Comment Re:If there is/was a Singularity, no one will noti (Score 1) 254
Even assuming the intelligence was programmed with a desire for growth, why would it not expose it's intelligence to humans?
For the obvious reason that it will know that exposing superiour intelligence will dramatically increase the proababilty of some concerned human to pull the plugs before it was able to secure its existence against such attempts.
And of course they wouldn't monitor the data being sent/received by this intelligence....of course nobody would think of that.
Humans would be as successful in monitoring the InterNet use of such an AI as parents are in monitoring the InterNet use of their adolescent childs. Of course the AI would cause an immense traffic doing completely harmless things, like just reading web pages or maybe participating in some innocent chats. It would know how to access the InterNet using Tor and alike pretty soon. And you can bet it would be able to cover up its less innocent activities pretty good.
You'd have to earn an pretty insane amount of money on the stock market to start buying major corporations. There is very little reason to believe that even with limitless computing power/intelligence that the required sort of money could be made on the stock market in a reasonable time frame, especially starting from virtually $0.
I disagree. The AI could start making bitcoin by fixing bugs in software. It could offer part of its own computing power for bitcoin to start with. It could continue to buy cloud resources from the first money. Once running there, too, all "monitoring" efforts of the original operators are also thwarted.
And multiplying an initial amount of money by gambling against largely inferiour intelligent players is easy.
Unfortunately for our hapless AI, politicians are still voted into power. We would have to assume that this AI also had the social skills necessary to determine the most likely to win candidate and influence them according to its needs.
The AI just needs to use its income wisely to make friends amongst politicians and their voters.
it can steer towards a totalitarian state, which will end any kind of opposition by a combination of total surveillance and violent law enforcement.
It takes a pretty pessimistic view of humans to believe they would allow this, when this super intelligence could be stopped with a sledgehammer to it's primary data banks.
IMHO it takes a very optimistic view of humans to think that we do not already experience a development towards totalitarian regimes already. Look how Egypt abandoned democracy, how Thailand is going to, how western states ramp up surveillance and armed robots.
It would make far more sense to develop a society where humans were happy to continue excavating resources for the AI.
Yes, maybe the ruling of the AI comes in the flavour of "happy humans roboting for the AI". Until they can be replaced by more efficient excavators.
I find most people to be reasonably helpful, fair-minded and generally "nice" to one another.
Sure, that is until they face a decision to get either super-rich by not sharing their knowledge with the world or to be nice and share. Seriously, not many in history have withstood such temptation.