AI Can Now Self-Reproduce—Should Humans Be Worried? | Eric Weinstein | Big Think

AI Can Now Self-Reproduce—Should Humans Be Worried?
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Those among us who fear world domination at the metallic hands of super-intelligent AI have gotten a few steps ahead of themselves. We might actually be outsmarted first by fairly dumb AI, says Eric Weinstein. Humans rarely create products with a reproductive system—you never have to worry about waking up one morning to see that your car has spawned a new car on the driveway (and if it did: cha-ching!), but artificial intelligence has the capability to respond to selective pressures, to self-replicate and spawn daughter programs that we may not easily be able to terminate. Furthermore, there are examples in nature of organisms without brains parasitizing more complex and intelligent organisms, like the mirror orchid. Rather than spend its energy producing costly nectar as a lure, it merely fools the bee into mating with its lower petal through pattern imitation: this orchid hijacks the bee's brain to meet its own agenda. Weinstein believes all the elements necessary for AI programs to parasitize humans and have us serve its needs already exists, and although it may be a "crazy-sounding future problem which no humans have ever encountered," Weinstein thinks it would be wise to devote energy to these possibilities that are not as often in the limelight.
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ERIC WEINSTEIN:

Eric Weinstein is an American mathematician and economist. He earned his Ph.D in mathematical physics from Harvard University in 1992, is a research fellow at the Mathematical Institute of Oxford University, and is a managing director of Thiel Capital in San Francisco. He has published works and is an expert speaker on a range of topics including economics, immigration, elite labor, mitigating financial risk and incentivizing of creative risks in the hard sciences.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Eric Weinstein: There are a bunch of questions next to or adjacent to general artificial intelligence that have not gotten enough alarm because, in fact, there’s a crowding out of mindshare. I think that we don’t really appreciate how rare the concept of selection is in the machines and creations that we make. So in general, if I have two cars in the driveway I don’t worry that if the moon is in the right place in the sky and the mood is just right that there’ll be a third car at a later point, because in general I have to go to a factory to get a new car. I don’t have a reproductive system built into my sedan. Now almost all of the other physiological systems—what are there, perhaps 11?—have a mirror.

So my car has a brain, so it’s got a neurological system. It’s got a skeletal system in its steel, but it lacks a reproductive system.So you could ask the question: are humans capable of making any machines that are really self-replicative? And the fact of the matter is that it’s very tough to do at the atomic layer but there is a command in many computer languages called Spawn. And Spawn can effectively create daughter programs from a running program.

Now as soon as you have the ability to reproduce you have the possibility that systems of selective pressures can act because the abstraction of life will be just as easily handled whether it’s based in our nucleotides, in our A, C, Ts and Gs, or whether it’s based in our bits and our computer programs. So one of the great dangers is that what we will end up doing is creating artificial life, allowing systems of selective pressures to act on it and finding that we have been evolving computer programs that we may have no easy ability to terminate, even if they’re not fully intelligent.

Further if we look to natural selection and sexual selection in the biological world we find some very strange systems, plants or animals with no mature brain to speak of effectively outsmart species which do have a brain by hijacking the victim species’ brain to serve the non-thinking species.So, for example, I’m very partial to the mirror orchid which is an orchid whose bottom petal typically resembles the female of a pollinator species.

[MusixProu]

His steady eye contact and lack of neurotic movement makes me feel at ease. I like this man.

[antoniolewis]

Parasitic computer programs which prey on more intelligent people?
You mean clickbait?

[silvanapopa]

Wanna bet the guy has been waiting a long time to name something "outtelligence"? I like him anyways.

[RasmusSchultz]

I had to laugh pretty hard at the comparison of spawn() to replication - it's not replication in the biological sense, it doesn't create new silicon, more memory, or more computing power. If you must compare with a biological event, a self-spawning AI program is perhaps more comparable to a multiple personality disorder ;-)

[aarongrooves]

The title does not match the content. Related, yes, but definitely clickbait. Thumbs down...

[matthewd]

His brother is Bret Weinstein the Biology professor at Evergreen College who was attacked by students demanding him to leave because he is white.

[rodojeda]

This has already happened. Early farming cultures had a much less interesting, probably less fulfilling and certainly less healthy life than neighboring hunter gatherers. Humans lost 6 inches in average height after the switch to agriculture (look this up). Why would human's give up the far more egalitarian, exciting and nutritious life of a hunter-gatherer for the back-breaking labor, frequent famines and harsh authoritarianism of early farming cultures? Without any understanding of what they were doing of course. One seemingly innocuous step at a time, from identifying edible wheat, to gardening, to seasonal farming, to full time agricultural oppression. And then of course the die was cast. Paradoxically, though their lifestyle was worse, farming cultures could support more populous and organized, and therefore more powerful cultures than hunter-gathering.
The truth is that brain-less wheat, (and other agricultural crops, most notably grains) domesticates US, using our own brain. We now plant them everywhere, and protect them from insects, drought, etc.
In the long run, agriculture brought sophistication, civilization and good lifestyles. But it took arguably until after the industrial revolution for our modern lifestyle to be better than that of successful hunter-gatherers, and then even then only for the affluent.
This process is occurring now for a second time. Research shows a very clear correlation between time spent on Facebook and feelings of loneliness and unhappiness. Before the digital age, the most common number of "close friends" for americans surveyed was 3. Now it is 0. But in the short run, Facebook has made its creators billionaires, it's employees well off, and a lot of people entertained. The internet age made our world more connected, perhaps more "civilized", even as it has probably had a negative effect for well-being on a holistic sense. I couldn't live without it, and definitely couldn't work without it. We have been domesticated, and there is no going back. The first step is acceptance.

[Captain_Tumbleweed]

Humans shouldn't worry... All is going to plan >:‑)

[drankmaker]

Let's all be honest with ourselves.. AI robots are the next step in human evolution. We get sick, they don't. We lose a limb, they can replace them. We can't really survive in space, they can. Let's just accept our fate.

[rece]

Everyone: Ai will become self aware

Animals: are we a joke to you?

[darkracer]

I'll be afraid of AI when new long lasting batteries are invented.

[danievdw]

The huge problem with AI is this, as soon as you make something as intelligent as humans, the entire human race MUST be ready to accept and treat them as equals. Now we can't even tolerate ourselves. Until we become more enlightened, we will always look at a Terminator / Blade Runner / endless other AI movies ending. Elons Musk is correct again, that AI should already be closely followed and heavily regulated.

[shunyaku]

Yeah, sure, just put the warning and concept on the INTERNET so our future robotic overlords have time to prepare! GOOD JOB GUYS!

[thstroyur]

It seems to me this is gonna be a probem only if we ever design code/machines w/ the appropriate specs and leave them 'out there', w/o monitoring/interference of any kind; who the hell wants to do that?

[Jacen]

"Life, Uh, finds a way" - Dr. Ian Malcolm

[majnuni]

Years ago, Norbert Weiner from MIT, suggested we should be worried about at least two events that took place; One was, the point in which technology became cybernetic, taking in data as feedback and altering behavior from it and two: when we could no longer make the technology we were using, it was all products, offspring you might say, from earlier technology, now needed to create the present forms, a lineage.
Weiner was the one who coined the term and wrote the book on Cybernetics. He also gave the parable of the Monkeys Paw that gave whatever one wished for, but at a cost and in the story, the man gets the money he asks for but the workers from the factory come to his house with the exact amount only to tell him they took a collection at the factory for his son who had been killed. ( not a bad metaphor, even the factory part).
Based on years or reflection on Weiners comments in the 60's I can only react when I hear of AI: Are you kidding me?... what do you thinks happening? it's here !, look around and ask who and what is in charge here and what is so completely dominating our experiences? We may have had taken part but really, honestly, only reacted, like children enchanted by what was being demonstrated with the tech and then obediently doing more for it and so forth or the stereotyped primitive fascinated by the trinkets and stuff from the developed world. The cartoon of the darkened room and the door slightly opening and the computer speaking: "Ahaa here comes my slave!" So the pumped up sophisticated, complicated talk about AI, well, the tech itself could be chuckling at the ignorance of being so engaged and caught up with with something already leading and drawing them on even more. The real, not artificial intelligence, but human is one asking what is it we really need for fulfillment, peace and happiness?

[michaelpalmer]

I say fuck it I'd rather be governed by a computer than a corrupt politician

[Astraeus..]

It's way past the time to be worried. What we should be focused on now is making it an integral part of the A.I directive to make sure that it only kill us in the most painless and humane way possible. We can't stop the outcome, but that doesn't mean we can't try to make it a little less unpleasant.

[AZaqZaqProduction]

I only hope that one day I can get my car pregnant. One day...

[BrianFaure]

When he says "spawn" is he referring to "fork"? I've never come across a "spawn" command