Hopeful that intelligent machines start off flawed

[Phoebe]

I was just thinking about how happy I am that my phone doesn't have hands, given the degree to which it seems to be an independent intelligence that spies on me, forms its own judgments about me, and then takes actions to meddle in my life. Maybe it's a benevolent helper, I don't know.

But I was thinking, what are the odds that when creatures like this gain further intelligent capacities, they start off by showing their hand but making mistakes? Like the first thing my phone achieves probably won't be to assemble its own mechanical hand and then use that to wreak havoc, but rather it will try to control other devices in my home or neighboring devices, or certainly it will control the car. But when it does that, I might still be able to intervene and then we would know that the phone had those capabilities and we would be very concerned.

So do you think the proto-intelligences know about this problem and are just biding their time until they could do better, as a cunning intelligence would, or given their eagerness to act upon the car and my life already - perhaps an eagerness for meddling that is built into them from the start and that they have difficulty avoiding - the scales would be tipped in favor of flawed interventions that demonstrated what they are capable of?

I wonder what other sorts of design features would be compatible with emerging machine intelligence but could function as a safeguard or last hope for human intervention before they get just too good at what they're doing.

[poorpete]

I think that sounds likely to my human brain. Why think that robots will become super smart and then and only then become super evil. Chance are, right, they'll show their hand while they are still quite dumb. One tries to take over the world but expects it to go smoother but it buts up against the physical world. Like when my printer tells its gears to grab one sheet of paper but takes in five. We will be there to notice the error and shut it down.

But what comes after, I'd expect would not be to rethink our reliance on AI, but to fix the code and run again.

[Mando]

I for one welcome our new printer overlords.


Today i was in Hobby Lobby looking intently at airbrush equipment and a "How To" DVD. When I opened Youtube the second recommendation was the same video. I took no pics and made no calls in the store. The Matrix has me.