[ExI] AI extinction risk

[BillK]

Interesting article from Stuart Armstrong, Research Fellow at the
Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

<http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/03/08/ai-could-kill-all-meet-man-takes-risk-seriously/>

Artificial Intelligence could kill us all. Meet the man who takes that
risk seriously.
By Martin Bryant, Saturday, 8 Mar 2014.

"One of the things that makes AI risk scary is that it's one of the
few that is genuinely an extinction risk if it were to go bad. With a
lot of other risks, it's actually surprisingly hard to get to an
extinction risk," Armstrong explains. "You take a nuclear war for
instance, that will kill only a relatively small proportion of the
planet. You add radiation fallout, slightly more, you add the nuclear
winter you can maybe get 90%, 95% - 99% if you really stretch it and
take extreme scenarios - but it's really hard to get to the human race
ending. The same goes for pandemics, even at their more virulent.

"The thing is if AI went bad, and 95% of humans were killed then the
remaining 5% would be extinguished soon after. So despite its
uncertainty, it has certain features of very bad risks."
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One of his points that I find very significant is -

The first impact of that technology, Armstrong argues, is near total
unemployment. "You could take an AI if it was of human-level
intelligence, copy it a hundred times, train it in a hundred different
professions, copy those a hundred times and you have ten thousand
high-level employees in a hundred professions, trained out maybe in
the course of a week. Or you could copy it more and have millions of
employees... And if they were truly superhuman you'd get performance
beyond what I've just described."
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To me this looks like a very strong near-time prediction. It doesn't
even need superhuman AI to produce a lot of unemployment.
Globalization has been described as 'Using third world slave labour to
produce cheap goods to sell to our first world unemployed population'.

When robot machinery replaces even the slave labour and computer tech
replaces professional workers, then the consumer society is finished.
People without an income don't buy enough stuff to maintain the
current system.

Central banks can cover up the problem temporarily by issuing more and
more debt, to enable consumers to continue consuming. But a big system
change seems inevitable.


BillK