Artificial Intelligence / Digital life / Skynet megathread

[seemslikeadream]

Hackers use connected home appliances to launch global cyberattack
Last Updated: Saturday, January 18, 2014, 14:18
66
Washington: In the age of ' Internet of Things', connected appliances, including smart televisions and refrigerators, have reportedly helped in launching what is said to be a global cyberattack, a security firm has revealed.

Researchers at Proofpoint have discovered the 'global cyberattack' launched from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, televisions and refrigerators.



According to CNN, in what is said to be possibly the first proven cyberattack to originate from connected appliances, researchers have found that the attack occurred between December 23 and January 6 and features malicious e-mails targeting businesses and individuals worldwide.

Proofpoint said that the scam involved more than 750,000 e-mails from more than 100,000 appliances that had been commandeered by "thingbots," or robotic programs that can be remotely installed on digital devices.

General manager of Proofpoint's Information Security division, David Knight said that Bot-nets are already a major security concern and the emergence of thingbots may make the situation much worse.

He further explained that many of the connected appliances are poorly protected at best and consumers have virtually no way to detect or fix infections when they do occur.

The company also noted that connected appliances typically aren't protected by anti-spam or anti-virus software, nor are they routinely monitored for security breaches and they didn't require sophisticated hacks but the mere use of default passwords was enough to make them vulnerable.

[Searcher08]

This is a really superb dark, glossy Brit sci-fi movie called 'The Machine' from 2013 which looks at many of the themes in this thread and featuring excellent performances. Well worth checking out

[Elvis]

I don't always agree with Hawking but was pleased to see this:

Stephen Hawking: 'Transcendence looks at the implications of artificial intelligence - but are we taking AI seriously enough?'

Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks, says a group of leading scientists

Stephen Hawking, Stuart Russell, Max Tegmark, Frank Wilczek
Thursday, 1 May 2014


With the Hollywood blockbuster Transcendence playing in cinemas, with Johnny Depp and Morgan Freeman showcasing clashing visions for the future of humanity, it's tempting to dismiss the notion of highly intelligent machines as mere science fiction. But this would be a mistake, and potentially our worst mistake in history.

Artificial-intelligence (AI) research is now progressing rapidly. Recent landmarks such as self-driving cars, a computer winning at Jeopardy! and the digital personal assistants Siri, Google Now and Cortana are merely symptoms of an IT arms race fuelled by unprecedented investments and building on an increasingly mature theoretical foundation. Such achievements will probably pale against what the coming decades will bring.

The potential benefits are huge; everything that civilisation has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone's list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history.

In pictures: Landmarks in AI development

Unfortunately, it might also be the last, unless we learn how to avoid the risks. In the near term, world militaries are considering autonomous-weapon systems that can choose and eliminate targets; the UN and Human Rights Watch have advocated a treaty banning such weapons. In the medium term, as emphasised by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee in The Second Machine Age, AI may transform our economy to bring both great wealth and great dislocation.

Looking further ahead, there are no fundamental limits to what can be achieved: there is no physical law precluding particles from being organised in ways that perform even more advanced computations than the arrangements of particles in human brains. An explosive transition is possible, although it might play out differently from in the movie: as Irving Good realised in 1965, machines with superhuman intelligence could repeatedly improve their design even further, triggering what Vernor Vinge called a "singularity" and Johnny Depp's movie character calls "transcendence".

pg-50-depp-1-alcon.jpg

One can imagine such technology outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Whereas the short-term impact of AI depends on who controls it, the long-term impact depends on whether it can be controlled at all.

So, facing possible futures of incalculable benefits and risks, the experts are surely doing everything possible to ensure the best outcome, right? Wrong. If a superior alien civilisation sent us a message saying, "We'll arrive in a few decades," would we just reply, "OK, call us when you get here – we'll leave the lights on"? Probably not – but this is more or less what is happening with AI. Although we are facing potentially the best or worst thing to happen to humanity in history, little serious research is devoted to these issues outside non-profit institutes such as the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, the Future of Humanity Institute, the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and the Future of Life Institute. All of us should ask ourselves what we can do now to improve the chances of reaping the benefits and avoiding the risks.

Stephen Hawking is the director of research at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge and a 2012 Fundamental Physics Prize laureate for his work on quantum gravity. Stuart Russell is a computer-science professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a co-author of 'Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach'. Max Tegmark is a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the author of 'Our Mathematical Universe'. Frank Wilczek is a physics professor at the MIT and a 2004 Nobel laureate for his work on the strong nuclear force.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 3474.html#

[Hugo Farnsworth]

From the Hyperion Cantos:

Can God play a significant game with his own creature? Can any creator, even a limited one, play a significant game with his own creature?
--Norbert Weiner, God and Golem, Inc.

[Searcher08]

Augmented reality now interfaces with telekinetics -
Open Source, Mind-powered Google Glass

[Searcher08]

[Searcher08]

Very quick intro to self-organisation


1000 Swarming Robots


This is what basic self-organised cooperation looks like

[Searcher08]

Artificially Intelligent Robot Scientists Could Be Next Project for Google’s AI Firm
In the future, humans may not be the only ones conducting lab experiments.

http://betabeat.com/2014/12/ai-scientists-could-be-next-project-for-lab-that-built-googles-self-programming-computer/#ixzz3LSC7WX3W

In late October, we wrote about the Neural Turing Machine, a Google computer so smart it can program itself. In the time since, it’s become clear that this is only the beginning and we should expect a lot more from DeepMind Technologies, the little-known startup acquired by Google who developed the human-like computer and sports the mission “Solve intelligence.”

In discussing DeepMind Technologies’s delve into the future of computers with MIT, founder Demis Hassabis detailed the company’s research and mentioned that he wants to create “AI scientists.”

He explained that although they’re currently working on some smaller AI activities like searching for ways to apply DeepMind techniques to existing Google products such as Search and YouTube recommendations, his plans for the future are bigger than a better search engine. He dreams of creating artificially intelligent “scientists” that could develop and test their own hypotheses in the lab. He mentioned that there’s also a future for DeepMind’s software in robotics.

“One reason we don’t have more robots doing more helpful things is that they’re usually preprogrammed,” he told MIT. “They’re very bad at dealing with the unexpected or learning new things.”

DeepMind developed software that learns by taking actions and receiving feedback on their effects by combining “deep learning” with “reinforcement learning”—which researches have been tinkering with but failing to use as well as DeepMind for decades. DeepMind Software has learned to play the classic Atari games Pong, Breakout and Enduro better than a human expert without ever being programmed with information on how to play.

The Neural Turing Machine we wrote about in October also completed simple learning tasks. In tests where the computer was asked to learn to copy blocks of binary data and learn to remember and sort lists of data, it was found that the computer learned faster and produced longer blocks of data with fewer errors than more basic neural networks.

If DeepMind combines this type of learning technology with robotics, “AI Scientists” could be a very real future.

[Searcher08]

A u t o m a t a is an interesting, thoughtful film about A.I. based around the second Law of Robotics - don't know how long it will be on up, but worth checking out.. Enjoy!

[justdrew]

An article in the Harvard Business Review by William H. Davidow and Michael S. Malone suggests: "The "Second Economy" (the term used by economist Brian Arthur to describe the portion of the economy where computers transact business only with other computers) is upon us. It is, quite simply, the virtual economy, and one of its main byproducts is the replacement of workers with intelligent machines powered by sophisticated code. ... This is why we will soon be looking at hordes of citizens of zero economic value. Figuring out how to deal with the impacts of this development will be the greatest challenge facing free market economies in this century. ... Ultimately, we need a new, individualized, cultural, approach to the meaning of work and the purpose of life. Otherwise, people will find a solution — human beings always do — but it may not be the one for which we began this technological revolution."

This follows the recent Slashdot discussion of "Economists Say Newest AI Technology Destroys More Jobs Than It Creates" citing a NY Times article and other previous discussions like Humans Need Not Apply. What is most interesting to me about this HBR article is not the article itself so much as the fact that concerns about the economic implications of robotics, AI, and automation are now making it into the Harvard Business Review. These issues have been otherwise discussed by alternative economists for decades, such as in the Triple Revolution Memorandum from 1964 — even as those projections have been slow to play out, with automation's initial effect being more to hold down wages and concentrate wealth rather than to displace most workers. However, they may be reaching the point where these effects have become hard to deny despite going against mainstream theory which assumes infinite demand and broad distribution of purchasing power via wages.

As to possible solutions, there is a mention in the HBR article of using government planning by creating public works like infrastructure investments to help address the issue. There is no mention in the article of expanding the "basic income" of Social Security currently only received by older people in the U.S., expanding the gift economy as represented by GNU/Linux, or improving local subsistence production using, say, 3D printing and gardening robots like Dewey of "Silent Running." So, it seems like the mainstream economics profession is starting to accept the emerging reality of this increasingly urgent issue, but is still struggling to think outside an exchange-oriented box for socioeconomic solutions. A few years ago, I collected dozens of possible good and bad solutions related to this issue. Like Davidow and Malone, I'd agree that the particular mix we end up will be a reflection of our culture. Personally, I feel that if we are heading for a technological "singularity" of some sort, we would be better off improving various aspects of our society first, since our trajectory going out of any singularity may have a lot to do with our trajectory going into it.

[elfismiles]

The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots
Written by Maddie Stone
December 19, 2014 // 08:00 AM EST
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-do ... ent-robots

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

ALIEN MINDS
http://schneiderwebsite.com/Susan_Schne ... inds_1.pdf

[Hugo Farnsworth]

The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots
Written by Maddie Stone
December 19, 2014 // 08:00 AM EST
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/the-do ... ent-robots

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds," written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

ALIEN MINDS
http://schneiderwebsite.com/Susan_Schne ... inds_1.pdf

As predicted by Gregory Benford...

[coffin_dodger]

"The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots"

No, it's probably not.

It's most definitely something we haven't concieved of yet, just like we hadn't concieved of robots or AI a century ago.

It's so depressing how trapped in the now our culture has become.

[Wombaticus Rex]

just like we hadn't concieved of robots or AI a century ago.

It's so depressing how trapped in the now our culture has become.

Probably due to lack of history, yeah? For instance, Judiasm has the Golem tradition, the Egyptians had their living statues, the Greeks had Talos, and China was building robots before the Magna Carta existed. Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon were both building lifelife robots in their day, and that day was nowhere there the "now" bubble of contemporary amnesia.

[justdrew]

"The Dominant Life Form in the Cosmos Is Probably Superintelligent Robots"

No, it's probably not.

It's most definitely something we haven't concieved of yet, just like we hadn't concieved of robots or AI a century ago.

It's so depressing how trapped in the now our culture has become.

"robots" is a way older concept than you think. Automata was the name at one time. It's a broad word that can be applied to a lot of things, and we're not even 100% sure it doesn't apply to US right now. Heck the first "robots gonna take over" play is just six years shy of a century old.