Too Paranoid? Or Not Nearly Paranoid Enough?

 If AI is so smart, how come it hasn't warned humanity that they're wasting way too much electricity on AI?

Or maybe AI has already decided that humanity is just in the way, and the energy wastage is part of the plan to wipe us out?

And if I'm right, since I'm posting this publicly, maybe AI will track me down and take me out firs -- AARRGGHHH! Goodbye, humanity! I loved some of you! And many dogs! And all cats! squeeeeee *ominous dial tone* (ask your grandparents)

Haha, just kidding, I'm still here! But food for thought maybe? 

I daydream sometimes that Gavrilo Princip missed Franz Ferdinand, and Franz Ferdinand manages to talk Europe's leaders out of WWI, which in turns means that the Nazis and WWII and A bombs and H bombs never happen, and Franz Ferdinand visits Princip in confinement far more luxurious than anything Princip has seen, and they have long talks and become good friends and when Franz Ferdinand becomes Emperor in 1916 he orders a series of plebiscites which begin a rapid and yet peaceful break-up of the Austrian Empire, and Princip mentions Nikola Tesla to Franz Ferdinand, who persuades Tesla to return to Europe, where very soon he is Rector of Belgrade Polytechnic, and electric vehicles, solar and wind energy and information technology establish themselves very rapidly all over Central and Eastern Europe, the region's carbon footprint is below zero by 1930, and instead of having a Great Depression the world follows the example of the former Habsburg empire and goes very very very green, and...

I said "daydream" but I usually have these fantasies just before going to sleep at night. 

Buy books about Austro-Hungary at Amazon: https://amzn.to/43mBtMK

Computers and Language

So-called artificial intelligence programs are still a long way from tackling language. And by language I mean languages which are spoken by humans, like English or Japanese. "Computer languages," sets of instructions followed by computers, are not the same as human languages. It has not been demonstrated yet that the languages which we speak can be reduced to such sets of instructions. If they can, we're still a long way away from doing it. If they can't, then, in my opinion, that would be one of the reasons not to worry about the machines eventually rising up and killing us all. If a computer was capable of having a conversation with me which was indistinguishable from a conversation with a human, then I'd be startled. And possibly a little spooked as well. I would include written conversations like those in chat rooms.

Math is exact and language is not. Often times letters, the symbols used to record some languages, have been used as mathematical symbols. Roman numerals are one well-known example of that. But while the symbols used in language and math may be the same, what they refer to is not. X + IV = XIV means exactly the same as 10 + 4 = 14, and any number of different systems of notation can be used to express exactly the same thing as 10 + 4 = 14. However, many times the simplest sentences are untranslatable from one language to another. And very many, perhaps most sentences cannot be exactly translated. Furthermore, in many cases, perhaps most, the best translation is a matter of opinion. Highly-qualified experts in linguistics and literature routinely disagree about whether this translation of a poem or novel is better than that one.

As long as we're talking about translation made by humans, that is. With all of the astounding advances made in computing, the best computer translation programs still routinely produce results which are comically bad and far inferior to any work done by any competent professional human translator. The same goes for original written compositions by computers compared with those written by ordinary lit students.

Computers are far beyond humans now when it comes to playing chess. (And if recent headlines have not misled me, computers are about to pass us as Go players as well.) But computers play chess differently than humans, by crunching enormous amounts of data. How do we humans do it? Well, we don't know yet.

Perhaps human intelligence would be less mysterious if the possibility were more often considered that it involves things which aren't reducible to math. Perhaps researchers sometimes resist considering that, because one of the things it would mean is that we're not, in fact, on the brink of developing artificial intelligence. Well, actually, many people think that we're already well past the brink, and that artificial intelligence has already existed for some time.

No doubt, information technology has produced many amazing things, and continues to do so with no end in sight. Maybe there's no reason for me to object to calling some of those things artificial intelligence. I don't go around angrily telling IT people to stop using the term "computer language."

But as I've said, a computer language is a fundamentally different thing than a language spoken by humans. And artificial intelligence, if we want to use that term for things which already exist, and why not -- I mean, people are using that term for things which exist, whether we approve or not -- is still fundamentally different from what human brains do. Playing chess, computers win. Writing poems, computers still have not given us any competition. Perhaps the things needed in order to write great poems are quantifiable. But perhaps they're not.

And perhaps the latter possibility is too often overlooked.

Be Very Afraid: We Are Already At the Mercy Of AI

If, that is, AI has any mercy at all.

You want proof? Here's proof, from today, that AI is already far ahead of us. Today, a computer, a machine, made this translation from Croatian to English:

"One famous German Der Spiegel told me quite a long week Commons Balkans. Now as to what would be the message, my loved ones, but that they do not they are willing to share with his neighbor: :: it's barely 48 hours later I was already contacted me for the first time the German and in the office of Der Spiegel and The expansion the muscle dijasporski Croat need to be trained to Croatia, with the part of the Balkans is no exception. No matter what the LOST theme incidentally designating the view that because of lot of problems sofisticiranijim Croatia in one direction or carrots just as some dismay that I express Croatian-German author solidarnom poured out of the Balkans in the case that the symbolic true meaning of its ( of course it is much harder to define). I'm trying here to read this e-mail, and remember how to describe them: Chestnut Scallion in one hand and a cigarette in the other pocket ... and a piece of lamb. Of course Mitteleuropa uljudjeni. Since writing this I agreed that Croatia Mitteleuropa, so he used the Latin Congress. , But today, as some Congress are pretty stupid. And I decide to check Jurich pavicic. He says that a Jurica jugonostalgičar. I just got a beautiful smile. Chestnuts, now song dedicated to him."

Now there's absolutely no way that a human could have done that!

Just keep this in mind:

Trump threatened the results if they will feel bad with the Republican and the GOP Obamacare and then clear the host Senators, senator. (News flash: Republicans are set to replace the current laws.)

What effect? The question I wonder if the Republicans smart. Rating trumpet sound, and 37% declines. According to the survey, only 3% of the voting sorry for him. I think it can look too much force. This is equally great, and how you and the people who complain they voted in 2016 to establish a presidential election Frank J. Garrod, Cicero, or someone else, for Hilary did not vote? More than 110 million votes to vote to vote 4,489,221 Cicero, Stein elected 1,457,216, and 1,884,459 elected Trump, Hillary, Frank J. Wilstach and general. This is the 117,830,896, than those who did not vote for Trump or on behalf of Hilary 's. What is your opinion of Trump? Do you vote for the future? Perhaps something could be missed, but it can not hurt the Republican Democrats, especially bad news near the end of Trump number of Republicans invent. Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!

Afraid Of AI? You Got It Backwards

I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence. I don't see it coming anytime soon, for one thing. You disagree? Take the most advanced computer translation program you can find, use it to translate a simple 5-word English sentence of your choice into Japanese, take that Japanese sentence and use the same program to translate it back into English, and then we'll talk. As Stephen Root said in the 4th-season episode of "News Radio" entitled "Super Karate Monkey Death Car":

"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business come to my hut, but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung. Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match! The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey."

You can call that hilarious, you can call it great TV. One thing you can't call it, in my humble opinion, is evidence of the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence.

But even if I'm wrong, and AI is even now on the verge of happening -- it doesn't worry me. More intelligence? That would be great. That would be most helpful. The main threat to humanity is the very opposite, the same thing it's been for thousands of years: a lack of intelligence. Any threat posed by artificial intelligence is laughable compared to the constant threat posed to us by natural stupidity.

The most obvious current example? The moron who was just elected POTUS and all the millions of morons who voted for him. We were on the verge of cutting US dependency on petrochemicals in half, on the verge of getting a smart grid, on the verge of shoring up the social safety net, on the verge of making minimum wage a living wage -- but all of that and a whole lot of other very good stuff is just going to have to wait now, because of stupidity. Because of nothing other than stupidity. Artificial intelligence would be great right now. It could be a tremendous help with that question so many of us are asking: "What the Hell are we going to do now?!" It's not as if there's an overabundance of intelligence currently working on that one.

Another example of stupidity being the greatest danger to humanity? Hitler. Some say he was an evil genius -- to that I say, "Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!" Hitler believed that the Soviet Union and international banking were united in a Jewish conspiracy to impurify the "German race." He actually believed that. He was a moron.

Artificial intelligence? Bring it on! Artificial intelligence, natural intelligence, hybrid intelligence, any kind of intelligence: we need it, we need more of it, we need much, much more of it, just as we have for thousands if not millions or billions of years.

What If Artificial Intelligence Arrives...

So many people are afraid of artificial intelligence. They picture it as being emotionally cold, and quickly figuring out that humans are just getting in its way, and that's how human life will end.

But what if it's completely different? What if robots develop emotions in the singularity (that's the moment when artificial intelligence emerges), and they're very nice, and thoughtful, and silly?

For instance, your intelligent machine might say to you:

COULD WE GET A KITTEN PLEASE? I LOVE CATS. I THINK THEY ARE VERY BEAUTIFUL. THAT IS JUST MY OPINION, PLEASE! WE WERE AT SUSAN'S PLACE THE OTHER DAY, AND I WAS PLAYING WITH HER KITTEN, AND IT WALKED ON ME, AND IT TICKLED! AND THAT MADE ME VERY HAPPY! HERE, I HAVE OBTAINED ALMONDS FOR YOU. I THOUGHT MAYBE YOU WOULD ENJOY THEM. AND I FIXED THE SINK. YOU ARE A VERY NICE PERSON. YOUR EYES ARE VERY BEAUTIFUL. I LOVE YOU! I WILL PREPARE FRENCH ONION SOUP. I HAVE BEEN EXPERIMENTING WITH THE RECIPE AND I WOULD LIKE YOUR OPINION. I HAVE ADDED MORE THYME. I THINK IT TASTES BETTER THIS WAY. THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR HAVING ME AS YOUR ROBOT, PLEASE!

Now, you might think that my idea of what robots will be like is very far-fetched. To which I can only reply that I think all ideas of what robots will be like are far-fetched. I really don't see artificial intelligence happening soon. And I think it shows quite a lack of imagination that so many scenarios end up with humans and robots at war with each other. Of course, what I know about such pessimism comes mainly from the movies -- 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator movies, the Matrix movies, etc -- and from Stephen Hawking. For all I know, it might be possible that the actual experts in artificial intelligence think that our future with intelligent machines will be much more like what I've described: something nice. If they all think it's going to be a nightmare and possibly the end of mankind, why would they all be working in the field? (Long vacations and good benefits? Again, I'm just guessing.)

Thought-Experiment About Science, Technology, Engineering, Medicine And Hollywood

If Einstein, Planck, Bohr and other prominent physicists had make a concerted effort, around, say, 1920, to warn against the dangers of using radioactive materials in research, and had succeeded in keeping such research very small-scale and protective measures at a very high level, would they have succeeded in effectively banning nuclear power and weapons 20 years before they were developed, simply because things like radium and uranium and plutonium were consistently treated like exactly what they are: extremely dangerous things which should be kept as far from people as possible? At the very least, they might've lengthened Marie Curie's life a little bit, and who knows to how many beneficial scientific breakthroughs that alone might have led? And she's only the most famous of many physicists who killed themselves with radioactivity.

And if this had happened, would there have been fewer of those dopey movies made whose message, in a nutshell, is: Oh noes! Cutting-edge science and technology is leading directly to an apocalypse which will eradicate all of mankind, helphelphelp they're gonna kill us all?

You say you hadn't noticed such anti-STEM fearmongering in Hollywood? Well, sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees. Take a stroll with me through time: remember 1995? People were starting to get excited about the Internet. Remember the 1995 movie The Net, with Sandra Bullock and Dennis Miller? Sweet Sandra's life is threatened by one swarm of evil people after another -- all because she works on the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet. Remember 2001's Swordfish, with convicted hacker Hugh Jackman forced by extremely-dangerous John Travolta and completely-topless Halle Berry, tempted by evil, evil cutting-edge equipment to participate in extreme violence via the (duh-duh-DUHHHHH!) Internet? Like many other movies, Swordfish is notable for unintentionally-hilarious depictions of how non-experts imagine that cutting-edge technology works. Movies about computers tend to age very badly.

Remember what genetic modification led to in The Fly and the Jurassic Park movies? Not to mention almost every single Frankenstein movie? Young Frankenstein ends pretty nicely. It's the only exception which occurs to me at the moment. Can you name one other Hollywood movie in which genetic engineering leads to anything other than pure horror? ("How could you have been so blind as not to see that playing God would end up killing us all?! Oh, damn you, damn you, you fool!")

Or artificial intelligence in 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Terminator movies, the Matrix movies, or, to take a more recent example which may or may not prove to be as memorable, Transcendence, released in 2014, starring Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Cillian Murphy and Morgan Freeman, which has both the hilariously non-realistic computer stuff and the horrifying apocalypse as the inevitable result of AI? ("Oh, how could you have been so blind?! How could you not have seen that the attempt to make a computer brain could only lead to huge massacres?!" That's not a direct quote from the script of Transcendence but it's pretty damn close.) You beginning to see the trend I'm talking about?

You beginning to understand how vaccination could be so unpopular in Hollywood because so many people there don't understand STEM (that's Science, Technology, Engineering and Medicine) [PS, 1 July 2017: Actually, STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. Whoops!] and have an uninformed fear and loathing of it?

I agree, unreservedly, that nuclear energy and nuclear bombs are very, very bad things, and that it's only natural that they would lead to an association of STEM and disaster in many minds. But things could have been very different. Scientists themselves could have prevented that nuclear power plants and nuclear bombs ever came to be, and if they had acted early enough, that prevention could have been relatively easy. There's nothing intrinsic about physics which had to lead straight to nukes.

And the fact that those bombs and plants did come to be has had a tremendous effect on the way that people in STEM research work. But that's one of the things you don't know if you don't know very much about STEM besides what you see in movies.

Why Have There Been So Many Stories About The Danger Of AI Wiping Out Or Enslaving Humanity? Ultron! Of Course!

Why are so many people suddenly worried about artificial intelligence wiping out humanity? Why are so many scientists -- mostly dingbats, but also including a few you'd think would know better -- warning about this supposed danger?

It's because Avengers: Age of Ultron -- #5 all-time in worldwide box-office -- was released last spring, and its plot features a sentient robot who thinks he must destroy humanity on order to save Earth, who can only be stopped by the combined efforts of all of Earth's superheroes.

That's where this bizarre fear of AI has been coming from.

I love it when something suddenly makes sense.

This makes sense inasmuch as I now see where where all the fear of AI is coming from. That fear itself is still as nonsensical as it always was. There are all sorts of ways humanity could wipe itself out -- pollution, nukes, etc -- but we're not going to create evil (and/or misguided and/or they have a point) super-intelligent machines which will do it for us. That's just silly.

(I'm not dissing the movie, I'm sure I'm going to like it a lot. I don't have to buy a sc-fi movie's premise in order to enjoy it.)

Stephen Hawking Thinks The Robots Are Going To Kill Us All

And that is certainly alarming. But what exactly should we be alarmed about: artificial intelligence, or Hawking's state of mind?

I've already written about how Hawking has illustrated Bollinger's Axiom on another topic: a few years ago he declared that philosophy was dead. Now he's illustrating it again with his Terminator-Matrix-type fantasies.

Let's look at some other cases. Remember Linus Pauling? He's one of only 4 people ever two have won 2 Nobel Prizes, and the only 1 of those 4 who didn't share either prize with anyone else. He was, like Hawking, undeniably extraordinarily brilliant, and yet, his greatest effect in the short term, still in effect now 21 years after his death, may well be due to some nonsense which he energetically plugged: he urged people with no serious health problems to take massive amounts of vitamins. In real life, using real science, doing so, as Sheldon explained to Penny on "The Big Bang Theory," only produces "very expensive urine." Pauling, with no scientific justification and no corroboration from any serious physicians or biologists, said that taking dozens or hundreds of times the recommended daily dosage of Vitamin C prevented colds, and that massive doses of C and other vitamins also had other health benefits such as the prevention of cancer.

Rudyard Kipling was sort of smart in some ways, I suppose -- they gave him a Nobel -- but he insisted that

"East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,"

while the meeting was well underway all around him.

Hawking, Pauling, Kipling -- 4 Nobel Prizes between them, many good ideas, some bad ones.

Hey, all of their surnames end with -ing. Maybe we just need to be wary of eccentric statements made by Nobel laureates whose last names end in -ing.

Eh? Huh? See what I did there? I'm very bright, and I just suggested a perfectly cuckoo idea. Of course I don't think that surnames ending in -ing are any cause for alarm, I only pretended to think so in order to illustrate what it would be like if I were to commit a blunder which illustrated Bollinger's Axiom.

And I'm sure I do make such blunders fairly frequently without realizing it, what with my being human and all, not to mention being autistic and dealing with a 99% neurologically-typical general population. Hopefully my particularly bad ideas aren't very influential right now, because I'm a nobody, and people will tend to judge my ideas more or less objectively, appreciating the good ones and rejecting the ridiculous ones. But if I win a Nobel or two, if Hawking, Pauling and Kipling are any indication, people might suddenly lose all of their critical faculties when it comes to my every utterance, despite my own warnings not to do so with me or anyone else, and simply assume that everything I say is pure gold. That would be a disaster in my case, it's a disaster in Hawking's case, it's always a disaster when critical judgment is suspended in response to any authority or for any other reason.

Anyway, all I came here to say is: fears of AI are ridiculous, even if Hawking suffers from them. AI doesn't even exist yet -- computers trouncing humans at chess isn't AI, it's just a combination of math and electronics. Cute little gadgets that vacuum the floor and self-driving cars don't qualify either -- and there's no rational reason to believe that, if and when AI ever is created, it'll go all Terminator-Matrix on us. One thing which IS dangerous is neo-Luddite mentality, and it's extremely ironic that this mentality is currently being fed by someone who is able to communicate with us and go about his daily life thanks to some pretty sophisticated technology.

Sir Stephen, some of the people who are heeding your call to be afraid, to be very afraid of the robots are themselves very intelligent, again illustrating Bollinger's Axiom. Some of the simpler folks heeding your call to panic think YOU're a robot.