The Bhavana Society Theravadins (roughly "Tradition Of Elders") in High View, West Virginia take ordinations. Theravadins keep the earliest known Pali Sutta scriptures. It is its own idiom but surprisingly similar to Stoic philosophical traditions with a Orthodox Ladder of Divine Ascent group study and meditation regimen. Great life option for long lived calmer wiser folks who do not want to raise families and enjoy reading nonfiction.
Bees, ants, and other social insects have complex societies with division of labor. One difference is that in insects, the roles are probably more hard-wired and instinctual while in humans these roles are more malleable and depend on culture.
Elon Musk had a thought provoking take on this question. I'll roughly summarize, and add some nuances he didn't mention. He was speaking to a room full of state governors, most of whom seemed fairly unconvinced by his concerns.
He said that he didn't believe his example was real, but that it was illustrative.
Consider an AI whose goal is to maximize stock market returns. So this AI ingests vast sums of historical data, of all kinds, and it considers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_Air_Lines_Flight_007 where the Soviet Union shot down a Korean Air Lines 747 in 1983 when it deviated slightly from its path from Anchorage to Seoul and entered the edge of Soviet protected airspace. About the same time, there was a nearby US aerial reconnaissance mission.
This event greatly increased tensions during some of the worst years of the cold war, and as a result, certain kinds of stock market issues moved in certain directions.
Considering this incident, and the state of the world in 2014, the AI takes three actions:
1. Buys/shorts the same and/or related stocks, as applicable.
2. Creates some fake intelligence chatter, consumed by the Russians, that where was going to be an areal target of interest over east Ukraine on a certain day and time. The location and direction would not clearly match known commercial airline flights.
The result? Another civilian airliner was shot down by the Russians, which increased global political tensions, and probably caused some stocks to move in relatively predictable ways. In this example, the AI met the goal it was given in an exceedingly unexpected and unpleasant way.
This is clearly NOT an end of the world scenario, and is a hypothetical.
But it is, in my mind, illustrative of some of the dangers of AI. Systems that can do powerful, unpredictable things in order to meet mundane and reasonable goals.
Hmm but we could program some laws like no hurting humans, or any other living being, that cannot be overridden ? Of course there will be always bad guys that will use AI for bad things, or their AI won't have trouble with living victims, but they will never have resources to power strong enoguh AI that can hack airlines, generate chatters and stuff like that. Doubt any nation or big company will be able to that in 50 years or even more.
Imagine this AI had access to the internet (after all, it'd be using cloud resources). Suppose it was smarter than the smartest human ever. I'm not that smart, and here's some things I can think it could do that would be scary:
- Find security holes in all computer systems, then replicate itself onto vulnerable systems
- Intercept, fake, modify phone calls (including between government members)
- Procure large amounts of money and then pay people to execute its bidding
- Make itself more intelligent
But again, it'd be smarter than me, so these ideas I just came up with in the 5 minutes since I saw your question wouldn't hold a candle to theoretical worst case.
Yeah, our weapons are really destructive now, but AI like that won't have mercy. If any nation fires nukes and nuclear war starts there is no way in practice all of the human race will wiped out, in theory yeah and then it doesn'matter who fired them, but that is only in theory.
