You are great, and so is your name.

I was expecting way, way more "but Skynet" comments here. The fact that so many commenters have a clear-headed perspective on AI, and what AI safety actual means, is fantastic. Good to know the reporters I'm attacking are being read with the proper amount of skepticism. I really think the stubbornly fearful need to come to terms with their SF consumption, and how Hollywood has every reason to present more apocalyptic AI scenarios than beneficial, or even neutral ones. And apart from SF, where are you getting your facts? What are your theories based on? If it's from stories and journalists who aren't putting in the work, and are clearly just focusing on the wacky end-times outcomes, then you're just plagiarizing from the long history of evil robot fiction. Also, remember that Musk is not a computer scientist, and does not work with AI. I'll post about this soon, but his claims that Vicarious is actively safeguarding against bootstrapped AI are false, based on statements from Vicarious' own founders. Even brilliant minds can be embarrassingly wrong.

Damn well put. AI is too complex to understand without a ton of study, so the assumption is always that general AI is right around the corner. Same with Jetpacks, flying cars, private space, and everything else that might turn life into the cover of a SF paperback.

Agreed. Seems pretty goofy to assume not just superintelligence, but clannish machine malevolence. Seems way more useful to work in concert, and eventually integrate.

This system works very differently, though. In a way, Watson is aiming for a more intellectual goal, a kind of evidence-based cognition. And in Watson's most useful applications, it grinds through data, and spits out possible answers and conclusions for review by humans. Robo Brain doesn't care about creating human-digestible conclusions or advice. It's translating human-speak, basically, into robot action, machine-readable results that tell bots how to physically perform certain tasks.

Yeah, I've made it my mission to try to tamp down the general hysteria, when it comes to coverage of really interesting robotics projects. But I spent a solid hour writing and deleting stupid SF-fueled intros to this story. It feels like a movie—not a very good one—that's on the verge of writing itself. Like all you'd have to do is give it the wrong chunk of data culled from the internet, and it would mobilize a machine army that *only* knows how to commit atrocities.

Force-feeding was a bit of a silly choice, on my part, but something about the process felt similar. It's not like they unleash Robo Brain on the internet, and let it hoover up whatever it pleases (and bully for that, given what's on the internet). They also don't let the machine filter out topics that it doesn't care for. So if we're going to anthropomorphize this system—which, of course we are, since we're a narcissistic species—it seems more like the Gluttony victim from Se7en than a willing participant.

Hopefully it'll become enamored of those hot ladies w/ guns videos, and direct all of its replicants to saunter into battle, hip-firing in their bikinis.

Awesome. It does make me wonder whether the various researchers watch any of the videos in their entirety, before feeding them into Robo Brain. I should have asked the guy I spoke to.