TORONTO, Canada -- Artificial intelligence continues to evolve at an astounding pace. How will the world change when it enters an age in which human intelligence has been surpassed in all fields? Nikkei reporters interviewed Professor Emeritus Geoffrey Hinton of the University of Toronto, known as the "Godfather of AI Research," at his home in Canada to discuss the future of AI and humanity. These are excerpts from Nikkei's interview with Hinton, edited for length and clarity. ... Q: Do you think AI will become self-aware, or have consciousness? A: I think multimodal chatbots are already having subjective experiences. I think most people's model of the mind is just wrong. ... Q: Professor Yann LeCun of New York University in the U.S., who co-won the Turing Prize, denies the possibility of consciousness or sentience in AI. A: We're still friends, but we completely disagree. Most people think they don't have subjective experience. We have something special, which is consciousness or subjective experience or sentience, and AIs don't have that. I think that's just wrong. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Te...-speaks-on-threat-of-tech-surpassing-humanity (open in incognito mode) Long interview with Geoffrey Hinton on Artificial Intelligence. The most interesting aspect is his belief that people who think AI cannot be conscious do not have a correct understanding of what consciousness is. Thus AIs can be conscious and surpass humans in capabilities.
Uh huh... Which brings us to the question... If one unplugs an AI could one be charged with roboslaughter? And if the AI acts to stop the unplugging is it self defense?
From the Article "Humans can try to share knowledge but we're very slow at it. In digital computation, you reduce everything to ones and zeros, so the knowledge is immortal. It doesn't depend on any one particular piece of hardware." If the state of the AI is in non-volatile memory or backed up, then the AI can be plugged in and restarted, or it can be instantiated on a new hardware system. Therefore, unplugging an AI is more like giving it an anesthetic than killing it.
AI bots can't even seem to maintain context across a long and complex social media threads. Let alone pass the Turing test. So a lot of the claims regarding conscious AI seem far fetched to me. I'm sure most of us have experienced AI based chat as used by some companies for customer support. If so, I rest my case.
I am hopeful that a political remedy for all of this may arise up out of The Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area film industry......
