What are your thoughts about the movie ExMachina?

While watching a show last night about auto's that drive them self I wondered if self driving cars might not help human beings to re-think how they think about  building AI robot's.

It's interesting to look at the process from a new angle once someone thinks about the whole thing from a not so usual way to assembling differently than what once was a common way of building them.Havent seen this movie yet, but watched the trailer..

Biggest concern with AI is it will eliminate jobs. I started off in electronics in the early 1990s and got into automation and control systems. These all were based on repetition for manufacturing mostly which no problem there, manufacturing has been this way of using machinery to reduce manufacturing costs for a long time.

However my job was outsourced outside the USA to cheaper employment after being there for almost 7 years and doing very well at your job. Reason we were all told was for the company to become more competitive and to increase the profits which will in turn make the stock holders happy.

Well if AI comes along to handle tasks that normally humans are required for, now you can work towards even lesser dependency on humans to work and they can work around the clock, and not have a constant heavy cost on the shoulders of a company to pay wages, instead there would be a heavy initial cost which is the same with any manufacturing plant with automation and then quickly if successful products are manufactured the cost of the machinery and AI automation pays itself off. Now you have even lesser humans working for the company, yet human population is ever increasing.

Jobs that are the easiest to automate are the first to go... so Truck Drivers, Bus Drivers, Cab Drivers, and the such. Food stores already have self checkouts, but an AI monitors for theft instead of a human to oversee it, or even better the cost of RFID drops to pennies and you go in, grab items off the shelf and load up your cart and as you walk down an check out lane, every RFID within a small perimeter crys out its ID and a fast AI register system works with you to tell you how much and any coupons and you pay and then your cart goes to an automatic bagger. In one side loose items and out the other side bagged items ( hopefully the eggs and bread not on the bottom ) 

As AI gets better more and more of the easier duty jobs are replaced and unemployment rises. People go back to college to try to better themselves but the market is flooded for dentists and doctors. And forget being a lawyer, lawyers have been replaced with Watsons that can piece together which ever is best for a client for whichever defense or claim there is and very little margin for error. The judges also replaced by AI in which whatever is deemed fair rides ( as long as there is no corruption )

It becomes an endless cycle of elimination until you end up with what is best shown on the movie Wall-E. A bunch of lazy people dependent on AI and Automation. The captain on the ship is even pointless in that movie as for the AI could do without him but that wouldnt make for a good movie watching a pile of lazy people being served by technology almost completely dependent on it for their own survival because of lazyness and greed.

And then the danger of skynet if the AI turns. Elimination of the human race and creation of a technological electromechanical race which is better fit for LEAVING the planet and working without air and environmental extremes. It can take forever to get from point A to point B for a ship of AI robots but it doesnt matter. When they get to their destination they take ownership of whatever land it is and like ants build a colony and replicate and move boulders etc over and over again not caring.

An AI race should also have the ability to adapt fast and creatively make changes to its racial existance as needed, more durable, faster, stronger, etc.

It comes down to the fact that if we are ever able to make a human like AI that can make decisions and be creative and its not regulated to minimize the negative impact it would have. Then the human race will force itself into self inflicted obsolescence.

Would the AI robot race be intelligent enough to not create something that creates self inflicted obsolescence for itself. Well what does it matter for us, we wouldnt CARE, we would all be long gone the way of the dinosaurs as part of the planetary evolution of life. At what point does AI and robotics become life? In college I had a professor that SAID that even fire is a living thing, while it exists that is. Given food ( fuel ) air (oxygen to turn fuel into energy output) it works changing the food/fuel into something else, it replicates itself to get bigger which both makes it stronger but also leads to its extinction when it uses up all the fuel or oxygen and burns out.Now taking that to the far, far side....
Imagine that more humans are out of work....
Imagine that more humans go hungry....
Imagine Humans can not afford to raise children..
Imagine the Human Population dwindles down to a few thousand...

Now imagine millions of Auto Trons with nothing to do!   
ha ha ha geek that was good.  I think the idea that AI will eliminate jobs is ridiculous on the one hand, and irrelevant on the other.

When it comes to AI being involved, we're talking about jobs that cannot be automated- we're not talking about, say, assembly line robots, who perform the same repetitive task, replacing a human and doing the work faster, and more efficiently. We're talking about trying to replace the decision making process of a human with an AI.

That seems reasonable, until we remember that the most advanced AI systems we have today have the decision making ability and comprehension of a 4-year-old.

Let's take some examples here.

Loss prevention officer. They usually watch security cameras and look for people shoplifting, and detain them.

I don't think any of these decisions can be made by an AI. First, the task of actually seeing when a customer is taking something from the store is not an easy one to process. The AI would have to keep track of countless variables. That person is going into the changing room- when they come out their shoes are different, or they are wearing a different shirt. Or they are wearing the same clothes but don't have the ones they took into the fitting room. How can it come to the decision? It can't. It could say that it suspects that customer of shoplifting, but additional information is needed and honestly a lot of what is involved in that sort of job requires a fair bit of SOCIAL awareness and the ability to recognize social behaviour patterns that can vary from individual to individual. Such an effort to replace it with Artificial intelligence would likely hit many roadblocks, not the least of which would be the enforcement Roomba tazing a pregnant woman for stealing a medicine ball from the sporting goods section, or maybe it breaks a toddlers arm "detaining" her because it saw the child put a candy bar in her pocket when her mother wasn't looking. I don't know about anybody else but I would argue that glorified Roomba's going around breaking the arms of small children is not something we should be working towards even temporarily. I don't want to read news articles about such an even going "Well, I know this is tragic, but as you can see, we've come a long way. It's no longer breaking their necks! Let's have a moment of silence for the 2078 Preschool AI massacre"

Not that those sorts of things don't happen with people. But the important factor there is that somebody can be held responsible. You can't sentence an AI to community service. It's an AI. It's not going to understand anything except that which it was programmed for. It won't understand that it was bad. It won't "feel" ashamed. it won't feel anything. For any normal person breaking a toddler's arm for any reason is going to be a critical turning point in their life. For an AI, it will just be Tuesday.

AI can replace very simple decisions- we've had AI for years in tasks such as deciding whether a Tomato is ripe, or grading eggs. But we're nowhere near the level of having an AI replace real, human decisions involving people.

Also, regarding the depiction of AI in movies. Hollywood cannot even get today's technology right. an Artificial Intelligence turning on it's creators makes a great plotline. That's really all that matters. At this point most of the "AI will destroy us all" talk seems about equivalent to Y2K. Back them people attributed computers with a level of intelligence they didn't have. There were articles explaining that aircraft's on-board computers would see it was 1900 because the date switched wrong, and then the plane would intentionally take control from the pilot and crash the plane because it would know it isn't supposed to exist. That's pretty much what happens when laypeople who barely understand how to save a word processor document start theorizing about neural nets.Wow, that went to places I didn't expect, very interesting. That said I wonder if AI'S aren't thought about in the eye of the creator; "human like" would probably be the starting point, to do human like activities and to work seems like a given. But is that all there is?
One way to consider CREATING a human like AI is to go about it from the subractive side of the creation meaning there are aspects that we do not want the creation to posess so we start by thinking of what it will not be.
That said when reading religious accounts of creation, man is spposidly created in the image of god. It seems to me that our ego would more than likely start there so like God we would more than likely start with the additive side and there in lies the problem. It's, like knowing all that is wrong with human beings we would still start with creating it like we are now. Not so sure that would be such a good thing.

There's another movie I just watched called " Lucy ". In this movie a girl is abducted and cut open to smuggle drugs across international borders. The drug is a " nootropic " aka a  " smart drug ". Long story short, the bag breaks inside of her and she gets real smart very quickly. She figures out how human thinking holds humanity back which made a lot of sense to me and in an obscure way applies to this discussion. If we start out with erroneous data then the end product will have errors.
Humans need to get their head on straight before they create a Frankenstein monster in the dorm of an AI
Quote from: Kryptonite on June 15, 2016, 08:14:26 AM

when reading religious accounts of creation, man is spposidly created in the image of god. It seems to me that our ego would more than likely start there