Is the Primary Intelligence on Earth Destined to be Artificial?

Geoffrey Hinton

"The existential threat is the one I've talked about the most, but that's not the most urgent part. I think surveillance is something to worry about. AI is going o be very good at surveillance." 

"I left Google because I was 75. I wanted a break and to watch a lot of Netflix. But also as I left Google, I figured I could just warn ... that in the long run, these things could get smarter than us and might go rogue."

"That's not science fiction like Aidan Gomez [co-fouunder of Cohere AI company in Toronto] thinks. that's real."

"[How can the world counter problems associated with AI?] For most things, I have no idea what they should do."

"[Governments must conduct large safety experiments since they're] the only thing powerful enough to make the big companies invest significant amounts of money."

"My suggestion was [in discussing how to 'build up resistance' to AI-generated material that spreads falsehoods] pay for a lot of advertisements where you have a very convincing fake video, and then right at the end of it say, 'This was a fake video'."

AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton

Hinton, right, helped develop neural networks with his University of Toronto graduate students, Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever. (The University of Toronto)

Geoffrey Hinton's opinions are generally speaking, important to a lot of people in the world of IT technology. The Nobel Prize of computing, the A.M. Turing Award was one of his recognition awards, given him in 2018 with Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun (who happens not to agree with the existential threat theory that is Hinton's pet project). Mr. Hinton recently delivered a 20-minute lecture at the Collision tech conference that took place in Toronto.

He is famous among his peers for the doomsday warnings he issues surrounding Artificial Intelligence. But for this occasion his spotlight shifted to an issue he described as imminently more pressing for humanity. He believes that surveillance is an overlooked issue, one that should be drawing concerned attention in that its use could be of valued assistance to authoritarian regimes to use and abuse its potential to enable them to retain power. He envisages few protections available against these regimes.

Beijing in particular is well known to have used AI for the singular purpose of spying on its vast population. He spoke on this occasion of the world being overdue in recognizing the threats associated with the increasing use of AI and its dangerous modifications, along with its growing 'intelligence' adeptness. At the conference he spoke of the rise of lethal autonomous weapons, not merely those already in their initial use, but more being developed to take full advantage of the technology's potential.

 

Military drones with a bombs at sunset (Getty Images/Anton Petrus)

 

Fake videos, corrupted elections, cybercrime and job losses, he asserted could all have the effect of increasing the widening gap between the world's wealthy and its poor. An 'alignment problem' exists owing to the fact that humanity finds it difficult to agree on what is promising and advantageous yet could also have unfortunate repercussions with the powerful technology in the wrong hands. He spoke of battle robots and the very existence of humanity being threatened as a result of AI.

The tech community is divided on these prognosticatians; some believing an existential crisis is a remote possibility the future will be able to deal with, while others feeling the fears of runaway AI will not materialize at all, since human ingenuity and intelligence will be capable of stopping AI's possible humanity-threatening features.

Geoffrey Hinton — a computer scientist known as 'the godfather of AI' — has stepped down from his role at Google and is warning about the potential dangers of a future in which artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence. (Submitted by Geoffrey Hinton)

Location! View! Security! Elegance! Prestige ....

"[Doomsday investors sell a] hypermasculine fantasy [that danger is approaching, and they will provide to those who can afford the comfort, the capability of saving their families from disaster -- should they care enough to make the choice]."
"Fear sells even better than sex."
John W. Hoopes, professor of anthropology, University of Kansas

"Our clients are sold on the unique advantage of having a luxury second home that also happens to be a nuclear hardened bunker."

"This aspect allows our clients to invest in an appreciating asset as opposed to an expense."

"Some people are worried about solar flares taking out the power grid. Some are worried about a dirty bomb or a pandemic, but it doesn’t matter what your threat scenario or ranking is, what matters is that this is a one-size-fits-all solution. ... Having a survival facility is certainly in vogue."

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"If you’re designed to withstand a nuclear explosion, you already get a lot of the other threats you can keep out. You get protection from things like meteors, comets, tornadoes, hurricanes, solar flares, civil unrest, global climate change, earthquakes, tsunamis."

"You can see the activity, you can see the wind turbines in the background on the hill [through CCTV. Psychologically, you don’t feel isolated. For all practical purposes, you couldn’t feel if you were on the surface or if you were 100 feet underground."

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d more here: https://www.kansas.com/news/local/article134892379.html#storylink=cpy

Larry Hall, condominium developer, Survivor Condo, Kansas

Courtesy of Survival Condo Project

Prepared to live 61 meters underground? Has Larry Hall got the luxury condominium unit for you! He's got the goods if you've got the lucre. These are condominiums with high ceilings and spacious living rooms. Amenities? a swimming pool, saunas, movie theatre. No worries, really, should the apocalypse ring in the new year -- or for that matter any year. He's got it all covered in his converted nuclear missile vault that is now a luxury condominium, 15 stories in height. Hard to see that height in the landscape, though. It's all underground.

He's a doomsday capitalist, like other new real estate developers who have realized that the thrill of knowing something very, very bad is in the future for humankind and short of establishing a colony on Mars which would take some time and some doing, the alternative would be to burrow underground, like a mole. The concept is not particularly new. Generations of Americans have built fallout shelters. Remember the Cold War? And the fears surrounding Y2K and basement supply caches?

Living room includes a live video feed of the world outside. K,Burgess The Wichita Eagle

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Well, now we have these wonderful new Doomsday Paradise sites. Want to be ahead of the game in this multimillion-dollar business? Feel like escaping from the inevitable-seeming potential of climate change, terrorism and other threats to human health and longevity? The choice is yours -- grab for it!

The military in its wisdom spent billions of dollars in the construction of nuclear warheads, hiding them in underground lairs in one site after another during the Cold War. Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and New Mexico were favoured sites. They've since been decommissioned. The Cold War fizzled. Of course it's returned and so have many other unfavourable-to-peace-and-life situations. Which is the point, after all; evading them entirely, as a  practical and attractive alternative to becoming a victim of 'circumstances'.

In the Survival Condo where apartments begin at $1.3 million, there is a dozen apartments to choose from. Oh, and a monthly fee of roughly $2,600. In this place where visitors enter the complex through a concrete dome. The apartments sit below, stacked, fifteen stories of them. Add to that the additional lifestyle conveniences such as digital screens in place of windows, to emulate the 'outside'. There's a dog park, where dogs can be dogs.

Full floor units cost $3 million, half floor units $1.5 million. K. Burgess The Wichita Eagle

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There are storerooms for food storage. A swimming pool, did we mention the swimming pool? The building has been outfitted with five air filters, a well has been drilled to the nearby aquifer. Diesel generators are in play, alongside a wind turbine and a battery bank for backup power. No worries, none whatever.

Originally the site was outfitted to house an Atlas-F missile. Its warhead infinitely more powerful than the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki. Oh, not to worry, it's no longer there. Apartments are, condominium apartments. Nifty, huh? The U.S. military spend millions to build this vault, and when it was sold in 1967 the new owners paid just over $3,000 for it. And then there was a succession of handovers to other owners, with the price steadily rising, until Mr. Hall bought it. And spent $20 million remodelling it.

If the facility ever went on lockdown, children would have to attend classes four hours each day in this classroom in the Survival Condo facility. Katherine Burgess The Wichita Eagle

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Larry Hall is an entrepreneur's entrepreneur, a man excited by possibilities, and willing to take risks because he so enjoys the opportunity to enhance and enrich peoples' lives. What could be more enhancing and attractive than selling not only a home, a lifestyle, but an assurance of avoiding disaster where others cannot? All it takes is some forethought and lots of money. The money is a piffling consideration, since after all, what's a life worth?

So excited is he over future prospects that he is busy building another, larger condominium project. A second Kansas vault, three times larger as the first experimental one keeps him busy, very busy.
The 'end' could arrive at any time, and there is so, so much to get done, to be able to offer assurances and luxury and leisure -- peace of mind! -- to people deserving of it. Evidently every time North Korea explodes another missile, enquiries about new condos come pouring in....

An armed security guard stands by an armored Pit-Bull VX outside the Survival Condo complex. Katherine Burgess The Wichita Eagle

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