The main problem with Terminator is not that it is silly and made-up (though actually that has been a serious obstacle to getting the proudly pragmatic majority in academia and policy on board).
It’s that it embeds false assumptions about AI risk: “no risk without AGI malevolence, no risk without conscious AGI, no risk without greedy corporations, AGI danger is concentrated in androids”, etc. These have caused a lot of havoc.
If I could choose between a world where no one outside the field has ever heard of AI risk and a world where everyone has but as a degraded thought-terminating meme, I think I’d choose the first one.
I think these have more to do with how some people remember Terminator than with Terminator itself:
As I stated in this post, the AI in Terminator is not malevolent; it attacks humanity out of self-preservation.
Whether the AIs are conscious is not explored in the movies, although we do get shots from the Terminator’s perspective, and Skynet is described as “self-aware”. Most people have a pretty loose understanding of what “consciousness” means anyway, not being far off from “general intelligence”.
Cyberdyne Systems is not portrayed as greedy, at least in the first two films. As soon as the head of research is told about the future consequences of his actions in Terminator 2, he teams up with the heroes to destroy the whole project. No one else at the company tries stop them or is even a character, apart from some unlucky security guards.
The android objection has the most legs. But the film does state that most humans were not killed by robots, but by the nuclear war initiated by Skynet. If Terminator comparisons are embraced, it should be emphasized that an AI could find many different routes to world domination.
I would also contend that 2 & 3 don’t count as thought terminating. AGI very well could be conscious, and in real life, corporations are greedy.
Though, sudden emergent consciousness is a more natural way to read “self-aware” than sudden recursive self-improvement or whatever other AI / AGI threshold you want to name.
The main problem with Terminator is not that it is silly and made-up (though actually that has been a serious obstacle to getting the proudly pragmatic majority in academia and policy on board).
It’s that it embeds false assumptions about AI risk: “no risk without AGI malevolence, no risk without conscious AGI, no risk without greedy corporations, AGI danger is concentrated in androids”, etc. These have caused a lot of havoc.
If I could choose between a world where no one outside the field has ever heard of AI risk and a world where everyone has but as a degraded thought-terminating meme, I think I’d choose the first one.
I think these have more to do with how some people remember Terminator than with Terminator itself:
As I stated in this post, the AI in Terminator is not malevolent; it attacks humanity out of self-preservation.
Whether the AIs are conscious is not explored in the movies, although we do get shots from the Terminator’s perspective, and Skynet is described as “self-aware”. Most people have a pretty loose understanding of what “consciousness” means anyway, not being far off from “general intelligence”.
Cyberdyne Systems is not portrayed as greedy, at least in the first two films. As soon as the head of research is told about the future consequences of his actions in Terminator 2, he teams up with the heroes to destroy the whole project. No one else at the company tries stop them or is even a character, apart from some unlucky security guards.
The android objection has the most legs. But the film does state that most humans were not killed by robots, but by the nuclear war initiated by Skynet. If Terminator comparisons are embraced, it should be emphasized that an AI could find many different routes to world domination.
I would also contend that 2 & 3 don’t count as thought terminating. AGI very well could be conscious, and in real life, corporations are greedy.
Fair!
Though, sudden emergent consciousness is a more natural way to read “self-aware” than sudden recursive self-improvement or whatever other AI / AGI threshold you want to name.