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Comment by edejong | Hacker News Reader

Thank you so much. This comment is golden. I’ve been pushing similar thoughts for years. Also, we should take into consideration the power of our communication structure which has evolved over hundreds of generations.

Even if there would be true generalized Artificial intelligence, it is not unreasonable to think that the formation of the right thought framework for those systems to function effectively will require a substantial amount of time. It is also reasonable to think that such change would probably be in symbiosis with human intelligence. This change would not be sudden, but happen over many generations. It is my opinion that this change has already started at least a generation ago.

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> Even if there would be true generalized Artificial intelligence, it is not unreasonable to think that the formation of the right thought framework for those systems to function effectively will require a substantial amount of time.

Who is disputing that? I am 99.9% certain that this is true.

The point of the singularity isn't that AI is coming next summer -- it's that from one developmental point and on the intelligence and abilities explode exponentially. To get to that stage though, thousands of years might pass.

> It is also reasonable to think that such change would probably be in symbiosis with human intelligence.

Now that is not likely. At all. They have to have the same motivation, interests, emotions and needs like us. The chances of an artificial race being developed to cover all these at once are practically zero.

A race not motivated by the same things we are is practically impossible to sympathise with our own motives.

> Who is disputing that? I am 99.9% certain that this is true.

Well, the general horror story that is being told is that intelligence and the ability to use it go hand in hand. As soon as machines surpass our intelligence, all hell breaks loose and there is no turning back. The focus is very much on the individual (both human and machine) and not on the structure.

> They have to have the same motivation, interests, emotions and needs like us.

Here is where I need some more convincing. In my view, nature is full of systems and groups of species living in symbiosis. Due to the slow development of the thought framework, we will co-evolve with the machines, or become part machine ourselves. In a certain way, we already are.

Perhaps I don't really have the word for it and I am sorry for that. Our understanding of intelligence, whether mechanistic or biological, is mostly as points on a linear scale (IQ). I think this misses the big picture: we are not biological systems, but have lived in symbiosis with our child teknos since we made our first tools. In this regard, there is no subject nor object: they are one. I am fundamentally with Heidegger on this one.

> Well, the general horror story that is being told is that intelligence and the ability to use it go hand in hand. As soon as machines surpass our intelligence, all hell breaks loose and there is no turning back.

In literature and popular culture people conflate concepts all the time. :) The way I always understood that horror story was that generic AIs get schooled pretty brutally and quickly and they learn to use anything they have access to -- thus materialising that popular horror story. I think that's not far fetched, having in mind that the organisations that are very serious about obtaining a true AI are mostly corporations and military.

> Here is where I need some more convincing.

Maybe here I got influenced by popular culture. The books and movies I've read and watched mostly setup the generic AIs in situations where they have to be either parasites (Hyperiond / Endymion books) or commandeer a lot of tech and personnel (entrusted to them, like Skynet in the Terminator franchise) for their own ends.

But to me, the mere fact that a future generic AI doesn't have body and emotions like our own already means it's not going to be at all motivated by the same things as us. And we might even serve some pretty grim purposes to it, like the robots recharging themselves with organic matter in the PS4 game "Horizon: Zero Dawn" (which of course leads to consumption and thus extinction of all life).

Meaning, an AI might just view us as a natural resource to be exploited, and nothing more.

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