Science Alert September 18, 2022
Considering recent advances in machine intelligence, several scientists, philosophers, and technologists have revived the discussion about the potentially catastrophic risks entailed by such an entity. An international team of researchers (Spain, Germany, USA – UC San Diego, Chile) traced the origins and development of the neo-fear of superintelligence, and some of the major proposals for its containment. They argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself. Turing’s halting program centers on knowing whether a computer program will reach a conclusion and answer (so it halts), or simply loop forever trying to find one. Any program written to stop AI from harming humans and destroying the world, for example, may reach a conclusion (and halt) or not – it’s mathematically impossible for us to be sure either way, which means it’s not containable. It may sound like fiction but according to the researchers there are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned it…read more. Open Access TECHNICAL ARTICLEÂ