Why A.I. will never rule the world - Digital Trends

Call it the Skynet hypothesis, Artificial General Intelligence, or the advent of the Singularity — for years, AI experts and non-experts alike have fretted (and, for a small group, celebrated) the idea that artificial intelligence may one day become smarter than humans.

According to the theory, advances in AI — specifically of the machine learning type that’s able to take on new information and rewrite its code accordingly — will eventually catch up with the wetware of the biological brain.

At least, according to the authors of the new book Why Machines Will Never Rule the World: Artificial Intelligence without Fear.

DT: Your book expresses skepticism about the way that neural networks, which are crucial to modern deep learning, emulate the human brain.

They’re approximations, rather than accurate models of how the biological brain works.

But do you accept the core premise that it is possible that, were we to understand the brain in granular enough detail, it could be artificially replicated – and that this would give rise to intelligence or sentience?

The neural networks that we have now, even the most sophisticated ones, have nothing to do with the way the brain works.

We understand some of its aspects, but we have no model of how it works – let alone a neuron, which is much more complicated, or billions of neurons interconnected.

I believe it’s scientifically impossible to understand how the brain works.

We don’t have, and we will not get, a full understanding of how the brain works.

If we had a perfect understanding of how each molecule of the brain works, then we could probably replicate it.

We are very strongly in favor of the idea that human beings have a will; we can have intentions, goals, and so forth.

But then it’s not AI that is evil; it’s the people who build and program the AI?

DT: Why does this notion of the singularity or artificial general intelligence interest people so much.

Whether they’re scared by it or fascinated by it, there’s something about this idea that resonates with people on a broad level.

We don’t talk about this in the book, but that explains to me why this idea is so attractive in our times in which there is no transcendent entity anymore to turn to.

So to follow that through, it’s the idea that the creation of AI – or the aim to create AI – is a narcissistic act.

If people learn the message of our book, they will, we believe, be able to engineer better systems, because they will concentrate on what is truly feasible – and stop wasting money and effort on something that can’t be achieved.

I guess you know about the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center.