What’s Next for Artificial Intelligence
One of the most striking things about this piece is the difference between the claims of AI practitioners and pundits.<p>LeCun and Ng are making precise, and much more modest, claims about the future of AI, even if Ng is predicting a deep shift in the labor market. They are not treating strong AI as a given, unlike Bostrom and Nosek.<p>Bostrom&#x27;s evocation of &quot;value learning&quot; -- &quot;We would want the AI we build to ultimately share our values, so that it can work as an extension of our will... At the darkest macroscale, you have the possibility of people using this advance, this power over nature, this knowledge, in ways designed to harm and destroy others.&quot; -- is strangely naive.<p>The values of this planet&#x27;s dominant form of primate have included achieving dominance over other primates through violence for thousands of years. Those are part of our human &quot;values&quot;, which we see enacted everyday in places like Syria.<p>Bostrom mentions the possibility of people using this advance to harm others. He is confusing the modes of his verbs. We are not in the realm of possibility, or even probability, but of actuality and fact. Various nations&#x27; militaries and intelligence communities have been exploring and implementing various forms of AI for decades. They have, effectively, been instrumentalizing AI to enact their values.<p>Bostrom&#x27;s dream of coordinating political institutions to shape the future of AI must take into account their history of using this technology to achieve dominance. The likelihood that they will abandon that goal is low.<p>Reading him gives me the impression that he is deeply disconnected from our present conditions, which makes me suspicious of his ability to predict our long-term future.