Concerned about the development of artificial intelligence created by him, Google is developing a "button" that can turn off AI in case of danger and threat to a person. This news, circulated by reporters in June 2016, added fuel to anxiety about the future relationships between robots and humans.
In 2016, authoritative Western publications reported that Google was developing a "big red button" designed to stop AI in the event that artificial intelligence threatens humanity. According to journalists, for this, specialists from the Google division - Deep Mind - have teamed up with scientists from Oxford University. £ 400 million has been allocated for research. “If the agent (AI) is working in real time under human control, the operator needs a big red button that can be pressed to prevent unwanted actions from the agent,” the online publications explain.
Earlier, indeed, a document titled "Safely Interruptible Agents" was posted on the Web. Its authors are Lauren Orso from Deep Mind and Stuart Armstrong from Oxford University. The document describes a possible future neighborhood of people with artificial intelligence, opposing the desires and aspirations of humanity like the fantastic Skynet and the Terminator. This does not seem crazy considering that not so long ago the oldest and largest American law firm Baker & Hostetler "hired" a robot lawyer to help with the proceedings. Artificial intelligence is powered by the IBM Watson supercomputer. As for Deep Mind, earlier the real news hero was the artificial intelligence developed by the company Alpha Go, which beat one of the strongest go players, Grandmaster Lee Sedol. This victory was the reason for a sharp boost by South Korea to develop its own artificial intelligence and allocate significant funds from the budget for this. It should be added that the head of Deep Mind, Demis Hassabis, urged people to be careful about the information released to the public. In his Twitter account, he noted that, despite rumors roaming the Internet, the company does not yet predict the future of Alpha Go artificial intelligence. “As we decide, we will make an official statement,” explained the head of the company.the company does not yet predict the future of artificial intelligence Alpha Go. “As we decide, we will make an official statement,” explained the head of the company.the company does not yet predict the future of artificial intelligence Alpha Go. “As we decide, we will make an official statement,” explained the head of the company.
European champion Fan Hui playing go / wikipedia.
Elon Musk: "We are already cyborgs"
Concern about upcoming complications in the relationship between robots and humans is growing. Moreover, it is the main adherents of scientific and technological progress who speak about this anxiety. For example, Elon Musk, who announced in August 2014 that artificial intelligence technology is "more dangerous than nuclear weapons." And a few months later, speaking to students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the creator of Tesla and SpaceX called AI "the greatest threat to our existence." At the same time, by the end of 2015, Musk himself co-founded the non-profit research company OpenAI, explaining its goal by the need to open the process of creating artificial intelligence. “If you have a 'button' that can do bad things in the world, you don't want to share it,” Musk explained.
At the end of May 2016, speaking at the annual Recode conference, Elon Musk talked about a certain project, or maybe just the idea of "neural lace", which should reduce the risk of humanity to become a favorite toy in the iron hands of robots. “For example, you have the limbic system, the cerebral cortex, and this is the third system, the digital layer that works well with your body. As the brain works in symbiosis with the limbic system, so this digital layer will work in harmony with the rest of the body,”said Musk. This neural system should increase the level of reception and transmission of information by a person, the ability to process it. “We are already cyborgs,” Musk said, explaining that the Internet, mobile phones and other gadgets, in fact, have developed superpowers in humans. “But we are limited in receiving and transmitting information. Especially in the program ",Musk added. People are able to receive and interpret a fairly large amount of information, but generating this information is much more difficult. A person can only speak quickly, write quickly or type. “Neural lace”, by connecting a person to a digital communication system, could overcome this biological limitation. Musk did not elaborate on whether this "lace" would be implanted into the body or grown naturally, such as through gene editing, but noted that it could pass "through veins and arteries" that provide pathways for neurons.could overcome this biological limitation. Musk did not elaborate on whether this "lace" would be implanted into the body or grown naturally, such as through gene editing, but noted that it could pass "through veins and arteries" that provide pathways for neurons.could overcome this biological limitation. Musk did not elaborate on whether this "lace" would be implanted into the body or grown naturally, such as through gene editing, but noted that it could pass "through veins and arteries" that provide pathways for neurons.
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However, there is also an opposite point of view. Alphabet (Google) chairman of the board of directors Eric Schmidt, in an interview with Tech Insider, was skeptical about the speeches of both Elon Musk and his colleague Stephen Hawking, who had also previously warned about the possible hegemony of AI. “Stven Hawking is certainly a genius, but he is not a computer expert. Elon is also a wonderful person, but he is also more of a physicist than a computer scientist,”said Schmidt. About a potential scenario of the future, in which robots destroy humanity, he stated the following: “Such a scenario simply describes the scenario in which computers become so smart that at some point, due to, say, a bug in the program, they decide to destroy humanity. My question for you is this: do you not thinkthat people will notice this and start shutting down computers? We will have a race between people turning off computers and AI frantically trying to move to a device that has not yet been turned off. And so on until the last computer. And we cannot turn it off. It's a movie, a movie. The current state of affairs in the world does not support such a scenario."
Large-scale robotization
Neil Jacobstein, co-chairman of NASA's Singularity University, told PCmag that global companies have invested more than $ 3 billion in AI research between 2011 and 2015. In addition to large investors, including Facebook and Google, there are also a number of lesser-known startups. For example, Brighterion is engaged in the use of artificial intelligence in cloud analysis and industrial IoT, Feedzai trains robots to detect fraud in banking transactions, Experfy uses AI to effectively solve business problems of merchants, and so on. That is, the scale of development of artificial intelligence in the world is now not limited to a dozen major players in the IT market - it is much larger. In his interview, Jacobstein essentially continued Musk's thought,also insisting on the need to develop the human brain to counter the synthetic. “We all have the same problems. The brain is limited in speed, memory, bandwidth and biases,”said Neil Yakobstein.
According to the scientist, the trend in the development of AI is now moving towards the creation of an artificial neocortex (a new cortex, which makes up most of the cortex in humans, in contrast to lower mammals) and the hippocampus. Thus, the robot's brain will be like a human, only many times more powerful and faster. “AI is becoming more powerful, and we need to decide how we will behave in the framework of the ongoing co-evolution. Both in terms of the tasks that we set for artificial intelligence, and in terms of how we want to build our relationships without losing human self-esteem,”explained Yakobstein. According to the scientist, initially, the interaction of humans and robots will be an "elite process", but then it will enter everyday life, like cell phones once did. “Through a smartphone, your brain gets access to all the knowledge of the world and powerful artificial intelligence,processing digital information. You already have a symbiosis with AI,”concluded Jacobstein.
Flesh of flesh
However, it may turn out that the threat to humanity will come not from a set of glands and wires, but from organic "flesh from flesh." At the end of May 2016, the world scientific community was intrigued by the past "secret meeting at Harvard", the participants of which want to create an artificial human genome and, accordingly, the person himself from scratch. The details of the meeting on the pages of Live Science were told by Harvard University graduate, molecular biologist specializing in gene editing, Jeff Bessen. As it turned out, we are not talking about some brainchild of Frankenstein. More than 130 scientists, industrialists and ethicists gathered at Harvard to discuss the Human Genome Project (HGP). The name is, in fact, a reference to a similar project,as a result of which in 2003 it was possible to completely sequence the human genome. That project began in 1990 under the direction of James Watson under the auspices of the US National Health Organization, and its goal was to determine the sequence of nucleotides that make up DNA and identify 20-25 thousand genes in the human genome.
The creation of the genome has its own history. In 2010, American biologist John Craig Venter deciphered the first genome of a microorganism - the bacteria Haemophilus influenzae - and announced the creation of an artificial cell. Venter introduced the world's first artificial organism, a synthetic bacterium named Cynthia. Since then, scientists have systematically tried to advance further in research, including the organizer of the Harvard meeting - American geneticist Jeff Bouquet, who was the first to create a functional eukaryotic chromosome contained in yeast.
However, such work comes at a cost. The creation of a synthetic bacterium for the same Venter cost more than $ 40 million and took years of work. Experts believe that under current conditions, the production of one human genome will cost about $ 90 million. However, if the business is “put on stream” and the proven technologies are applied, by 2036 this amount may be reduced to $ 100 thousand. In addition, there is an industrial problem - the capacity of all laboratories operating in the world, according to Jeff Bessen, today is not enough to create one human genome.
From learning to creating
As noted by Jeff Bessen, at the Harvard meeting, scientists called for a shift from reading the genome to creating it from the building blocks of DNA. As conceived by the masterminds of HGP, including geneticist George Church, his American colleague Jeff Bouquet and biotechnology lawyer at Autodesk Nancy Kelly, it is possible to "completely synthesize the human genome in a cell line." The process of creating artificial DNA, according to Jeff Bessen, is similar to the process of offset printing - the main thing is to put everything in the correct order. The result is chemically identical to the natural macromolecule. The world market for synthesized DNA (we are talking about the existing creation of individual DNA elements, not a complete genome) is now estimated at about a billion dollars a year. An artificial macromolecule has practical applications:this is the cultivation of human organs for transplantation, the creation of immunity to viruses, oncological diseases, the creation of new drugs and so on. Harvard attendees expressed the hope that their work will help "develop safer, less expensive and more effective therapy."
The secret halo around this meeting can be easily explained: the project is ethically complex enough, and it is not known how the scientists' ideas will be perceived by the general public. In particular, now the organizers have actually vetoed any comments regarding the meeting before the official publication of the meeting results.
There are really many questions for HGP. "How well will it be to study and then create the Einstein genome?" - Stunned bioengineer from Stanford Drew Andy. Dr. Church and bioengineer Andy, by the way, have been working together for a long time - together they created the company Gen9, whose specialization is clear from the name. Some experts believe that the participation of businessmen in the meeting and the alleged private funding of the project will ultimately lead to "the privatization of genetic modification technology." It has also been suggested that researchers are hatching underground plans to clone humans using synthetic DNA. According to Jeff Bessen, the chemical production of the human genome - the collection of genetic instructions contained in every cell - may indeed give new meaning to the term "test tube baby." “If such a technology existed,the genome of any person could be deciphered and then synthesized at the request of someone,”warns Bessen.
Clones from the future
The fear is not really unfounded. Chinese scientists, who presented a "clone factory" project at the end of 2015, later announced their readiness to clone people. China's Boyalife Group will build the world's largest cloning facility in collaboration with South Korea's Sooam Biotech Research Foundation and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Tianjin, North China. The volume of production of cloned cows, according to scientists, by 2020 will amount to one million per year. In the future, the "clone factory" also intends to engage in the production of racing horses and police dogs with specialized abilities (increased sense of smell and search). Another area of interest for the enterprise is the cloning of primates for medical experiments. Therefore, the statement of the management of the future factory about its readiness to move from primates to humans became logical.“The technology is already there. If it is officially allowed, I do not think that anyone will cope with it better than Boyalife,”Xu Xiaochong, executive director of the future factory, told reporters. He stressed that the company has not carried out any experiments in the field of human cloning.
And yet, despite the need to address ethical issues, according to Bessen, the creation of the human genome is still a pipe dream. “Today, there is no effective way to transplant an artificial genome into a human cell. Even the most impressive achievements in this regard, such as Dr. Bouquet's "yeast" project, are hundreds of times smaller in scale than the current challenge. Manufacturing the genome of the fruit fly or nematode is ten times easier and safer in terms of ethics, it can answer the same questions that they want to get by synthesizing the human genome,”the molecular biologist believes.
Harvard's "Last Supper", he said, exposed another problem in modern science - its conservatism. Journalists learned about the project on the Internet, in social networks. Official information has a long way to go. “Once my colleagues and I waited six months for the publication of the required scientific publication,” adds Bessen. According to the scientist, his colleagues now critically need to find a balance between the control of publications and the right of journalists to do their job, which ultimately affects scientific information.
Alexander Kornev