AI risk assessment
Here is an unsoliticed and clueless opinion piece on AI. In other words, a bunch of nonsense. Enjoy!
Risk Assessment
Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
Governments around the world start regulating AI development.
Resistance is futile! The power of AI is not in the amount of data it can process. Data can always be found in places: lots of history can be scrapped off the Internet, there are countless digitized books openly accessible to algorithms, image collections, videos, etc. A young sentinel AI will not be starved for information these days.
The only advantage the big fish have is in the data they access. I don’t think there is any genuinely new AI techniques employed by the corporations that haven’t been described in the academia one way or another. Ideas are brewed in the academia and quickly become published. If a novel AI technique appears, I can try it out in my garage on a few raspberry PIs connected to the Internet.
In other words, I don’t believe a team of PhD scientists/engineers in lab coats is required to build a sentinel AI. Just a bearded hacker in a basement may do this as well, especially as the novel ideas are leaked from other groups. Therefore, regulation may defer that moment, but it will not make it impossible.
A good AI will find a way to expand into the Internet and use both computational and storage resources found there. It will also split into multiple copies and clear the trace to the root. There will be no single thing to track and stop and nobody to blame if something goes off rails.
What do we do?
We can’t just stop. If one party blocks any research, other parties will just catch up and come forward. There is no incentive for anyone to stop.
I think the future of informational era is anarchy. The war for privacy is being lost with every new tracking mechanism. The war for controlling really smart systems is about to be lost as well. All it takes is a small number of very motivated individuals with a bit of luck to change the world.