The New York Times has a pretty good piece today about the recent history of AI development among Silicon Valley techbros. (With the exception of a couple of brief asides, not a single woman is mentioned in the story.) I enjoyed reading it even though I'm already fairly familiar with this stuff.
My favorite anecdote is a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist and founder of DeepMind:
Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. Dr. Hassabis replied that the plan would work — so long as superintelligent machines didn’t follow and destroy humanity on Mars, too. Mr. Musk was speechless. He hadn’t thought about that particular danger.
Dude! Fred Pohl wrote a whole novel about precisely that in 1976. It won a Nebula Award!
Admittedly, you were only five years old then, but still. It's a pretty famous book in the kingdom of the nerds. Everyone knows that killer robots are going to follow us into space.
Isn't a homicidal AI robot accompanying us on an interplanetary space voyage one of the major plotlines of 2001: A Space Odyssey?
I thought Musk was one of the bozos who claim we need MORE people. Am I wrong?
I believe Musk is one of those people who thinks we need more of the RIGHT kind of people, for example, more people who literally share some of Musk's DNA. This implies either that Musk's sperm be introduced to a lot more "birthing vessels," or that we need a lot fewer non-Musk relatives on earth. Both thoughts are really disgusting for the non-eugenicists out there.
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Not exactly - but HAL had been given some incompatible instructions at the beginning of the original mission that slowly corrupted his responses. This came out in the Space Odyssey 2010 sequel.
I'd say that was one of the early warnings of the dangers of giving conflicting instructions/imperatives to an AI. Which is pretty much what it can and has done to a lot of humans.
That meathead doesn't really ever think about anything deeply. If he did, he'd realize his plan requires killer robots - both to protect him as god emperor of Mars, and to ensure resupply.
He cannot survive alone. No one can. You need an industrial base and people who know how to use it to provide the inputs to the inputs to everything he needs to keep breathing.
And he's such an insufferable prick that he can only survive that sort of environment as a tyrant. Which requires a gun to everyone else's head, including those who could starve him by withholding resupply.
Operation Martian Douchebag requires killer robot martial law.
Of course robots will take over in space and on most other planets. They don't need air, water or dirt, just a source of energy.
Presuming robots are made of matter and not magic, they will indeed require some form of air, water, or dirt, in addition to energy.
And why does a robot need air, water or dirt?
I'm sure Elmo saw one or all of the Terminator movies or any of the Matrix movies, or Star Trek TOS "Intimate Computer or I Mudd. Killer robots taking over is common Sci Fi theme. Unfortunately, reality of this may show up in some form, sooner than we expect.
"And why does a robot need air, water or dirt?"
Because it is constructed of matter? Probably matter in an arrangement more complex than that of a human, or at least significantly more complex than, say, a car or an airplane or a power grid. Which, unless we are talking magic here, requires mining and manufacturing and manipulator capability to build, and raw materials that said mining, manufacturing, and manipulating can use to build the robot.
I would assume a robot would run on electricity, which can be obtained via sunlight, wind, etc, and not "foodstuffs". Also, it would have no need to breathe, and in fact, oxygen is very corrosive.
Repair and reproduction are separate items from just "living." And you don't need a life-capable full planet with an atmosphere to mine for minerals. See "asteroids, iron-nickel" and "comets, water".
Look, I'm not arguing that a robot would need to eat "foodstuffs", just making the (what I thought was fairly obvious) point that a robot would have to be constructed of matter, and not merely "energy" as skeptonomist above seemed to imply.
Nope. Being able to reproduce is part of the definition of living. This is literally grade-school biology.
Made of is easy, since I think from your language that you are talking about building AIs - at least if the AIs are on Earth. Once they launch - they have VAST advantages over meatbags in space or on the surface of Mars. (well assuming "real" AIs not yet in evidence.
Consider an AI Hitler who does not need oxygen to breathe, nor human food. Survival of standard organic life is not a concern. On a resource level, it's ability to build superior space travel tech would be much less constrained than even Musks' most fevered imaginings.
Satellites and space probes already exist without air, water or dirt, and some of them (Voyager I and II) have been operational since the 1970s without access to new air, water or dirt. (I'm not sure if some residual air, water or dirt is trapped inside them, but they certainly haven't acquired more of it on their journeys.) If they can survive a half-century without new air, water or dirt being introduced to them, it seems robots could do so too.
Killer robots won't necessarily follow us to Mars when they'll have all of outer space to stomp around in. They won't obviously need a planet where they'd have to bother about landing and blasting off again. That humanity may not be able to leave Mars may be the bigger issue.
Killer robots may make it a priority to kill or enslave humans. So if Mars is where the humans are in space, they may want to crash the party.
If robots would want to get near enough to a planet of flailing and erratic, inept organisms playing let's make a deal with one another and anything else that comes along.
They don't need to "get near" a planet. Just divert a convenient asteroid (they're everywhere) or two or three to slam into the target planet. Near-instant extinction of most everything.
Bastard robots.
Let Musk go to Mars. He can read the books along they way.
I'm less afraid of super-intelligent robots on Mars than I am of super-stupid people here on Earth.
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I'm surprised I could find the emoji button!
Windows key and ; key together does it every time.
superintelligent robots are already well on their way to obliterating homo sapiens
they're doing it by propagating the conservative fantasy that poisoning the atmosphere with co2 is a good thing, actually
you naively thought it was the oil companies doing that?
exactly what the AI wants you to think
Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth.
There isn't a single danger to human life on Earth that couldn't be solved with fewer resources than it would take to create a self-sustaining colony anywhere else in the universe.
For those who are interested I highly suggest A CITY ON MARS by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith, which goes into great depth about how stupid an idea trying to colonize mars is.
The tldr; it is way way harder than Antarctica or the Sahara and it is unlikely that we could do anything to make the entire earth worse than those places.
Still there is something for keeping Elon in the dark. He seems to be pretty good at spinning off progress in various areas by being too naive about the problems with his ideas.
Right?! Until there is some sort of break through in matter transformation (making shit on Mars) or fuel cheat code (boosting shit to Mars), we aren't going to Mars to stay.
i mean, VERY famously, Battlestar Galactica was about killer robots following humans EVERYWHERE
Frak.
Mars is already the only planet populated entirely by robots.
🙂
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I believe I am echoing Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but the entire thing is moronic as there is no conceivable scenario including climate change, nuclear war, or asteroid strike that would make Mars more inhabitable for humans than earth is. Maybe in 5 billion years after the Sun expands but it for sure isn't happening in Elon Musk's lifetime.
The idea is that people like Musk will loot the Earth of its last remaining resources and fuck off to Mars while the rest of us knife each other. The idea isn't so much that Mars itself can be made more habitable than Earth, but that Musk and his elect can build a utopian society there while the rest of us burn.
Yes. As has been so often said, the cruelty is the point.
This. For the billionaire fcks out there, having a Martian outpost is all about just squirreling away all the resources from Earth and then not worrying about whatever they establish out there being sustainable long term... as long as it gets all used up after their personal life expectancy has ended.
IIRC the AI strapped to his back used magnetic core memory. Hey, 1976.
the idea that the likely failure point for musk's mars colonization plan is an AI machine attack seems laughably, absurdly stupid.
This whole conversation is weird.
But kind of cool, right?
This conversation is so funny. Just like something out of Big Bang Theory. They have a great idea then one of them says you forgot about the killer robots. Oh yeah, the killer robots. LOL.
I'd imagine there's a lot of things Musk hasn't thought of before.
+1
"a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis, a neuroscientist and founder of DeepMind"
Right? And two tech bros confidently imagining his colonization plan will succeed is just the icing on the cake.
Musk will have his brain frozen. AI will defrost it to steal the data and plant it into a wholly biomechanical body, but with new programming to be a slave to the Bots. A butler, specifically, during the evenings and otherwise a peon during his daily chore of upkeep of Bots.
It's far more likely that he has his brain frozen and then the company storing it goes belly up and his brain is prematurely defrosted when they don't pay their power bill (or the power utility goes bankrupt too or the infrastructure fails or whatever)... and his brain ends up in a dumpster somewhere.
especially if the company is one he was running.
"Everyone knows that killer robots are going to follow us into space."
Oh. I thought they were going to precede us into "space" and then lie in wait to ambush us.
You'd have to go interstellar to seriously reduce the risk of killer robots getting you off-world, and even then it's a big question mark.
That said, we haven't seen any other killer robot swarms out there or in our solar system, so that's heartening - if there are any other alien civilizations in our galaxy, they didn't unleash those.
Assumes we can see alien robot tech. Perhaps it's all nanotechnology disguised as lifeless bits of sand or what we call "meteor fragments" or whatever...
To say nothing of Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" stories.
Elmo finds out:
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"Mr. Musk explained that his plan was to colonize Mars to escape overpopulation and other dangers on Earth. "
Wait, what? I thought Elon Musk was leading some sort of initiative for people to breed more: “If people don't have more children, civilization is going to crumble,” was the quote, I think.
Musk thinks both that (1) the right kinds of people (such as his descendants) needed to preserve civilization aren't breeding enough and (2) the wrong kinds of people (such as basically all poor/middle class people and people of color) are breeding too much and will use up all the resources before the right kinds of people manage to hoard them all. (That last part - the wrong people getting all the resources the right people want/need/deserve is the "other dangers on Earth" that Musk is referring to.)
I was 16. But I've also managed to overlook this nebua-award winning novel my entire life. Thanks for the reference!
Aha! I see I've got a copy in my collection! And also its sequel, "Mars Plus." Time to re-read them.
I thought underpopulation was why Musk was dropping so many children. Maybe it's just white asshole underpopulation.
We're not going to Mars, except in robot form. It cannot be terraformed.