How AI Can Improve Product Safety
Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence
Why would Artificial Intelligence kill us? This could happen for at least two reasons. Either we might totally mess up the goal we give them: For example, if we task a super intelligent AI to make all humans happy, it might behave benignly for a while until it achieves sufficient power to kill everyone.
When every human is dead, no human Artificial Intelligence is not happy, and the goal is perfected. Though it might sound stupid, it's generally hard to predict how a super intelligence will interpret a goal.
Another possible reason is that almost regardless the goal, resources will help a lot in achieving it. And humans control (and consist of) a lot of resources.
Stuart Russell, top professor in AI and author of the famous textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach , elaborates on these points:
AI Safety does not mean that we shouldn't build super intelligent machines, only that we should spend a fair deal of effort to avoid the potentially very bad outcomes.
Possible solutions
1- Learn how to construct AIs that do what we want them to do.For this, we have to solve the AI Control Problem, which is plenty harder than one would first expect. Nonetheless, this is the most explored venue for AI Safety. See Bostrom's book Superintelligence for details.
2- Structure society in a way that no agent, especially no super-Artificial Intelligence, will have incentives to do damage ("crime shouldn't pay").
3- Whether this path possible depends on how fast super-Artificial Intelligence's can self-improve: If the improvement is too fast, a single agent may become so powerful that no law or societal structure can stop it. In this case, solving the AI Control Problem would be safer.
super AI's Work for Human's Benefit
If self-improvement is a bit slower, a mixed economy of humans and AI's may arise (see Hanson Economics Of The Singularity). In the mixed economy, humans will have a much better chance to prosper if they can properly control super AI's to work for their benefit. This is a second good reason to solve the AI Control Problem.
