tracks.

Technology Is The Master Of Modern Slavery

Authored by Tom Chtham via Project Chesapeake,

The recent cyber attack on computers worldwide is just the latest wakeup call to the future we are blindly building for ourselves. The vast majority of humanity embraces technology like it is their next breath of air. Without it, they feel like they will die.

Technology is a double edged sword that we wield that must be handled with care less we cut off one of our own limbs. Technology allows us to be more productive and work faster than without it but as we embrace more technology to relieve us of many manual tasks we must not let it rule our very existence.

Technology must be used as a lever, not a crutch. When we give up our ability to function in daily life and allow technology to rule our every move, we ultimately give up our freedom. To allow technology to dictate what we can do and when we can do it is to reduce ourselves to nothing more than compliant slaves to it.

When a hospital cannot perform operations or even see patients because their computers are down or we cannot communicate or travel because of computer hacking, we have allowed technology to become a crutch that prevents us from falling on our faces in its absence. When we cannot buy food or fuel or depend on electrical power for basic needs we have become too dependant on the technology we invented to assist us.

The use of technology is a good thing that allows us to move forward and build things we never dreamed of before but when it becomes a weakness, we need to reexamine our use of it. If we become so dependant on technology that we cannot function without it we are preparing ourselves for a doomsday scenario when it eventually fails and we are helpless to care for ourselves.

It is only logical to have backup systems to utilize in the event our technology fails for some reason. This is the whole reason we have people to warn us before hand such as the EMP Commission to tell us we are in danger if certain events happen. Technology provides us with many good things but it also leaves us susceptible to many bad things as well if we ignore our responsibility to use it wisely and not become too dependant on it.

Many people today can actually have withdrawal symptoms if they lose access to their technology for any length of time. This should be an alarm to society but most just brush it off as fear mongering. When the loss of technology causes a business to completely stop operations, that should be an indication they do not have sufficient backup systems to fall back on.

One of the prime tenants of the prepper movement is that they have multiple backup systems to rely on if technology stops working. This is just a logical step taken by people that have taken the time to analyze the threats posed by the loss our technology and determine action is warranted for the preservation of life following certain events. The less technology you require to take care of daily activities, the more freedom you have to live a normal life.

Most people still do not take the threat of technological disruptions to society seriously. They think that if something happens, someone will fix it and life will go on as normal. What they refuse to contemplate is if something happens and nobody can fix it. As society moves along this technological road they become more dependent on it and the risk to their lives increases as they lose the ability to do basic tasks. Hopefully this latest cyber attack will instill in people the need to have backup systems in place to continue their daily activities and live life as a free person and not be a slave to the technology they so eagerly seek.

Great News For College Grads: Starting Salaries Are Finally Back To Where They Were 10 Years Ago!

The Wall Street Journal and others are cheering today as a new study from executive search firm Korn Ferry International found that the "average base pay for college grads this year ticked to the highest level in at least a decade."  We guess in the new millennial world that getting back to your original starting point is actually celebrated as an "accomplishment".

“This has been the best year for students that I’ve seen since coming here,” said Thomas Ward, executive director of the career-services center at Adelphi University, in Garden City, N.Y., who joined the school in 2008. Some students at the school are fielding multiple job offers, allowing students to be choosier about where they ultimately land, he said. “It’s very rewarding.”

So where are new college graduates earning the most bank?  Well, average starting salaries for 2017 grads are just under $50,000 but software developers, engineers and actuaries, particularly those moving to San Francisco, can be expected to outperform that average by quite a bit. 

Here are the top 10 money makers for grads:

Of course, while this may all seem like a lot of money, with median rents in San Francisco still hovering around $3,200 per month that means that the average college graduate will be about $5,000 short of covering their annual rent payments...so looks like mom and dad will still get to cover a substantial portion of their daily living costs.

Meanwhile, on the bottom of the earnings rankings we find "category assistants", whatever that is, and "call center specialists", which we"re almost certain could be done without a $250,000 college degree...but what do we know?

Of course, higher salaries are only helpful if you"re among the graduates fortunate enough to find a job after graduation.  As we recently pointed out, according to the following chart from Bloomberg, there are 2.2 million millennials who live at home with mom but neither attend classes nor have a job.  Of those, 40% of them are already in their 30"s, they"re predominantly white and have a high school diploma of less.

But we would hate to rain on the daily parade of our snowflakes...so congrats on the "good news" day.

This House Was 3D-Printed In Under 24 Hours At A Cost Of Just $10,000

While 3D-printing may have been faded away in recent years from the spotlight of core "disruptive" technologies, that may soon change again after a company managed to 3D-print an entire house in just 24 hours. Located in Russia, the following 400-square-foot home, or 37 square meters, was built in just a day, at a cost of slightly over $10,000.

As profiled in the Telegraph, the company Apis Cor, 3D-printing specialists based in Russia and San Francisco, built the house using a mobile printer on-site. According to the company, the walls of the building were printed and painted in just 24 hours.

What makes Apis" process unique is that while 3D-printing a home usually involves creating the parts off-site and constructing the building later, Apis Cor uses a mobile printer to print their apartments on-site. As profiled here, in 2015 the world"s first 3D-printed apartment building was constructed in China, with the structures printed off-site.

However, the Apis process is unique in that it eliminates the need to transfer the printed blocks to the contstruction site.

"Printing of self-bearing walls, partitions and building envelope were done in less than a day: pure machine time of printing amounted to 24 hours," the company said.

The main components of the house, including the walls, partitions and building envelope are printed solely with a concrete mixture. Once the house has been completed, the printer is removed with a crane-manipulator and the roof is then added, followed by the interior fixtures and furnishings, as is a layer of paint to the exterior of the house.

The total construction cost of the house: $10,134.

The initial house consists of a hallway, bathroom, living room and kitchen and is located in one of Apis Cor"s facilities in Russia. The company has claimed that the house can last up to 175 years.

Nikita Chen-yun-tai, the inventor of the mobile printer and founder of Apis Cor, explained his desire is “to automate everything”.

“When I first thought about creating my machine the world has already knew about the construction 3D printing,” he explained. “But all printers created before shared one thing in common – they were portal type. I am sure that such a design doesn’t have a future due to its bulkiness. So I took care of this limitation and decided to upgrade a construction crane design.”

He adds: “We want to help people around the world to improve their living conditions. That’s why the construction process needs to become fast, efficient and high-quality as well. For this to happen we need to delegate all the hard work to smart machines.”

Apis Cor has claimed to be the first company to have developed a 3D printer than can print whole buildings on-site.

For now the technology is in its infancy, however in a few years, the deflationary pressures unleashed by Apis-Cor and its competitors could results in a huge deflationary wave across the construction space, and would mean that a house that recently cost in the hundreds of thousands, or millions, could be built for a fraction of the cost, providing cheap, accessible housing to millions, perhaps in the process revolutionizing and upending the multi trillion-dollar mortgage business that is the bedrock of the US banking industry.

It Won't Be Like The Jetsons

Via Eric Peters of EricPetersAutos.com,

What does it mean when people talk about self-driving cars? We really ought to be talking about programmed cars.

And about who does the programming.

The “self-driving” car doesn’t decide for itself how fast it goes or what route it takes – at least, it won’t until it becomes an autonomous thinking machine, an artificial intelligence. We are not quite there yet.

So, in the meanwhile, who decides?

And it is a who – a flesh-and-blood someone (or someones). Guess what? It’s not you. This whole “self driving” car thing is about taking you out of the driver’s seat. And putting someone else in control of “your” car.

That part stays the same. Nominal ownership. You will make the payments, pay the taxes and fees. You will still be responsible for all of that.

But who will control the car? And how will they control it?

The “who” will be the same people who already control the roads: The people who are the government. Clovers. Authoritarian Control Freaks. The same people who make the laws about how fast you’re allowed to drive, when (and whether) you’re allowed to pass, make a right on red or a U turn . . . every last little thing.

They will control your “self-driving” car.

And when they do, not only will you not be allowed to proceed at a speed faster than they decree – or make a U turn or a right on red . . .  or do anything they do not want you to do- it will be impossible to do so.

The car – controlled by them – will not do your bidding.

It will do theirs.

Can you imagine? I can – and it makes my teeth ache.

People have this idea that the “self driving” future will be fast and free. A techno-Libertopia of high-speed and high-efficiency. Cars zipping along at triple digit speeds in tight formation, travel times cut down to a fraction of what they are now.

In fact it will be the opposite.

It will be Least Common Denominator . . . universalized and encoded in the electro-mechanical DNA of “your” car. No longer will you bee free to mash the gas and thread the needle through a Clover Cluster, chuckling to yourself as you watch them recede in the rearview. There will be no “speeding,” no right on red.

You – that is, your car – will drive at exactly the pace of the Clover Cluster.

A slow pace.

No more burnouts; no more drifting. Nothing “aggressive.”

Acceleration will be metered in accordance with the Fear Factor of the Clover Cluster. Think of your mother-in-law.

Of your grandmother. In her ’87 Buick Le Sabre, hunched over the over the wheel, perpetually riding the brakes.

It will have to be one size fits all. Because the programming must be. No more wiggle room; no more driving the way you prefer. No more driving faster – or harder – than they allow.

Individuals vary, but the Clover Hive is just that – a hive. Napoleon chose it as the symbol of his authoritarian state for good reason. Everyone the same and expected to do the same, except the Queen. The analogy is excellent, too, because the people dictating programming policy will almost certainly be “moms” and others of the female persuasion – who esteem saaaaaaaafety above everything and for whom velocity is the sine qua non of not-safe.

Slower is always better.

It will be like taking the bus – only worse. The bus driver was still an autonomous individual; he had the option to exercise initiative; he could even do something technically illegal – but reasonable and even necessary to deal with a situation that would otherwise mean just sitting there, Because It’s The Law.

Imagine how it will be in your programmed-by-others car. Traffic has come to a dead stop because of an accident up ahead. You could drive on the shoulder – briefly – to reach that exit a few hundred yards away.

But the programmed-by-others car will veto that. It is, after all, illegal to drive on the shoulder – and the car’s programming won’t will permit the law to be violated. Leaving aside the Cloverific adulation of The Law, the lawyers would never allow it.

Can you imagine?

Well, your honor, I knew it wasn’t legal to drive on the shoulder but I was just the passenger.

Shrug.

So the cars will be programmed to never do anything that isn’t “safe” – as well as punctiliously, exactly legal. And what is legal will be strictly in accordance with what your near-sighted, fearful mother-in-law would approve of. What the termagants who control the levers and billy clubs of government decide is “safe.”

To believe otherwise, you must believe that in this one instance, the government will not use technology to further control us. That it will set us free, expand our liberty.

The one upside – maybe – is that we’ll be able to get soused before the trip and just pass out. Tell the car to wake us up when we get there.

Whenever that turns out to be.