Superintelligence, Nick Bostrom, 2014 – This is an AI ethics book and one of the most exhaustively imaginative one you can find. I have come across a lot of concepts and philosophy in the book having followed Eliezer’s blogs and “LessWrong”. To imagine radically different futures means to veer off on tangents and go far and further than anyone else. This book does just that to portray scary futures of how things may go wrong – both for us and AI sentience, if it ever gets there. To that effect, this book is like an antidote for Kurzweil’s works on singularity.
The rough fear is that an AI optimizing for manufacturing of paper clips could turn all of planet’s resources to that purpose, highjack our power networks and metal production and turn the world into a flood of paperclips, using every last Watt of energy for that purpose and once done, move on to colonise the rest of the solar system and beyond. The worry is that AI superintelligence might be reached in a very short period of tinkering and we may not even realize and not having sufficient safeguards might prevent us from stopping the exponential proliferation before the crossover happens (point of no return).
The author also comes up with different paths to AGI – be it a whole brain simulation (neuromorphic AI), brain-computer interfaces (cyborg route), networked AI (sentience on the internets, but not literally) etc. Such superintelligence could be based on speed, say brain emulation on hardware much faster than our biological one (200 Hz of our brain vs 2 GHz microprocesser), or have a lot more planetary resources at its disposal. We might think why not just switch the damn thing off – in other words “box” the AI, or control capabilities (stunting), incentives, tripwires, domesticity, specificity etc. – there are several pitfalls with the approach as well discussed. Like I said, its a imaginative book – there’s an AI given the goal of evaluation Reimann hypothesis which turns the solar system into a computronium. Its that level wacky. Being an optimistic yet skeptical person, I liked balancing Kurzweil with Bostrom but it may not be everyone’s cup of tea. 8/10
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