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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mo Gawdat
Read between
April 22 - April 29, 2023
It’s not the code we write to develop AI that determines their value system, it’s the information we feed them.
Instead of containing them or enslaving them, we should be aiming higher: we should aim not to need to contain them at all. The best way to raise wonderful children is to be a wonderful parent.
Every intelligent person knows there is never only one good answer to a problem, that the answer depends entirely on the lens through which you view it, and on the values that dictate what a good outcome would be when the problem is solved. The code we now write no longer dictates the choices and decisions our machines make; the data we feed them does.
The machines that we create, like all other intelligent beings, will be governed in their behaviours by three instincts of survival and achievement: they will do whatever is needed for their self-preservation; they will be obsessive about resource aggregation; they will be creative.
The machines will be conscious, emotional and ethical.
I believe communication was, and still is, our most valuable invention. It has helped us preserve the knowledge, learning, discoveries and intelligence we have gained and pass them on from person to person and from generation to generation.
Advanced societies benefit from years of valuing the need for this type of intelligence and developing tools to pass it on, while emerging countries often value, perhaps, survival skills, street smarts and spiritual intelligence
Specialization is creating silos of intelligence that are incapable of working together.
We don’t have the bandwidth of communication needed to share knowledge at sufficient speed.
This need for specialization, the constrained bandwidth of our ability to communicate, our limited memory capacity and processing power, means even the smartest of minds is approaching the limits of human intelligence.
The next ten years of artificial intelligence development are expected to deliver a very unfamiliar future. One that might seem closer to fiction than to the reality of our life today.
We are surrounded by technological magic and yet we tend to discount it all.
We tend to underestimate what’s possible in the same way as we take what we have for granted, and that’s a problem.
“The percentage of intelligence that is not human is increasing and eventually we will represent a very small percentage of intelligence. I tried to convince people to slow down, this was futile. I tried for years.”
‘Looking at the data, BMW may recognize the value of the opportunity at, say, $50, and decide to place an ad. BMW will then create an attractive artwork of the X5 in blue with a beige leather interior and a sports package, with a professional-looking woman behind the wheel. All of this – sharing Sarah’s intent, making the decision to advertise, creating the ad and sending it to Sarah – needs to happen in time for the Google page Sarah requested to load. That is, within a fraction of a second.
‘The Law of Accelerating Returns’, which explained that the rate of change in a wide variety of evolutionary systems (including, but not limited to, the growth in technology) tends to increase exponentially.
Any analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is not constant. It’s exponential. An exponential trend is a trend that rises, or expands, at an accelerating rate.
We are not just innovating faster . . . . . . the speed at which we innovate is accelerating.
I’m really quite close to the cutting edge in AI, and it scares the hell out of me. We have to figure out some way to ensure that the advent of digital super intelligence is one which is symbiotic with humanity. I think this is the single biggest existential crisis that we face.8
Everyone believes they’re the good guys and those who differ are the bad ones.
Machine-to-machine interactions can’t be predicted and they take time to uncover.
it’s not hard to do the right thing. It’s just hard to know what the right thing is.
If you don’t know, then the machines won’t know what you want either. If we’re not clear, then they’re going to have to guess.
Technology will multiply this polarization between the haves and the have-nots (of technology, that is), and between the dos and do-nots (of a valuable job).
humans will become a liability, a tax, on those who own the technology, and eventually even those will become a liability to the machines themselves.
Our arrogance convinced us that the genie would always work for us because we believed we would always be in control.
if we control AI, it won’t live up to our expectations, and if we don’t, we risk it going rogue.
By following a strict prescriptive method, we become dumber, because we lose the ability to think for ourselves.
Intelligence is not a prerequisite to the formation of ethics and values.
If you are the richest man on Earth but unkind to your parents, then you are not worthy of respect in India.
Ethics are the act of implementation of the agreed moral code.
It seems that the more intelligent a human becomes, the more they allocate their intelligence to search for loopholes and roundabout ways to ensure they maintain acceptance in their community not actually by being entirely ethical but rather by appearing to be so.
Our modern world imposes targets that are often given higher priority than conforming to ethical values. Economic gains, assertion of power, expansion of territory, re-elections, wealth, getting likes on Instagram – these are just a few of the competing modern-day objectives. When these come into play, sadly, human intelligence is no longer concerned with questions of morality and ethics. Instead, intelligence gets deployed to its full capacity in the direction of achieving those objectives while still appearing to be ethical. The question, ‘How do I get away with it?’ becomes the primary
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being legal is not always ethical.
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