What I mean is, you can think of an AI system as a tool, like a hammer or a chainsaw or a screwdriver or a featherduster.
It's created with certain goals in mind, to solve a problem.
There may be side effects that are dangerous, but I don't see those dangers as being any different from any other tool.
The assumption seems to be that an AI system will somehow transcend the purposes for which it was built, or that we will seek to build a replicant, in the sense of literally reproduce a human in silico.
That goal seems kind of unrealistic to me, because it doesn't accomplish anything, because we already have humans.
However, people do all kinds of things that don't make sense--but then that is a problem with the humans designing the AI, not the AI per se.
I'm probably not explaining myself well, but basically I think whenever you create something (as opposed to it randomly evolving), it has a purpose. That purpose constrains the design and/or affords constraints. To the extent the maldesign comes about, though, that is a problem with the designer and not the design.
I guess I just don't see super AIs coming about and deciding humans are worthless, unless humans design them that way, in which case that's a human problem, not a design problem.
Humans are self-interested because that's how we evolved. AIs would come about because we created them to do something. If we choose to design them to do something malicious, it has to be a reflection of our malice, not the AI.
More directly to your question, the vulnerable server isn't the danger, it's the hackers who hack it. That's not to say that there shouldn't be security concerns, but to me it is a different use of the term "safety," closer in meaning to "vulnerability." People aren't talking about vulnerabilities or errors in AI, because that's just a computer bug-vulnerability problem. They're talking about AIs being a threat themselves.
Honestly, I think these kinds of fears are misguided at a certain level. What you need to be worrying about is regulation and/or incentivization of human behavior, not AI design.
Why?
Because typically people design things to solve a problem, and those problems have constraints. Your automatic vacuum cleaner wouldn't try to kill you because it wouldn't be equipped to do so, and to the extent that it might be potentially deadly, it would be treated as an extension of pre-existing problems (e.g., robotic lawn mowers can be deadly as a side-effect, but so can mowing your lawn with an old-fashioned gas mower).
Underlying these fears I think are two classes of problems:
1. The idea of a general-purpose AI. The problem with this is that this probably won't happen except by people who are interested in replicating people, or as some sort of analogue to a virus or malware (where rogue developers create AI out of amusement and/or curiosity and/or personal gain and release it). I would argue then the question is really how to regulate the developers, because that's where your problem lies: the person who would equip the vacuum cleaner with a means of killing you.
2. Decision-making dilemmas, like the automatic car making decisions about how to exit accident scenarios. This is maybe trickier but probably boils down to ethics, logic, philosophy, economics, and psychology. Incidentally, I think those areas will become the major focus with AI in dealing with these problems: the technical issues about hardware implementation of neural nets, DL structures, etc. are crazy challenging, but when they are developed, I think the solutions about making AI "safe" will be "easy". The hard part will be the economics/ethics/psychology of regulating the implementations to begin with.
I feel like The Google Memo has become this kind of litmus test for understanding workplace social dynamics, and ironically, is one of the reasons for emphasizing things like diversity, etc.
The reason this person was fired was not because of the argument they outlined, but because they communicated this position via a long, widespread memo without appreciating the ramifications of doing so. The "hostile workplace environment" part isn't the argument per se, it's the fact that they're asserting this very publicly in a decontextualized way.
The employee could have written a 20 page memo about coffee being poisonous, and how it shouldn't be allowed at Google functions, with all sorts of scientific support they marshaled, and if they sent it out in the same way I guarantee that they would get checks on their "socially incompetent and unpleasant to work with" list, even if they wasn't outright fired for doing so.
Now, instead of coffee, you're talking about gender and sex, where there are people in the workplace who have reason to feel threatened. This doesn't mean those women are correct, or that the memo-writer's position is incorrect, but that writer distributing that memo in that way shows a lack of appreciation for social behavior.
Add to this that Google is a private company, and that employee is asking to be fired.
It's really simple: they could have kept the same opinions, and brought them up at specific times, with a limited subset of people, when it was practically relevant--such as when discussing a specific hire, or when the topic is being discussed with a limited number of need-to-know people.
Frankly, this is a time when I think how you talk about minorities in the workplace does matter. It's not thinking there shouldn't be quotas that's the problem, it's how you bring that up.
It's created with certain goals in mind, to solve a problem.
There may be side effects that are dangerous, but I don't see those dangers as being any different from any other tool.
The assumption seems to be that an AI system will somehow transcend the purposes for which it was built, or that we will seek to build a replicant, in the sense of literally reproduce a human in silico.
That goal seems kind of unrealistic to me, because it doesn't accomplish anything, because we already have humans.
However, people do all kinds of things that don't make sense--but then that is a problem with the humans designing the AI, not the AI per se.
I'm probably not explaining myself well, but basically I think whenever you create something (as opposed to it randomly evolving), it has a purpose. That purpose constrains the design and/or affords constraints. To the extent the maldesign comes about, though, that is a problem with the designer and not the design.
I guess I just don't see super AIs coming about and deciding humans are worthless, unless humans design them that way, in which case that's a human problem, not a design problem.
Humans are self-interested because that's how we evolved. AIs would come about because we created them to do something. If we choose to design them to do something malicious, it has to be a reflection of our malice, not the AI.
More directly to your question, the vulnerable server isn't the danger, it's the hackers who hack it. That's not to say that there shouldn't be security concerns, but to me it is a different use of the term "safety," closer in meaning to "vulnerability." People aren't talking about vulnerabilities or errors in AI, because that's just a computer bug-vulnerability problem. They're talking about AIs being a threat themselves.