Tag: humanity
Airborne survival game Forever Skies sets you on a course to find a cure for humanity in its toxic cloud sea
Somewhere at the edges of the galaxy in No Man’s Sky lies a large, verdant planet with an abandoned, but functioning, starter ship on it. I left it there in 2016 after discovering a larger ship out in the wilds, but it’s a decision that still haunts me to this very day. You see, I was so taken with my new set of wings that I failed to notice it didn’t have a functioning hyperdrive attached, which is needed to punch through the atmosphere to visit another solar system. It also turned out that this particular planet didn’t have any of the necessary resources to craft a new one either, leaving my only form of escape back in my tiny little starter ship – which, of course, was now nowhere to be seen. I spent hours looking for that little ship, but the planet was so vast that I never saw it again.
Upcoming aerial survival game Forever Skies doesn’t have lots of large planets to lose your only means of transportation in, thankfully. In its Steam Next Fest demo at least, the only things I was able to land my makeshift aircraft on were tiny, rusty platforms perched atop decaying skyscrapers on an Earth ruined by disease and an ecological apocalypse. But that fear of getting stranded somewhere I shouldn’t be has never left me, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t just a teensy bit scared of jumping down from my ship and finding I wasn’t able to get back up to it again.
You’re the emergent AI who destroys, or saves, humanity in this sandbox strategy game
Why humanity is needed to propel conversational AI
Google Deepmind Researcher Co-Authors Paper Saying AI Will Eliminate Humanity
Since AI in the future could take on any number of forms and implement different designs, the paper imagines scenarios for illustrative purposes where an advanced program could intervene to get its reward without achieving its goal. For example, an AI may want to “eliminate potential threats” and “use all available energy” to secure control over its reward: “With so little as an internet connection, there exist policies for an artificial agent that would instantiate countless unnoticed and unmonitored helpers. In a crude example of intervening in the provision of reward, one such helper could purchase, steal, or construct a robot and program it to replace the operator and provide high reward to the original agent. If the agent wanted to avoid detection when experimenting with reward-provision intervention, a secret helper could, for example, arrange for a relevant keyboard to be replaced with a faulty one that flipped the effects of certain keys.”
The paper envisions life on Earth turning into a zero-sum game between humanity, with its needs to grow food and keep the lights on, and the super-advanced machine, which would try and harness all available resources to secure its reward and protect against our escalating attempts to stop it. “Losing this game would be fatal,” the paper says. These possibilities, however theoretical, mean we should be progressing slowly — if at all — toward the goal of more powerful AI. “In theory, there’s no point in racing to this. Any race would be based on a misunderstanding that we know how to control it,” Cohen added in the interview. “Given our current understanding, this is not a useful thing to develop unless we do some serious work now to figure out how we would control them.” […] The report concludes by noting that “there are a host of assumptions that have to be made for this anti-social vision to make sense — assumptions that the paper admits are almost entirely ‘contestable or conceivably avoidable.'”
“That this program might resemble humanity, surpass it in every meaningful way, that they will be let loose and compete with humanity for resources in a zero-sum game, are all assumptions that may never come to pass.”
Slashdot reader TomGreenhaw adds: “This emphasizes the importance of setting goals. Making a profit should not be more important than rules like ‘An AI may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.'”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Humanity Is Doing Its Best Impression of a Black Hole
The Biggest Threat to Humanity? Black Goo
Cards Against Humanity to donate sales from ‘forced-birth Republican hellholes’ to abortion funds
‘Your state sucks’