the approaching limits of artificial intelligence

[billy rubin]

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59810383

Amazon has updated its Alexa voice assistant after it "challenged" a 10-year-old girl to touch a coin to the prongs of a half-inserted plug.

The suggestion came after the girl asked Alexa for a "challenge to do".

"Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs," the smart speaker said.

Amazon said it fixed the error as soon as the company became aware of it.

The girl's mother, Kristin Livdahl, described the incident on Twitter.

She said: "We were doing some physical challenges, like laying down and rolling over holding a shoe on your foot, from a [physical education] teacher on YouTube earlier. Bad weather outside. She just wanted another one."

[hermes2015]

The ideal of implementing Asimov's laws will probably fail as AI becomes more advanced, particularly when it becomes self-aware.

[billy rubin]

within this last year an arab nation loosed full automatonic killer drones on combatants in the saudi peninsula.

i cant remember which state it was, but tbe full auto attack was a first.

not asimov-like at all.

[billy rubin]

dammit

libya

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/01/1002196245/a-u-n-report-suggests-libya-saw-the-first-battlefield-killing-by-an-autonomous-d

What's new about the incident in Libya, if confirmed, is that the drone that was used had the capacity to operate autonomously, which means there is no human controlling it, essentially a "killer robot," formerly the stuff of science fiction.

[Davin]

I've been saying it for a while, since the start of machine learning, that we have to cool our expectations. I mean, we had a good leap forward with the machine learning pattern, and that was treated like it was a ramp up to real AI, but it was really just a new tool the helped make a few specific use cases easier. Too many people bent their needs towards the pattern instead of seeing how the pattern would be useful to their needs. It happens every few years, NFTs are the new overused and less useful than advertised technology. After a year the hype will die down and it will fall largely into the areas where it's most useful instead of so many people trying to fit their thing into the new tech.

A bit ranty, sorry.

[Bluenose]

I have long felt that AI, in the sense of true intelligence is nowhere near as close as many people think.  I will be unimpressed until and unless the machine can understand natural language, a feat which is as far away as it has ever been.  Sure, you can "talk" to Siri, or Google to accomplish certain things, but that process is simply pattern recognition, there is no actual understanding going on.

As for autonomous armed drones I have long been an opponent of such devices.  First, I am opposed to the use of lethal force in almost all situations anyway and secondly no automated system can possibly weigh up all the circumstances in a given situation in order to make a morally acceptable decision.