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Comment How do you make friendly AI? (Score 2) 311

by jrincayc (#53808691) Attached to: Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns?

The problem is that we don't know how to make friendly AI. As in at some point, Artificial Intelligences will be able to beat humans at any task, at which point, how do you make sure that they don't destroy humanity (possibly through indifference). Even if you don't care about humanity, how do you make sure they do something interesting with the universe?

Various articles:
Stuart Armstrong's book Smarter than us discusses what happens when machines are smarter than humans:
https://intelligence.org/smart...
http://jjc.freeshell.org/Smart...
Bill Joy's article Why the Future doesn't need us on the dangers of robotics:
https://www.wired.com/2000/04/...
Tim Urban's article on superintelligence:
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/...
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/01/...
AI

Are Gates, Musk Being 'Too Aggressive' With AI Concerns? (xconomy.com) 311

Posted by EditorDavid from the welcome,-robot-overlords dept.
gthuang88 reports on a talk titled "Will Robots Eat Your Job?" Bill Gates and Elon Musk are sounding the alarm "too aggressively" over artificial intelligence's potential negative consequences for society, says MIT professor Erik Brynjolfsson. The co-author of The Second Machine Age argues it will take at least 30 to 50 years for robots and software to eliminate the need for human laborers. In the meantime, he says, we should be investing in education so that people are prepared for the jobs of the future, and are focused on where they still have an advantage over machines -- creativity, empathy, leadership, and teamwork.
The professor acknowledges "there are some legitimate concerns" about robots taking jobs away from humans, but "I don't think it's a problem we have to face today... It can be counterproductive to overestimate what machines can do right now." Eventually humankind will reach a world where robots do practically everything, the professor believes, but with a universal basic income this could simply leave us humans with more leisure time.
AI

Elite Scientists Have Told the Pentagon That AI Won't Threaten Humanity (vice.com) 169

Posted by BeauHD from the nothing-to-see-here-move-along dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: A new report authored by a group of independent U.S. scientists advising the U.S. Dept. of Defense (DoD) on artificial intelligence (AI) claims that perceived existential threats to humanity posed by the technology, such as drones seen by the public as killer robots, are at best "uninformed." Still, the scientists acknowledge that AI will be integral to most future DoD systems and platforms, but AI that could act like a human "is at most a small part of AI's relevance to the DoD mission." Instead, a key application area of AI for the DoD is in augmenting human performance. Perspectives on Research in Artificial Intelligence and Artificial General Intelligence Relevant to DoD, first reported by Steven Aftergood at the Federation of American Scientists, has been researched and written by scientists belonging to JASON, the historically secretive organization that counsels the U.S. government on scientific matters. Outlining the potential use cases of AI for the DoD, the JASON scientists make sure to point out that the growing public suspicion of AI is "not always based on fact," especially when it comes to military technologies. Highlighting SpaceX boss Elon Musk's opinion that AI "is our biggest existential threat" as an example of this, the report argues that these purported threats "do not align with the most rapidly advancing current research directions of AI as a field, but rather spring from dire predictions about one small area of research within AI, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)." AGI, as the report describes, is the pursuit of developing machines that are capable of long-term decision making and intent, i.e. thinking and acting like a real human. "On account of this specific goal, AGI has high visibility, disproportionate to its size or present level of success," the researchers say.

Comment Re:How much longer before Wikipedia supports MP3 ? (Score 1) 140

by jrincayc (#53278489) Attached to: Red Hat Announces Fedora Will Support MP3 Playback

How many more years until Wikipedia supports MP3 ? They don't give a damn about everyone being able to use their website right now. Will it change?

They are working on it, but probably will wait until encoding is also patent free. See https://phabricator.wikimedia.... and https://phabricator.wikimedia....

Submission + - Redhat Declares MP3 Decoding allowed in Fedora

Submitted by jrincayc
jrincayc writes: On the fedora legal mailing list Tom Callaway wrote:
"Red Hat has determined that it is now acceptable for Fedora to include MP3 decoding functionality (not specific to any implementation, or binding by any unseen agreement). Encoding functionality is not permitted at this time. "
https://lists.fedoraproject.or...
Christian Schaller announced on the gnome blog:
"You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media. "
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus...
Security

Someone Is Learning How To Take Down the Internet, Warns Bruce Schneier (schneier.com) 237

Posted by msmash from the storm-is-coming dept.
Some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them, says Bruce Schneier. He adds that these attacks are of much larger scale -- including the duration -- than the ones we have seen previously. These attacks, he adds, are also designed to test what all defense measures a company has got -- and they ensure that the company uses every they have got, leaving them with no choice but to demonstrate their defense capabilities to the attacker. He hasn't specifically shared details about the organizations that are under attack, but what little he has elaborated should give us a chill. From his blog post: [...] This all is consistent with what Verisign is reporting. Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there's a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains. Every quarter, Verisign publishes (PDF) a DDoS trends report. While its publication doesn't have the level of detail I heard from the companies I spoke with, the trends are the same: "in Q2 2016, attacks continued to become more frequent, persistent, and complex." There's more. One company told me about a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services. Who would do this? It doesn't seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do. Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering. It's not normal for companies to do that. Furthermore, the size and scale of these probes -- and especially their persistence -- points to state actors. It feels like a nation's military cybercommand trying to calibrate its weaponry in the case of cyberwar. It reminds me of the US's Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.
Google

Ray Kurzeil's Google Team Is Building Intelligent Chatbots (theverge.com) 98

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'm-feeling-lucky dept.
An anonymous reader quotes an article from The Verge. Inventor Ray Kurzweil made his name as a pioneer in technology that helped machines understand human language, both written and spoken. In a video from a recent Singularity conference Kurzweil says he and his team at Google are building a chatbot, and that it will be released sometime later this year... "My team, among other things, is working on chatbots. We expect to release some chatbots you can talk to later this year."

One of the bots will be named Danielle, and according to Kurzweil, it will draw on dialog from a character named Danielle, who appears in a novel he wrote -- a book titled, what else, Danielle... He said that anyone will be able to create their own unique chatbot by feeding it a large sample of your writing, for example by letting it ingest your blog. This would allow the bot to adopt your "style, personality, and ideas."
Kurzweil also predicted that we won't see AIs with full "human-level" language abilities until 2029, "But you'll be able to have interesting conversations before that."
Google

Don't Use Google Allo (vice.com) 127

Posted by msmash from the privacy-bloodbath dept.
At its developer conference on Wednesday, Google announced Allo, a chatbot-enabled messaging app. The app offers a range of interesting features such as the ability to quickly doodle on an image and get prompt responses. Additionally, it is the "first Google" product to offer end-to-end encryption, though that is not turned on by default. If you're concerned about privacy, you will probably still want to avoid Allo, says the publication. From the report: Allo's big innovation is "Google Assistant," a Siri competitor that will give personalized suggestions and answers to your questions on Allo as well as on the newly announced Google Home, which is a competitor to Amazon's Echo. On Allo, Google Assistant will learn how you talk to certain friends and offer suggested replies to make responding easier. Let that sink in for a moment: The selling point of this app is that Google will read your messages, for your convenience. Google would be insane to not offer some version of end-to-end encryption in a chat app in 2016, when all of its biggest competitors have it enabled by default. Allo uses the Signal Protocol for its encryption, which is good. But as with all other Google products, Allo will work much better if you let Google into your life. Google is banking on the idea that you won't want to enable Incognito Mode, and thus won't enable encryption.Edward Snowden also chimed in on the matter. He said, "Google's decision to disable end-to-end encryption by default in its new Allo chat app is dangerous, and makes it unsafe. Avoid it for now."
Botnet

This Unusual Botnet Targets Scientists, Engineers, and Academics (zdnet.com) 67

Posted by BeauHD from the unusual-suspect dept.
schwit1 quotes a report from ZDNet: A botnet and cyberattack campaign is infecting victims across the globe and appears to be tracking the actions of specially selected targets in sectors ranging from government to engineering. Researchers from Forcepoint Security Labs have warned that the campaign it has dubbed 'Jaku' -- after a planet in the Star Wars universe because of references to the sci-fi saga in the malware code -- is different to and more sophisticated than many botnet campaigns. Rather than indiscriminately infecting victims, this campaign is capable of performing "a separate, highly targeted operation" used to monitor members of international non-governmental organizations, engineering companies, academics, scientists and government employees, the researchers said. The findings are set out in Forcepoint's report on Jaku, which outlines how of the estimated 19,000 unique victims, 42 percent are in South Korea and a further 31 percent in Japan. Both are countries and neighbors of North Korea. A further nine percent of Jaku victims are in China, six percent in the US, with the remainder spread across 130 other countries.

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