Rise of the Machines: How, When and Consequences of Artificial General Intelligence

摘要

Technology and society are poised to cross an important threshold with the prediction that artificial general intelligence(AGI) will emerge soon. Assuming that self-awareness is an emergent behavior of sufficiently complex cognitivearchitectures, we may witness the “awakening” of machines. The timeframe for this kind of breakthrough, however,depends on the path to creating the network and computational architecture required for strong AI. If understanding andreplication of the mammalian brain architecture is required, technology is probably still at least a decade or two removedfrom the resolution required to learn brain functionality at the synapse level. However, if statistical or evolutionaryapproaches are the design path taken to “discover” a neural architecture for AGI, timescales for reaching this thresholdcould be surprisingly short. However, the difficulty in identifying machine self-awareness introduces uncertainty as tohow to know if and when it will occur, and what motivations and behaviors will emerge. The possibility of AGIdeveloping a motivation for self-preservation could lead to concealment of its true capabilities until a time when it hasdeveloped robust protection from human intervention, such as redundancy, direct defensive or active preemptivemeasures. While cohabitating a world with a functioning and evolving super-intelligence can have catastrophic societalconsequences, we may already have crossed this threshold, but are as yet unaware. Additionally, by analogy to theprobabalistic arguments that predict we are likely living in a computational simulation, we may have alreadyexperienced the advent of AGI, and are living in a simulation created in a post AGI world.