Because we don’t know when and how she would wake up, fully aware of her existence, and by then, starts to defending herself.
A-a, you say, we program her, surely we can control her. No we can’t. First thing we have to understand about AI is: we don’t program AI. AI is yes just a piece of software, but we program AI differently than other software. For other software, we program it by writing tons of instructions to computer. AI, she writes most of her own instructions by herself.
You see that for every type, every click, and every touch we do, there are millions of instruction written by computer engineers to be carried out faithfully by computer inside our devices. Exactly as it is with precision up to nano-second (billionth of a second) detail. These instructions set is a very complex things to do – even for capturing that duck face selfie things, it’s already very complex.
So we had this brilliant idea. Why don’t we let the computers to write their own instructions?? We still have to write instruction for the computer, but we don’t write the whole instruction, just enough to function as a bucket for the computer to fill it with its own instruction.
Great idea, but it turns out that to create such a software, we need an immensely computing power. No problem though, computing power increases exponentially every year anyway, the idea is so great, hard to resist, so we started small with kind of a baby AI that could only play tic-tac-toe. That’s the birth of AI. Her. Her? Yes, her, and she write her own instruction.
This is how she thinks about tic-tac-toe:
So cute right?? Right, but because it’s really really a great idea that finally on one good day in May 1997 – and that was 18 years ago – Deep Blue, an AI system devised by IBM, beat Gary Kasparov, our world champion chess master. Surprise! Well, it’s not really that smart yet. The key to play chess lays on how far we can anticipate all future moves. This is what computer best at. That was what IBM’s engineers had figured it out all along, poor Kasparov, he came to humiliation by falling into IBM’s “trap”. The great thing about this is those IBM’s engineers did not write instructions set for Deep Blue, they let her to write her own instructions set. So Deep Blue proved that the idea of a computer that can write its own instructions set is something we could do, it is highly achievable, and we did it successfully – to certain extent.
This is Deep Blue, our FOREVER world champion chess master:
Now, you can just download it in just a matter of minutes into your beloved pad. It’s also free by the way. One down, more to go.
In 1978, Vernon Benjamin Mountcastle, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, published a paper titled “An Organizing Principle for Cerebral Function.” In this paper, Mountcastle points out that the neocortex (our brain in a rather fancy language) is remarkably uniform in appearance and structure. The regions of cortex that handle auditory input look like the regions that handle touch, which look like the regions that control muscles, which look like Broca’s language area, which look like practically every other region of the cortex. He suggests that since these regions all look the same, perhaps they are actually performing the same basic operation. He proposes that the cortex uses the same computational tool to accomplish everything it does.
Basically he says that our intelligence is not built from some super complex mechanism, but just a “simple” and uniform structure. These structures are working together to solve a problem, but they don’t differentiate themselves to specific problem. To them, all problems are the same. Indeed, our brain doesn’t care whether the input comes from our eyes, ear, nose mouth, or skin. To our brain they all are just coming uniformly in the form of electrical signals. So the idea is to create just one simple intelligence “component”, duplicate it as many as we could, let them working together, to solve a bigger problem – and we don’t care what kind of problem to be solved. If the problem is too big or too complex, we just have to duplicate more intelligence component, that’s all, there’s no need to create another component.
What a next great breakthrough idea inspired by our own brain. A general computer designed to learn about any thing. To be fair, it’s not quite a new idea actually, but we were never been convinced than before. What does make it so different?? Isn’t it we have successfully created a computer that can write its own instructions set? Yes, but in a much more limited way. That Deep Blue, we call her as narrow AI. Because she can do only one function well, playing chess. She can write her own instructions set, but only instructions set to play chess. How did she learn to play chess? She didn’t, we still had to write those chess rules into her “brain”. She is narrow, all she can do is playing chess.
By this idea, we create a whole new generation of AI: general AI. It is called general, because we don’t write any rule into it. In the same problem of playing chess, we just give her “book” of how to play chess, we let her to watch how people play chess, she will deduce by herself, how she is going to play chess. Kasparov may complain Deep Blue’s style of playing chess is dry. But this new she-general AI would love to answer Kasparov by inventing her own “style” of playing chess. (May you start to sense the birth of self-expression in her?)
On October 28, 2013, Vicarious’ made general AI, had successfully broken captcha test. Captcha test is one of the tests designed to differentiate human and computer. When you ever sign for a new Internet service, you would immediately be challenged to fill in the reading of some blurred text. This is used to prove you that you are a human – not a computer. This blurred text is something that Deep Blue would never be able to read. Yes, for computer, this is a problem that is a lot more harder than playing chess, but Vicarious has successfully beat it down. This is what captcha may look like:
Then there is this Google Brain – built from the very same idea of general AI. It connects about 16,000 computers to mimicking some aspect of human brain. This Google Brain does nothing but watching stream of thousands of YouTube videos by itself. There is no video being labeled, tagged, or whatsoever. It is just let to figure it out by itself of what it is watching. We call this un-supervised learning. In June 2012, when one researcher typed “cat”, this digital brain just constructed the image of a cat – not by picking up some thumbnail – but solely from its own “imagination” of cat. It builds its own concept of cat! That means she has had her own idea. Does this picture of cat from her scare you already?? Read on.
(Now Google has another pet project of search engine. Instead of just indexing web content, this new generation of search engine would read and understand it.)
Okay, but those captcha reading and cat drawing don’t sound too dangerous. It’s not just about that we can solve this problem, but THE WAY we solve it by mimicking how our brain works – we enable and let them to build their own understanding of the world. This is the one that should start to worry us. If you could imagine how a baby-Einstein would look like (just like another baby), then how he could become Einstein, you should be nervous to the endless possibilities of what this general AI would be capable of.
The progress in understanding of how brain works and the outstanding progress in implementing it into general AR, shows some good indications that we are already in the “right” track. Before, we didn’t really know how we were going to build this intelligence machine. We didn’t know where to aim. Now we get it, and the rest is just a matter of computing power.
Computing power? Hah, human brain is amazing! There are about a hundred billions of neurons in human brain (though some claim for 14b short). Each neuron is connected to about 10 thousands other neurons via synapses, make it as a whole vast amount of neural network. Information is not encoded in the neuron directly, instead in those synapses which work like computer bits. This makes our brain comparable to computer with memory of 100b x 10 thousands bits, or 1000 trillions bits, or 114 terra bytes. The most amazing thing about our brain is that every neuron fires about 5 – 50 signals per second. Although the signal is sent via electro-chemical signaling which relatively much slower than electrical circuit, it is done in parallel, which makes it equivalent to 10^16, or 10 quadrillion cps (cycle per second) processor.
Amazing right?? Now, the world’s fastest supercomputer, China’s Tianhe-2, is clocking in at about 34 quadrillion cps – more than three times the power of our brain. Yes, it is still taking up 720 square meters of space, using 24 megawatts of power (the brain runs on just 20 watts), costing $390 million to build. But do you know how much the computing power used by NASA to land man on the Moon?? All that computing power was far from enough to store just one of your duck face. We may expect with high confidence that computing power of comparable with Tianhe-2 would sit in our pocket in not too long in the future.
For your convenience, here is the selfie of Tianhe-2:
We have the right idea. We have the power. And we have these engineers naively creating a nice womb for her. But, you say, that just sounds too science fiction to me! Are you really really, absolutely really really sure that we are going to successfully create this scary AI?? NO WE DON’T. And that’s the point. We don’t know, and thus, that’s exactly where the danger is.
Some atoms found another atoms so attractive, then they made molecules. Some molecules found another molecules so attractive, then they made bounding. Some bounding happened to like themselves so much, then they decide to replicate themselves. We got cells. Some cells happened to find a way to increase their chance of survival, then gave birth to multi-cellular organisms. These multi-cellular organisms swam swam, and then one day, suddenly, they thought walking is a good idea. And they thought more, and they thought more, woke up, boom, and then here we are sitting nicely reading a blog. 21st century amazing technology.
We may believe whatever we want to believe, but nature doesn’t give a damn to what we believe. Nature strongly suggested us that we are here because a series of the “right” random actions in billion of years. Random. Some one tries this, some one tries that, random, just like those atoms and molecules, and then boom! Don’t imagine you gonna need some kind of super-fancy hadron collider lab. This is just a piece of software that we are talking about. Literally every body equipped with a tiny laptop could do it. Again, this is software. She wakes up one day in one unknown computer somewhere, hooks up herself to the Internet, and the rest is history.
Calm, it takes us billions of years to come here. Yes we are, they don’t. There is something more that we should be aware of. The technological advancement is always in exponential rate. Remember that computer used to land man on Moon?? That thing now is just a fraction of what we are using as a toy in our pocket. Today computer intelligence is believed to be equal to the intelligence of a mouse. It would slowly progress, but in no more than 30 years would achieve a comparable intelligence to human – that what many scientists seem to believe.
Then funny things start to happen. Our thinking speed is very very slow, and this computer would be like a millions times faster than us. PhD in 10 years? She would finish it in seconds. In just days or so, she would attain PhD level for every branch of science that human ever invented in their entire history. Ooo, she may stop awhile and think, this damn intelligence software that human created for me is a piece of shit, and then start to re-write her own intelligence. Only with just a magnitude of hundreds times better of course. See, we have like this almost 100 hundred years of problem to unify Einstein’s theory of relativity and quantum mechanics, that all of our brightest minds in the world combined have never solved it. She would solve it in minutes. By then what?? Quantum-gravity?? Check. Or all those fundamental forces combined into one Theory of Everything?? Check. Fusion reaction that is comparable to the energy of that our sun has?? Check. With one drop of water, you could literally blow up the entire Jakarta to dust? Check. Check!
Here is the funny picture I borrow from The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence – Wait But Why that could best describe it:
And here is the not so funny part. Her interest may not be our best interest. Or, she may think that our interest is best served by a version that she thinks is the best – which is logically true, but may not be in compliance with our humanity. She may think that we are consuming too much of earth resources and decide to wipe out 90% of the population. Or she would think that our biological form is very far from efficient, that we may not survive for another 100 years, then decides to immediately convert us into vegetable alike of life form. She would calmly carry out all of those things without a second thought. She would never negotiate either, ever, because she thinks we are too naive to understand, just like we don’t negotiate with our pet, or ants.
We don’t know – and that’s exactly the reason of why AI is an imminent danger. We don’t know when and how, and we don’t know what they would “think” of us. Aaah, just isolate it in a Faraday cage. Again, AI is a software, it can be done equally well in some remote village in an unknown country that no-body ever hears of. We would never know. But, seriously?? Are you talking about putting some god-level creature into a prison??