berkus wrote:Heh, we'd make a nice little Mars colony, as I have always dreamed about.
David, have you read "Steel Beach" by John Varley?
No, but I've just read the Wikipedia entry on it. If there's any serious idea in there about something that would make A.I. dangerous, that needs to be extracted from the story and looked at properly to see if it's a genuine threat or just something that sells stories.
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Solar wrote:Besides, with all that automation going on today, we still haven't figured out how to make it so that the machines doing the work actually feed the people, instead of just making them unemployed and / or impoverished. We have all the ressources we need, all the food, all the space, but we can't figure out how to distribute it fairly and sustainably.
We've worked out how to do it, but the greed of many rich elites prevent it being done. By not having a world government we are failing to get food to the people who need it while people who have plenty are literally killing themselves by eating too much. The result of our failure to set up a world health service results in population growth because poor people compensate for all the deaths by having larger families, and the lack of their fair share of the world's food resources results in them having to thrash their environment far beyond its ability to sustain itself just in order to scrape enough food together to stay alive. In wealthy countries we're obsessed with job creation to the point that half the workforce either do unnecesssary work or support those who do. What governments should be doing is getting rid of as many jobs as possible, which could be done while increasing the quality of life for those laid off - the money would still be in the system to continue to pay them enough to maintain their quality of life at the very least. There are solutions, but people seem to be too stupid to be able to agree on trying to apply them. Things are so messy that we're going to need A.I. to sort it all out.
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Chandra wrote:I personally believe that when humans tend to rely on brainless tin-beings, there's no reason to live for. Why have hands when you have nothing to do with it?
Play. Computer games are going to get more real-world, particularly as augmented reality takes off. Creating these games will be a popular passtime, and the most imaginitive people will probably still be able to come up with ideas which A.I. wouldn't be so likely to, given that A.I. isn't likely to understand so much about what it is that makes things interesting or fun for people. Personally, I won't miss work at all - I'll do a lot of sailing, hillwalking, birdwatching, etc. Might cycle round the world a few times too, if I can recover my health sufficiently (sitting at a computer is killing me, and I've got another medical issue which is quite limiting, but a possible cure for that is on the cards).
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Solar wrote:The "available data" on a crime isn't rows of data. It will come from humans. Filtered through their eyes and ears, their imperfect recollection, their own personal agendas, their abilities to express themselves.
People act and lie, but they all have a history. A.I. will know a lot of their history and will have a fair idea about how reliable they are. It might be sufficient just to collect people's opinions of each other as that would allow them to be given reliability ratings based on their considerable knowledge of each other. People would soon be sorted into a number of different groups, one of which would contain those who are extremely reliable while the group at the opposite extreme would contain utterly unreliable ones - the system would only need to know a few things about a small number of these people to work out which group is at which extreme. Add into that the knowledge collected by A.I. through direct observation of people's behaviour and it's easy to see how such a system would know how to weight the evidence from different sources.
Either you try to build an AI that takes all this into account - and I will adamantly oppose the concept, on the basis that a system that judges nuances like this by a fixed set of rules can be fooled.
It's dead easy to fool people - at the moment many cases are decided by how well a performance went down with the jury. Cases should be judged by logical analysis of actual facts, and the history of the accused should ensure that a person with a good record should be given the benefit of the doubt even when the performance of the accuser would convince a human jury, whereas if the accused has a history of abusing other people, that person would already have been given the benefit of the doubt on previous occasions and it would be safer to make more assumptions of guilt, all based on probabilities. We lock people up on the basis of probabilities at the moment, but huge mistakes are made. Using A.I. would make the calculations of probabilities right every time, though it still wouldn't guarantee that it would produce the right verdict. Even so, it would get it right more often, and it would err in the direction of letting people off if their history is good while erring the opposite way if people have a bad track record, particularly in cases where an individual is dangerous.
The reality is that this will simply happen all by itself - A.I. will independently judge all cases and demonstrate that it does a much better job, thereby driving the public into forcing a change to using A.I. to decide on all cases so that the world becomes a safer place to live in. At the moment we have cases where someone is wrongly found guilty, and even though it's demonstrated that an error has been made it takes years of T.V. documentaries on the case and legal marathons to overturn them. With A.I. that would not happen - the corrected facts would be fed in, the data would be crunched afresh, and out would come a new verdict there and then.