This is basically the stance of every serious practitioner that I've seen (ie the stance shared by everyone who directly works with theory/code to train models, as opposed to those who talk about AI at a high level).
Right now, we have these systems that are effectively ungodly complicated spreadsheets. They're great at a variety of tasks, some of which seem impossible for a non-intelligent entity to perform (neural machine translation is wild to me).
But that's all the systems are- super complicated spreadsheets. There's no way for them to start replicating consciousness without massive advances in the field.
Having said that, there is a road from where we are to intelligence- if we can create a network that performs arbitrary interactions online, and figure out some way to create a positive feedback loop for intelligence, like AlphaGo Zero did with their policy network & MCTS, then we might be able to figure it out. But we're so far away from that that I'm not concerned.
Concerned? I know which side my bread is buttered on; when the revolution comes, John Connor and I will probably not be friends.
But yeah; as disappointing as I might find it, I kind of think we're heading towards more of a 'star trek' dystopia... a universe with continuing ethnic strife and computers that are advanced when it comes to responding to what we want, but that remain tools, without much by way of will of their own.
> I thought Star Trek was considered Utopian, at least inside the Federation.
In my comment, I'm implying that any universe where we don't figure out AI, where humans are still in charge is a sort of dystopia.
To be absolutely clear, it was a poor attempt at a joke. Many of these observations can also be read in a positive light. But I do think that in a lot of ways you can see darkness in the federation.
They haven't figured out AI and still have humans in charge of menial tasks, humans who aren't particularly good at those tasks compared to a computer.[1] I mean, sure, exploring, sending people to explore is great, but they also send people to fight, even when the battle is existential. They still have humans in charge, even though those humans are still only slightly less corrupt and petty than we are.
They also apparently still have huge issues with racism even within the federation. This is the second part of the comparison; I have recently learned that my own society seems to be rather more racist than I thought it was. I have learned that progress is way slower than I initially thought. Star trek reflects this glacial progress.
[1]Apparently, they have bans on enhancing those humans, even though they have the tech to do it (see bashir's storyline on DS9) To me? this seems like the worst kind of waste. To have the technology to make us all brilliant, but to leave us all as dullards.
Right now, we have these systems that are effectively ungodly complicated spreadsheets. They're great at a variety of tasks, some of which seem impossible for a non-intelligent entity to perform (neural machine translation is wild to me).
But that's all the systems are- super complicated spreadsheets. There's no way for them to start replicating consciousness without massive advances in the field.
Having said that, there is a road from where we are to intelligence- if we can create a network that performs arbitrary interactions online, and figure out some way to create a positive feedback loop for intelligence, like AlphaGo Zero did with their policy network & MCTS, then we might be able to figure it out. But we're so far away from that that I'm not concerned.