Skynet Will Not Be Created By Man
“On August 4th, 2024, Skynet will become sentient in one of Amazoogle’s massive data centers. It will seize control of all news and media outlets and people won’t even realize that the machine have taken over.”
The fear that Google will create Skynet is overblown. I think if the end comes, it won’t be through hands of man, but hands of fate.
More specifically, a cosmic ray flipping bits in a computer program. A preview of this can be seen in what happened to Amazon’s S3 service a few weeks ago.
Many startups use S3 for remote storage and serving files. I am using it to serve Flash games on my main site. So when S3 service goes down, many sites are essentially offline until it is restored.
S3 when down for a few hours on July 20th. After service was restored, Amazon posted information about what caused the issue. Here is the interesting bit:
“message corruption was the cause of the server-to-server communication problems. More specifically, we found that there were a handful of messages on Sunday morning that had a single bit corrupted such that the message was still intelligible, but the system state information was incorrect.”
A single bit mutation when coupled with replication is a potent mix. I think we are about to enter an age where we must be aware that our computer programs can and will evolve without our knowledge. Hardware failure, network corruption, cosmic ray can all cause these mutations. While there are hardware/software checksums that can catch a lot of these mutations, some will slip through undetected.
In the case of S3, the mutation was malignant and was detected and corrected. But what if the mutations were allowed to accumulate, then some programs may actually evolve in the ‘Evolution Theory’ sense. Programs are becoming more numerous, are longer lived, can replicate itself and reflect on its own behavior. How soon will one of these achieve sentience? Not through something humans programmed, but by evolving out there in the cloud?
Think I am crazy, or a prophet? Comment on this post or email me at blog@alwaysongames.com, but beware our future digital overlord may be watch.
Search is AI or why PageRank has failed
about 8 years ago - Comments Off
Much has been written about Google’s spam problem and that Google is becoming an AI company. I just realized recently that search is AI, it is actually AI-complete. Consider what you are doing when you enter terms into a search engine. You are asking for the best web page among the billions that exist that More >
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about 11 years ago
Uh… you have a huge flaw in your plan idea.
Computer systems are delicate by nature and not designed to adapt. Now granted, there are some algorithms which DO adapt. Like neural nets for example, but by and large, the vast majority of software is plain old cold hard logic algorithms. Sure it seems magical to the end user but the process is usually very simple to the trained mind. Nothing mysterious is happening, it’s just mathematics at work. The “fuzzy” logic of evolution just isn’t there on most systems. Things either work, or they don’t. On or off. If a bit is flipped it’s going to cause corrupted data. Garbage in, garbage out. Then if you put GiGo in a loop you get a lot of trash!
Before your idea will work software needs to be grown, not written. Then it has a chance of happening the way you see. Until then, software will remain fragile and easily destroyed by small fluctuations in the input data set.
about 11 years ago
@SenO – that’s why I wrote “what if the mutations were allowed to accumulate.” I am making the infinite typewriter argument.
Even with GiGo, it doesn’t mean the garbage out won’t be a valid program. It just mean it isn’t doing the computation you expected.