THE RECENTLY PUBLISHED Future of Life Institute (FLI) letter “Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence,” signed by hundreds of AI researchers in addition to Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, many representing government regulators and some sitting on committees with names like “Presidential Panel on Long Term AI future,” offers a program professing to protect the mankind from the threat of “super-intelligent AIs.”

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Which brings me back to the FLI letter. While individual investors have every right to lose their assets, the problem gets much more complicated when government regulators are involved. Here are the the main claims of the letter I have a problem with (quotes from the letter in italics):

– Statements like: “There is a broad consensus that AI research is progressing steadily,” even “progressing dramatically” (Google Brain signatories on FLI web site), are just not true. In the last 50 years there has been very little AI progress (more stasis like than “steady”) and not a single major AI based breakthrough commercial product, unless you count iPhone’s infamous Siri. In short, despite the overwhelming media push, AI simply does not work.

– “AI systems must do what we want them to do” begs the question of who is “we?” There are 92 references included in this letter, all of them from CS, AI and political scientists, there are many references to approaching, civilization threatening “singularity,” several references to possibilities for “mind uploading,” but not a single reference from a biologist or a neural scientist. To call such an approach to study of intellect “interdisciplinary” is just not credible.

– “Identify research directions that can maximize societal benefits” is outright chilling. Again, who decides whether research is “socially desirable?”

– “AI super-intelligence will not act with human wishes and will threaten the humanity” is just a cover for justification of the attempted power grab of AI group over the competing approaches to study of intellect.

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AI researchers, on the other hand, start with the a priori assumption that the brain is quite simple, really just a carbon version of a Von Neumann CPU. As Google Brain AI researcher and FLI letter signatory, Illya Sutskever, recently told me, “[The] brain absolutely is just a CPU and further study of brain would be a waste of my time.” This is almost word for word repetition of famous statement of Noam Chomsky made decades ago “predicting” the existence of a language “generator” in the brain.

FLI letter signatories say: Do not to worry, “we” will allow “good” AI and “identify research directions” in order to maximize societal benefits and eradicate diseases and poverty. I believe that it would be precisely the newly emerging neural science groups which would suffer if AI is allowed to regulate research direction in this field. Why should “evidence” like this allow AI scientists to control what biologists and neural scientists can and cannot do?

Ref: Google and Elon Musk to Decide What Is Good for Humanity – Wired