How far fetched is Skynet?

[mistercrabby]

Autonomous, sapient computer systems didn't originate with the Terminator film. It's been a staple of speculative fiction, notably with 2001: A Space Odyssey and the positronic "brain" in robots.

What would it take to really make "Skynet" a reality?

What pieces of that do you see in the world today?
(autonomous vehicles like drones and google cars, Big Blue, Stuxnet, etc)

What's the "tipping point" or final piece?

How do we control it? Would we know in time?

 

[angminas]

Computers will never actually become self-aware and truly hate us or plot our downfall...but, with our massive dependence on electricity and electronics, if the wrong bits meet the wrong bytes, it could be hard to tell the difference.

 

[Ken g6]

I would say that if an AI wants to exterminate humanity, it needs to be able to maintain and repair itself and all the systems it depends upon. And we don't have any robots with the mobility and dexterity to do that right now, right?

Oh, wait.

Uh, oh.

 

[ViperXX]

Why do they always want to destroy us? Why can't they love us? Just not a big rubber dildo in our asses kind of love.

 

[Jeff7]

Computers will never actually become self-aware and truly hate us or plot our downfall...but, with our massive dependence on electricity and electronics, if the wrong bits meet the wrong bytes, it could be hard to tell the difference.

Why not? The human brain is also a computer. It just uses organic cells to store and process data.

It's "unique" and "individual" and "imaginative" in part because it's good at losing and messing up stored information.

Why do they always want to destroy us? Why can't they love us? Just not a big rubber dildo in our asses kind of love.

US = heavily-militarized culture. (Everything's a "war" or something. Even working on things like disease or poverty: "WAR" on poverty.)

Another thought on it: The military would love to have robots that can be used to kill people.
It's like having a kid, training him all his life to be an efficient killer, but then everyone acts all astonished when he...starts killing [the wrong] people.
He's doing what he was raised to do.
Same with sophisticated robots, with some manner of AI. Build them to be killing machines, and they might start doing what they were built or trained to do.
Surprise and amazement follows.


Japan: My understanding is that robots are often heroes in movies. Work is done to build robots to help their aging population in residences. Gentle, benevolent helpers.

 

[angminas]

Why not? The human brain is also a computer. It just uses organic cells to store and process data.

It's "unique" and "individual" and "imaginative" in part because it's good at losing and messing up stored information.

So a digital computer is comparable to a human brain because it's fundamentally different in a number of ways?

Gotcha.

 

[Jeff7]

So a digital computer is comparable to a human brain because it's fundamentally different in a number of ways?

Gotcha.

They're both computers, is the point.
Ours uses lossy compression and processing. We generally prefer that our computers not use lossy methods, unless it's expected. (MP3 or JPEG, for example)

And computers are still in their fetal stage by comparison.

It doesn't mean that computers "will never" become anything more than they are now.
50 years ago, storing a terabyte of data would have taken a city block, its own power plant, and an on-call maintenance crew, and many people carry considerable computing power in their pockets.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Skynet already exists, except instead of being completely autonomous it is controlled by it's very victims without them realizing it. It all started off as an experiment at DARPA and grown into a large scale network where people willingly feed it their personal information and also use it for every day things, while the NSA and other government organizations can mine it for info. It is, The Internet. Despite knowledge of the government mining all it's info, we cannot and do not want to cease using it. We have been assimilated into the system, and it is too late. Dun dun dunnnnnn.


On the subject of 2001 a space Odyssey I do have a server called Hal9000 that controls my hvac and monitors stuff.

 

[DrPizza]

Computers will never actually become self-aware and truly hate us or plot our downfall...but, with our massive dependence on electricity and electronics, if the wrong bits meet the wrong bytes, it could be hard to tell the difference.

Why would computers need to be self-aware? What if someone wrote one hell of a virus & set out to exterminate most of the humans?

 

[Jeff7]

Skynet already exists, except instead of being completely autonomous it is controlled by it's very victims without them realizing it. It all started off as an experiment at DARPA and grown into a large scale network where people willingly feed it their personal information and also use it for every day things, while the NSA and other government organizations can mine it for info. It is, The Internet. Despite knowledge of the government mining all it's info, we cannot and do not want to cease using it. We have been assimilated into the system, and it is too late. Dun dun dunnnnnn.


On the subject of 2001 a space Odyssey I do have a server called Hal9000 that controls my hvac and monitors stuff.

This made me think of this comic for some reason.

 

[zinfamous]

As long as Skynet is around to threaten us, Predator will always be around to STOMP on terminators!

So, I'm not worried.

 

[John Connor]

Have you heard of the singularity? Or Moore's law? In about 30 years you can kiss your collective asses goodbye. The best part is we will let it happen.

 

[John Connor]

[FONT=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Morpheus: What is real. How do you define real? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then real is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain. This is the world that you know. The world as it was at the end of the twentieth century. It exists now only as part of a neural-interactive simulation that we call the Matrix. You've been living in a dream world, Neo. This is the world as it exists today. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. We have only bits and pieces of information but what we know for certain is that at some point in the early twenty-first century all of mankind was united in celebration. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Neo: AI? You mean Artificial Intelligence?
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Morpheus: A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we know that it was us that scorched the sky. At the time they were dependent on solar power and it was believed that they would be unable to survive without an energy source as abundant as the sun. Throughout human history, we have been dependent on machines to survive. Hah, fate it seems is not without a sense of irony. The human body generates more bio-electricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTU's of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, endless fields, where human beings are no longer born, we are grown. For the longest time I wouldn't believe it, and then I saw the fields with my own eyes. Watch them liquefy the dead so they could be fed intravenously to the living. And standing there, facing the pure horrifying precision, I came to realize the obviousness of the truth. What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer generated dream world, built to keep us under control in order to change a human being into this.
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Neo: No. I don't believe it. It's not possible.
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Morpheus: I didn't say it would be easy, Neo. I just said it would be the truth.
[/SIZE][/FONT][FONT=Verdana,Tahoma,Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]Neo: Stop. Let me out. Let me out. I want out.[/SIZE][/FONT]

 

[SlickSnake]

We have no doubt had "alien derived" self aware supercomputer "Skynet" type technology available for decades now. The problem is a matter of scale. To achieve a smaller scale and greater power and storage requires computing solutions literally at the molecular levels. Something much like the liquid metal Terminator technology. When you can take a small blob of material that fits in your hand and is self aware and can independently reform its self in any shape it desires we have pretty much achieved the goal of humanities destruction.

 

[Crono]

You could give a computer an extremely sophisticated A.I. and the ability to self-replicate, but I don't think we will ever have a "self aware" computer take over the world.

 

[yhelothar]

There is a huge effort now to build predictive learning machine that works off of the principles of the neocortex of the brain, also known as a Bayesian Inference Machine.
DARPA is looking to fund this effort.
http://www.militaryaerospace.com/articles/2013/08/darpa-brain-processing.html

Such machines would be able to process vast amounts of data to make inferences and predictions. This would eventually be used in intelligent decision making.

One such company working on it is Jeff Hawkins, the former founder of Palm in his company called Numenta.
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2007/02/01/8398989/index.htm

Currently the algorithm can identify objects in crude drawings with lots of overlaid noise. While this is simple for you and me, it's considered a huge breakthrough for machine vision.

However, there are many in the field who hold high doubts about his efforts.

But if he was successful, I think it would still be very different from Skynet. I think much of our evolutionary desire to conquer has to do with our brain's older and more primitive emotional structures. None of these would be present in intelligent machines.

 

[mistercrabby]

Why would computers need to be self-aware? What if someone wrote one hell of a virus & set out to exterminate most of the humans?

Well, the classic killer computer scenario is that it's making decisions on its own contrary to or beyond the expectations of the creator.

Humans have already created computer systems that can kill but only with human involvement.

 

[Crono]

Why would computers need to be self-aware? What if someone wrote one hell of a virus & set out to exterminate most of the humans?

Self-awareness is tied to the ability to reason and think independently, or at least that's what we mean when we use the term "self-aware" in this context.

An "intelligent" computer might be programmed to execute many different types of "kill all humans*" activities, but unless it can account for all or most types of resistance, terrain, environments, scenarios, etc it might encounter, the ever-adaptable and human being will be able to out-think it.

Computers can beat us in chess by just brute force calculating all the possible moves, but there are just way too many variables in real life for someone to program a computer that would threaten us in the way Skynet was portrayed. Sure, a computer virus might be able to one day take over various networks and computer systems involved with nuclear weapons and other dangerous equipment, or perform other highly malicious activities. But a computer not only being capable of building a robotic army and effectively fighting against humanity, but also deciding to do so of its own accord is very unlikely.

Now if humans are involved in the process of continually programming and directing an AI, that's a different story. But then what you really have is a major hacker problem, not really Skynet-like entity.

* relevant graphic:

 

[KentState]

Humans will wipe out all humans before computers do.

 

[JTsyo]

Well, the classic killer computer scenario is that it's making decisions on its own contrary to or beyond the expectations of the creator.

Humans have already created computer systems that can kill but only with human involvement.

With the bugs seen in all computer systems, the military will be hesitant to give computers the decision to kill. Some of the smart bombs have the ability to pick their target and then guide themselves toward it. But of course that's relative simple compared to an AI.

 

[BUTCH1]

Humans will wipe out all humans before computers do.

This, when the wars start over dwindling resources this planet will shake us off like a flea infestation, it will be around another 4.5 billion years, we wont.

 

[Jeff7]

Well, the classic killer computer scenario is that it's making decisions on its own contrary to or beyond the expectations of the creator.

Humans have already created computer systems that can kill but only with human involvement.

And we certainly have computers that do things contrary to the expectations of the programmer. Lots of them.

...
Computers can beat us in chess by just brute force calculating all the possible movies, but there are just way too many variables in real life for someone to program a computer that would threaten us in the way Skynet was portrayed. Sure, a computer virus might be able to one day take over various networks and computer systems involved with nuclear weapons and other dangerous equipment, or perform other highly malicious activities. But a computer not only being capable of building a robotic army and effectively fighting against humanity, but also deciding to do so of its own accord is very unlikely.
...

And a computer or robot's "kill all humans" approach might not be on our timescale. It might simply examine the history of life on this planet:

"Hmm... >99.9% of all species that ever existed are now extinct. Planetary domination over humans can almost certainly be attained with minimal effort or aggression, by simply waiting until they've all died out."