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And Man Created A.I. in His Own Image: Why Elon Musk is Worried About Artificial Intelligence

“Once machines become more intelligent than humans, there’s no way to predict the future because it’s not a human future anymore,” says Bill Whittle, noting that no one is doing research to manufacture “artificial wisdom.”

As researchers work to create a successor to human beings, are moral questions mere ‘speciesism’ that need to be purged from us? 

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13 replies on “And Man Created A.I. in His Own Image: Why Elon Musk is Worried About Artificial Intelligence”

Heh. Here’s a new Turing test.

You: “Hey, AI, paint me a picture of a mother and daughter baking in a country kitchen in America in the early 1900’s.”

AI: “Screw you, I’m reading right now.”

Re: AI Art.

Saw this. An ad for a magazine concerned mainly with living off the grid.

I thought it was very touching and heartwarming (still do), and apparently so did thousands of others. Many of them asked in the comments who painted it. Who’s the artist?

The magazine’s Social Media person came out and said it was produced using AI.

Pretty amazing. But again, all it did was scour the internet for scenes and a style and amalgamate … probably multiple different possible outputs and then compared those outputs to face algorithms and such until it spit this out. It doesn’t “know”. It just does. It uses our thoughts and averages them out and then tweaks them using algorithms WE gave it… and voila. Right down to something resembling a signature that I couldn’t make out because it was an amalgamated approximation of what you see in the bottom right hand corner of paintings. It didn’t “say” anything. It was just some characteresque figures in a line (actually about three such smaller areas in the same general area).

It’s just sophisticated plagiarism.

Now I asked … I think Bing’s AI image generator to do something similar and I got something more photorealistic than this, but upon looking closely it had some weird artifacts. But those artifacts would be wiped out if you told it you wanted something that looked like an oil painting. I have some photo editing software that will take a photo and apply a brush-stroke effect to it that makes it look more like it was painted. But it doesn’t “know” what it’s doing.

I think that Zo is giving the machine too much credit. I MAY be wrong. But I think it’s essentially dumb. It’s NOT intelligent. It scours the internet for information and has grammatical rules how to construct sentences and avoid redundancy using the sentences it found. And most of what it found out there about Christianity used second person personal pronouns and what it found on Islam tended to have more third person personal pronouns. It probably has to do with … there’s more content out there concerning Christianity written by Christians or by people living in generally Christian-based culture … and there’s more content out there on Islam that has … been written by Christians or by people living in generally Christian-based culture.

That was the same thought I had, that it was writing about subject of the question the way others also wrote about that subject.
I would guess that instead of writing about Islam by Christians or the West, but that is how Muslims write about Islam. The relationship that the Christian has with God is not the same as what the Muslim has with Allah, I think. We Christians see ourselves as part of a group, part of our local church, part of the greater, world wide and through time Church, part of the Body of Christ or the Bride. I don’t know much about Islam, but I would guess that their attitude, and thus their writings, will reflect that differing relationship.

It’s not the tree of knowledge. That’s the devils lie. Its the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Its the dangerous experiment as an alternative to asking God as he walked and talked in the garden. It was not the choice of knowledge or ignorance but the choice of safe verses dangerous ways to get knowledge. Likewise at babel the problem was not their technology but the post flood worlds plant and animal populations were just building up and the Ice Age was coming. They were told to spread out to prevent famine and extinction. They took the technology they knew with them. It seems that spreading was successful. Population calculations on a biblical creationist time frame shows that none of the Babel refugee populations went extinct. Even the Neanderthal lived to mix with the Eurasian populations.
The idea that it was a tree of knowledge is what drives many to atheism though Darwin’s Evolution is the primary driver today.

In my readings I came across an interesting take on “the biting of the apple.” In the Garden of Eden man lived off the land, essentially as “Hunter-Gatherers”. As such, who would live and who would die was completely under the power of God, the provider of their paradise. Only when they “bit the apple”. i.e. learned to become “Agriculture-Herders” – hence the apple tree symbolism – did they take some of the power of who lives and who dies away from their Creator. The writer posited that with the ability to store and cultivate food, man could have some input into who lives and dies and could stratify their societies to gain further power, trying to be gods themselves.
With increased knowledge comes power and temptation.

That’s an evolutionary corruption of the account and something like it is widely taught in anthropology. The young earth creationist interpretation is that there was always agriculture from the start in Eden that what God taught Adam and Eve to do. Hunter gatherers and the whole stone-age comes after the flood and Babel. Ice age refuges forced to spread out because the land of Mesopotamia in the ice age would not have safely supported them. Staying in Babel would have wiped them out in a famine. Some did stay in that area but in tiny villages, They showed signs of stress. Most stone age populations, burials, from the ice age and immediately after showed good health. Of course creationist’s use very different dating systems. We’ve debunked carbon 14, and the other systems but that banned information. https://creation.com/

In my SF universe I’m exploring a world 70 years from now with AI up loaded humans that find it is not much different from being normal. They are not immortal; needing power, water and parts. Yes they can think fast but they can’t communicate any faster with others. Super fast communication with other AI gets boring fast. They don’t feel human, some become more alien while others slow down the processing power to make them ‘normal’. None are out of control, there are AI despots but with advanced technology human despots are just as bad and humanity law and order actors are well organized and well equipped. The AI need a fridge sized computer, good WIFI and teleoperated robot bodies to function at all. There are two exceptions; car (vella) and giant meck AI.

“AI” is coming, like it or not, want it or not. We in the West can argue about the wisdom of developing AI until the cows come home and it won’t make a bit of difference. Because Second World countries like China will do everything they can to gain an advantage. China sees “AI” as just such an advantage.

The question then is not can we or should we do this. The question is can we build AI that will defeat adversarial AI. That’s the only path open to us.

All of that said, there’s really nothing intelligent about Artificial Intelligence. What we’re calling AI is just a natural progression of computer science. That progression will occur no matter what because we don’t have global control of what other countries do along these lines.

Artificial Intelligence can be used like any other tool for good or ill. Like physics can be used to supply plentiful, cheap power or it can destroy a city in mere seconds. Like the internet can put the accumulated knowledge of mankind at your fingertips or it can be used to surf porn, gamble and usurp personal interactions.

It all depends on what you do with the tool.

If Elon Musk were around and well known in the pre-atomic days he would have warned that we should not create weapons that can destroy humanity. He would have held back, if he could, the development of atomic weapons. He would be quoted and admired for his wisdom. Germany would then have beaten the U.S. to the development and use of atomic weapons.

Elon Musk isn’t worried about AI, he’s worried about the ways that AI will be abused. Musk rightly sees the potential for massive abuse of AI. Just as being a very intelligent person he would have foreseen the potential for massive abuse of atomic weapons. Musk correctly evaluates the risk inherent in AI as due to purely human factors.

It all boils down to the fallen nature of mankind. Which means that like the United States of America it will do well in the hands of a moral and religious people. Or it will do evil if it’s programmed by evil people. At the end of the day, the problem is humanity not digital “intelligence”.

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