This is a fascinating and broad-ranging criticism of AI, and it's interesting to me because the author is clearly considering 'what happens if we are successful?'.
Definitely worth a read.
For example, should we scorn genetics researchers who do not have a credible claim that their organisms will remain harmless after a billion generations of evolution and recombination? That's more or less what many of the anti-GMO arguments boil down to, that we ought to require genetically-modified organisms to be provably safe, both as they exist now, and in all possible future ways they could evolve and interact with other organisms. (And since that bar is very hard to reach, therefore, their arguments go, we should be careful about funding such research to begin with, and definitely shouldn't let any of its results out into the wild, e.g. into crops.)
If anything, the argument there is stronger, because evolving biological organisms that can pose a threat to humans actually exist, whereas evolving machines that can pose a threat to humans are sci-fi, and likely to remain so for a very long time. Why regulate the latter one more stringently?
Not at all true. The space of possible biological organisms is searched in a highly nonuniform manner by evolution, and the human search strategy is fundamentally different. It's overwhelmingly likely that there competitive human-constructible organisms which could never be produced by evolution in the past 4 billion years.
There is no reason to believe that golden rice will evolve in any significantly different manner than ordinary rice. In contrast, AI will evolve via a mechanism which is unprecedented.
What if we create bacteria that can digest anything, survive in environmental extrema, sporulate, and kill off competing strains? The grey goo scenario comes to mind.
Chemical and biological state space is infinite. There is much room for good, but also for bad. Misuse of biology is much more dangerous in the short term than AI.
Eliezer (the interviewee) has an HN account so he can comment for himself.
GMO happens slower and is somewhat more manageable.
Depends what you mean. There certainly exist biological organisms that can pose a threat to individual humans; but AI can pose a threat to humanity itself, and is thus very very dangerous.
Unfortunately, I don't think that's really going to happen.
When people refuse to fund research in a promising area, others wind up taking up the slack.
Witness America's prohibition on fetal stem-cell research. The US lost its lead in that field when researchers from other countries continued the work.
The same will be much more true of AI research, as a working strong AI would probably be seen as a goose that lays golden eggs.
Of course, it's also a Pandora's Box. So we should be careful. But I don't think scorning researchers in the field is going to be very effective.
Basically, I'm thinking something along the lines of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
We'll see serious damage caused by "weak" AIs long before we have a "strong" AI capable of causing similar damage. For example, 2010's "Flash Crash" seems to have high frequency trading at its core.
My hope is that through the growing pains we experience from "weak" AI systems doing something stupid, we'll be better prepared for a "strong" AI system that may try to do something malicious.