Scientist warns that the robot apocalypse really is coming unless steps are taken now

10 years ago | Posted in: Technology | 743 Views

From HAL 9000 to the Terminator — all those Hollywood movies in which artificially intelligent robots end up turning on their human masters might not be too far from the truth.

Noted artificial intelligence researcher Steve Omohundro published a paper in the April edition of the Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence in which he argued that, “unless they are carefully designed,” the “rapid development of autonomous systems” will lead to machines that “are likely to behave in anti-social and harmful ways.”

In “Autonomous technology and the greater human good,” Omohundro argues that “autonomous systems” — by which he means any in which the designer has not predetermined all possible responses to changing operating conditions — are capable of “surprising their designers” by behaving in ways that are both unexpected and undesirable. He claims that “military and economic pressures are driving the rapid development of autonomous systems,” and that these pressures are causing the designers of these systems to pay inadequate attention to unintended consequences.

A 2010 report from the United States Air Force, for example, states that “[g]reater use of highly adaptable and flexibly autonomous systems and processes can provide significant time-domain operational advantages over adversaries who are limited to human planning and decision speeds.” This need for “operational advantages” creates a pressure on system designers to design systems whose computing power makes human supervision of them nearly impossible.

Moreover, he writes, “[r]ational systems exhibit universal ‘drives’ towards self-preservation, replication, resource acquisition and efficiency and that those drives will lead to anti-social and dangerous behaviour if not explicitly countered.” The end result, according to Omohundro, are systems that are too powerful to control and too self-interested in their own preservation to necessarily serve their intended purpose… see more

source: rawstory

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