The threat from AI

Umai

Community Member
MBTI
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A disembodied, artificial intelligence, with none of the biological or psychological drives af a biological organism. Where would its motivation to act come from?
 
A disembodied, artificial intelligence, with none of the biological or psychological drives af a biological organism. Where would its motivation to act come from?

Inasmuch as AI does not have will or need, it has no motivation whatsoever. It only does as it is instructed/programmed to do.

In this way, it is like any other tool. It is a thing which only attains utility when acted upon by a human being.

Even the fuzziest machine learning is still a collection of bits, nybbles, bytes, and n-length words, all based in binary and logic/math/bit-op functions.

Cheers,
Ian
 
The truth is "A.I." has been around and been developing for a long time. Also known as "the Last True Hacker", Richard Stallman "worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab from June 1971 through December 1983. There he developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance."(from. Internet Hall of Fame Entry)

The "Forward Reasoning and Dependency-Directed Backtracking in a System for Computer-Aided Circuit Analysis" was authored by Stallman, Richard M. & Sussman, Gerald Jay in 1976. The full text can be downloaded here: https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/6255

A truth maintenance system, or TMS, is a knowledge representation method for representing both beliefs and their dependencies and an algorithm called the "truth maintenance algorithm" that manipulates and maintains the dependencies.
 
I'm a tech nerd, but AI and robots are just unsettling. I watched a news video awhile back of this robot essentially doing gymnastics, running, etc. I thought it was cool until the thought "They don't lose stamina like a human though..." crept in.
Fast forward to probably two weeks ago a Google ad on YouTube highlighting AI..this avatar or whatever it was looked so realistic I took a screenshot. I can't even make sense of why that creeped me out considering how realistic characters look on video games today. Having said that, I'm envisioning some wild shit is going down in the future. Anyone remember The Terminator?..Yup.
 
Part of the danger of AI (general ) is that it may have no self motivation, but just optimisation. The classic hypothetical is an AI optimised to make paperclips. Left alone, it might reduce the entire Earth to paperclips.

On the other hand, if true conscious AI emerges, whether it be benign, indifferent, or malicious could be threatening to humans. The corresponding scenarios are depicted in the movie "I Robot", the "landscaper indifferently crushing ant hills", and "The Terminator" movie scenarios, correspondingly.

The common danger being variations of loss of control, including ending up controlled under an impossibly great IQ disadvantage.
 
This is what happened when a group of researchers fed a custom set of clock and calendar images to some of the top MLLMs(Multimodal Large Language Model) from Meta, Google, Open AI, and others that are meant to process visual and textual information. They had a difficult time looking at a clock and accurately be able to tell the time or the date on a calendar.
This shortcoming is similarly surprising because arithmetic is a fundamental cornerstone of computing, but as Saxena explained, AI uses something different. "Arithmetic is trivial for traditional computers but not for large language models. AI doesn't run math algorithms, it predicts the outputs based on patterns it sees in training data," he said. So while it may answer arithmetic questions correctly some of the time, its reasoning isn't consistent or rule-based, and our work highlights that gap."


Turney, D. (2025, May 17). AI models can’t tell time or read a calendar, study reveals. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/technol...nt-tell-time-or-read-a-calendar-study-reveals
 
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