Along with self-driving cars, Watson’s Jeopardy win shows that, given enough time, a team of AI engineers has an excellent chance of creating a specialized system which can outpace the best human expert in a much wider variety of tasks than we might have thought before.
The capabilities of such a team has risen dramatically since I first studied AI. Charting and forecasting the capabilities of such a team is worthwhile.
Having an estimate of what such a team will be able to accomplish in ten years is material to knowing when they will be able to do things we consider dangerous.
After those two demonstrations, what narrow projects could we give a really solid AI team which would stump them? The answer is no longer at all clear. For example, the SAT or an IQ test seem fairly similar to Jeopardy, although the NLP tasks differ.
The Jeopardy system also did not incorporate a wide variety of existing methods and solvers, because they were not needed to answer Jeopardy questions.
In short order an IBM team can incorporate systems which can extract information from pictures and video, for example, into a Watson application.
Bostrom’s wonderful book lays out many important issues and frames a lot of research questions which it is up to all of us to answer.
Thanks to Katja for her introduction and all of these good links.
One issue that I would like to highlight: The mixture of skills and abilities that a person has is not the same as the set of skills which could result in the dangers Bostrom will discuss later, or other dangers and benefits which he does not discuss.
For this reason, in the next phase of this work, we have to understand what specific future technologies could lead us to what specific outcomes.
Systems which are quite deficient in some ways, relative to people, may still be extremely dangerous.
Meanwhile, the intelligence of a single person, even a single genius, taken in isolation and only allowed to acquire limited resources actually is not all that dangerous. People become dangerous when they form groups, access the existing corpus of human knowledge, coordinate among each other to deploy resources and find ways to augment their abilities.
“Human-level intelligence” is only a first-order approximation to the set of skills and abilities which should concern us.
If we want to prevent disaster, we have to be able to distinguish dangerous systems. Unfortunately, checking whether a machine can do all of the things a person can is not the correct test.