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Let’s Shape AI Before AI Shapes Us
Artificial intelligence is like a beautiful suitor who repeatedly brings his admirer to the edge of consummation only to vanish, dashing hopes and leaving an unrequited lover to wonder what might have been.
Once again, big shots are hearing the siren song of AI and warn of hazards ahead. Visionary entrepreneur Elon Musk thinks that AI could be more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Physicist Stephen Hawking warns that AI “could spell the end of the human race.” Even Bill Gates, who usually obsesses on such prosaic tasks as eliminating malaria, advises careful management of digital forms of “super intelligence.”
Will today’s outsized fears of AI become fodder for tomorrow’s computer comedy?
Past AI scares now seem silly in hindsight. In the 1950s, building on excitement over the advent of digital computers, scientists foresaw machines that would instantly translate Russian to English. Rather than 5 years, machine translation took more than 50. “Expert systems” similarly have experienced a long gestation, and even now these programs, built around knowledge gained from human experts, deliver little. Meanwhile, HAL, the Terminator, Ava, and other computer-generated rivals remain the stuff of Hollywood.
In recent years, some claims for AI seem to have been realized. Computers now can literally pick faces out of a crowd and unerringly provide customer service over the phone by simulating a real conversation. Driverless cars and package-delivering drones promise to revolutionize the movement of things and people. Bombs that select their own targets and robots that kill are within reach. Daily life already seems impossible without digital devices that record, alert, and advise their owners on actions and plans.
The beautiful suitor is back, more fetching than ever. Now the human embrace of robots is closer, and probably inevitable.
Because betrayal is central to romance, humans, jealous of AI, worry about the loss of their own supremacy in the world. Digital minds may emulate, then resent, and finally attack humans.
From this dark space, thoughts arise of existential doom. An evil genius might conquer the world with a malevolent AI army. Software agents could knock out the essential systems from which a stricken society could not recover. To Daniel H. Wilson, author of How to Survive a Robot Uprising, humans need not wait for the first AI catastrophe in order to install a “steel-reinforced panic room” to which they can escape from disobedient digital servants.
Dark fantasies, however, distract attention from more urgent questions. How will AI affect employment, especially higher-paying work? When will robot writers and artists alter the way humans consume creative content? Who will be held accountable for accidents when humans are no longer in the decision or action loop?
Instead of “wolf” criers of the Musk sort, humans need a serious discussion about new norms and practices that will shape and govern AI. Here are a few suggestions on how to direct the global conversation in ways fruitful rather than fearful:
- Embrace the precautionary principle: Bans rarely work; careful testing and technical revisions do. Civil society needs safe spaces to conduct experiments with synthetic intelligences. Governments should encourage controlled tests by private actors on the condition that data and analyses be widely shared.
- Engineer in equity and diversity: The disturbing truth is that the digital frontier is dominated by men living in North America, Europe, Japan, and China. Adventures in AI ought to reflect the aspirations of women as much as men and also reflect culture and values from the global South.
- Help the losers: The spread of AI will hurt some, mostly by reducing the demand for human labor. Responses should include helping people to use their time in useful and appealing ways. Governments might also consider giving every human, as a legal right, dominion over a set number of robots. Such policies would at least create a measure of equity, because surely wealthy folks will invest in assembling their own armies of bots.
G. Pascal Zachary is a professor of practice at Arizona State University and author of Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (MIT Press, 1999).
Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/lets-shape-ai-before-ai-shapes-us
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Founded by Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov in February 2011 with the participation of leading Russian specialists in the field of neural interfaces, robotics, artificial organs and systems.
The main goals of the 2045 Initiative: the creation and realization of a new strategy for the development of humanity which meets global civilization challenges; the creation of optimale conditions promoting the spiritual enlightenment of humanity; and the realization of a new futuristic reality based on 5 principles: high spirituality, high culture, high ethics, high science and high technologies.
The main science mega-project of the 2045 Initiative aims to create technologies enabling the transfer of a individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality. We devote particular attention to enabling the fullest possible dialogue between the world’s major spiritual traditions, science and society.
A large-scale transformation of humanity, comparable to some of the major spiritual and sci-tech revolutions in history, will require a new strategy. We believe this to be necessary to overcome existing crises, which threaten our planetary habitat and the continued existence of humanity as a species. With the 2045 Initiative, we hope to realize a new strategy for humanity's development, and in so doing, create a more productive, fulfilling, and satisfying future.
The "2045" team is working towards creating an international research center where leading scientists will be engaged in research and development in the fields of anthropomorphic robotics, living systems modeling and brain and consciousness modeling with the goal of transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality.
An annual congress "The Global Future 2045" is organized by the Initiative to give platform for discussing mankind's evolutionary strategy based on technologies of cybernetic immortality as well as the possible impact of such technologies on global society, politics and economies of the future.
Future prospects of "2045" Initiative for society
2015-2020
The emergence and widespread use of affordable android "avatars" controlled by a "brain-computer" interface. Coupled with related technologies “avatars’ will give people a number of new features: ability to work in dangerous environments, perform rescue operations, travel in extreme situations etc.
Avatar components will be used in medicine for the rehabilitation of fully or partially disabled patients giving them prosthetic limbs or recover lost senses.
2020-2025
Creation of an autonomous life-support system for the human brain linked to a robot, ‘avatar’, will save people whose body is completely worn out or irreversibly damaged. Any patient with an intact brain will be able to return to a fully functioning bodily life. Such technologies will greatly enlarge the possibility of hybrid bio-electronic devices, thus creating a new IT revolution and will make all kinds of superimpositions of electronic and biological systems possible.
2030-2035
Creation of a computer model of the brain and human consciousness with the subsequent development of means to transfer individual consciousness onto an artificial carrier. This development will profoundly change the world, it will not only give everyone the possibility of cybernetic immortality but will also create a friendly artificial intelligence, expand human capabilities and provide opportunities for ordinary people to restore or modify their own brain multiple times. The final result at this stage can be a real revolution in the understanding of human nature that will completely change the human and technical prospects for humanity.
2045
This is the time when substance-independent minds will receive new bodies with capacities far exceeding those of ordinary humans. A new era for humanity will arrive! Changes will occur in all spheres of human activity – energy generation, transportation, politics, medicine, psychology, sciences, and so on.
Today it is hard to imagine a future when bodies consisting of nanorobots will become affordable and capable of taking any form. It is also hard to imagine body holograms featuring controlled matter. One thing is clear however: humanity, for the first time in its history, will make a fully managed evolutionary transition and eventually become a new species. Moreover, prerequisites for a large-scale expansion into outer space will be created as well.
Key elements of the project in the future
• International social movement
• social network immortal.me
• charitable foundation "Global Future 2045" (Foundation 2045)
• scientific research centre "Immortality"
• business incubator
• University of "Immortality"
• annual award for contribution to the realization of the project of "Immortality”.
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