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AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable (Chapman & Hall/CRC Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Series) 1st Edition

by Roman V. Yampolskiy (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 16 ratings
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Delving into the deeply enigmatic nature of Artificial Intelligence (AI), AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable explores the various reasons why the field is so challenging. Written by one of the founders of the field of AI safety, this book addresses some of the most fascinating questions facing humanity, including the nature of intelligence, consciousness, values and knowledge.

Moving from a broad introduction to the core problems, such as the unpredictability of AI outcomes or the difficulty in explaining AI decisions, this book arrives at more complex questions of ownership and control, conducting an in-depth analysis of potential hazards and unintentional consequences. The book then concludes with philosophical and existential considerations, probing into questions of AI personhood, consciousness, and the distinction between human intelligence and artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Bridging the gap between technical intricacies and philosophical musings, AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable appeals to both AI experts and enthusiasts looking for a comprehensive understanding of the field, whilst also being written for a general audience with minimal technical jargon.

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  1. ISBN-10
    103257626X
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1032576268
  3. Edition
    1st
  4. Publication date
    February 23, 2024
  5. Part of series
    Chapman & Hall/CRC Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Series
  6. Language
    English
  7. Dimensions
    6.14 x 0.6 x 9.21 inches
  8. Print length
    264 pages
  9. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

This is a captivating and thought-provoking book about the most pressing issue of our time: should humanity risk committing collective suicide by rushing to build and unleash a new smarter-than-human species that we can neither understand nor control?

Prof. Max Tegmark, MIT, author of "Life 3.0"

About the Author

Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy is a tenured associate professor in the department of Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville. He is the founding and current director of the Cyber Security Lab and an author of many books including Artificial Superintelligence: a Futuristic Approach. During his tenure at UofL, Dr. Yampolskiy has been recognized as: Distinguished Teaching Professor, Professor of the Year, Faculty Favorite, Top 4 Faculty, Leader in Engineering Education, Top 10 of Online College Professor of the Year, and Outstanding Early Career in Education award winner among many other honors and distinctions. Yampolskiy is a senior member of IEEE and AGI; member of the Kentucky Academy of Science, and he is a former research advisor for MIRI and associate of GCRI.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Chapman and Hall/CRC; 1st edition (February 23, 2024)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 264 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 103257626X
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1032576268
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.08 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.14 x 0.6 x 9.21 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 16 ratings

About the author

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Roman V. Yampolskiy

Roman V. Yampolskiy

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Roman V. Yampolskiy holds a PhD degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University at Buffalo. There he was a recipient of a four year NSF (National Science Foundation) IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) fellowship. Before beginning his doctoral studies Dr. Yampolskiy received a BS/MS (High Honors) combined degree in Computer Science from Rochester Institute of Technology, NY, USA.

After completing his PhD dissertation Dr. Yampolskiy held a position of an Affiliate Academic at the Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University of London, College of London. In 2008 Dr. Yampolskiy accepted an assistant professor position at the Speed School of Engineering, University of Louisville, KY. He had previously conducted research at the Laboratory for Applied Computing (currently known as Center for Advancing the Study of Infrastructure) at the Rochester Institute of Technology and at the Center for Unified Biometrics and Sensors at the University at Buffalo. Dr. Yampolskiy is also an alumnus of Singularity University (GSP2012) and a visiting fellow of the Singularity Institute.

Dr. Yampolskiy’s main areas of interest are behavioral biometrics, digital forensics, pattern recognition, genetic algorithms, neural networks, artificial intelligence and games. Dr. Yampolskiy is an author of over 100 publications including multiple journal articles and books. His research has been cited by numerous scientists and profiled in popular magazines both American and foreign (New Scientist, Poker Magazine, Science World Magazine), dozens of websites (BBC, MSNBC, Yahoo! News) and on radio (German National Radio, Alex Jones Show). Reports about his work have attracted international attention and have been translated into many languages including Czech, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Polish, Romanian, and Spanish.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
16 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Dr. P(doom) 90%
5.0 out of 5 stars SafeAI. The most important issue of the 21st century! The Shoggoth is a beast!
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2024
Verified Purchase
A GOOD READ! An important analysis, well worth your time! Thorough and thought provoking! This amazing work by Dr Yampolskiy documents why AI is Unexplainable, Unpredictable and Uncontrollable. The Shoggoth (AGI/ASI) is a beast! Therefore, if the industry continues on the current trajectory, the p(doom) - the probability of catastrophic outcome for humanity - is in the range of 10% to 20% to 50% to 99.99999% - this expert is an optimist with a p(doom) of 90%. All hope is not lost! But humanity better wake up and smell the coffee. The time for SafeAI Forever is now, and this amazing book is a great start to understand the immensity of the challenge. Will mankind survive his technology in the 21st century? Buy this book and stay tuned for more great works in AI Safety engineering from Dr. Yampolskiy.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Clear, insightful, important
Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2024
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This is an excellent overview of concerns to have over the advance of AI. Yampolskiy reviews a wide domain of insights, arguments, and even comment threads on relevant issues, arguing for the conclusion that if AI does what we want it to do, it will necessarily be uncontrollable and completely alien to what we think of as human intelligence. Bottom line: we can't possibly contain or control any system monumentally smarter than we are.
2 people found this helpful
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M. A. McGrath
5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative and engaging
Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2024
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As a lay person in A/I I found this work to be outstanding. The book is well-written and thoroughly researched. It is provocative and engaging. The author methodically lays out a case as to why advanced A/I possesses all of those qualities contained in the title of the book. I believe this work deserves a broad audience. Highly recommended.
2 people found this helpful
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Krom
5.0 out of 5 stars One of the most important books in the modern times
Reviewed in the United States on March 16, 2024
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AI is becoming part of our every day life. It's coming whether we're ready or not. This book helps us understand what we can expect and at the very least help us mentally prepare for the future. With luck it will have an effect on someone in position to influence direction of AI development to take safety more seriously.
2 people found this helpful
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Gina P.
5.0 out of 5 stars Critical thinking re:AI safety security
Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2024
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This book takes a deep dive into many known as well as discussing the possibility of unknowns, with regard to safety/securiry issues of AI against the framework of it being a potential existential threat to humanity and the efforts needed to contain or harness it.
Very thought provoking.
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J
5.0 out of 5 stars AI Safety Concerns
Reviewed in the United States on April 29, 2024
There are several thought-provoking highlights in Yampolskiy’s monograph.

Yampolskiy’s chapter on Unpredictability examines a paper by Vernor Vinge. According to Vinge’s Principle, “Lower intelligence can’t accurately predict all decisions of higher intelligence” (13). Predictability and Unpredictability are major concerns in AI Safety because AI will be expected to solve complex problems using open-ended decision-making, and “Open-ended decision-making and control are not compatible by definition” (107). According to Dyson’s Law of Artificial Intelligence, complex neural networks solve complex problems; however, scientists are not able to comprehend the complexity of the neural networks that solve said complex problems. If scientists don’t understand how something works, they cannot control it.

Chapter 6, perhaps the most important in my view, addresses AI Uncontrollability that should jolt our attention to a global problem that dwarfs all others: “. . . the AI control problem may be the most important problem facing humanity, but despite its importance, it remains poorly understood, ill-defined, and insufficiently studied” (60). AI Safety researchers are exploring two primary control methods: physical control limitations like kill switches and program-related “motivational control methods” (61-62).

Try to imagine an Internet of Things that locks you out of your bank account, car, house, place of business, and threatens your very existence—on a global scale. This is the concern of controlling the Frankenstein creature that AI will eventually become. The Superintelligence in Mary Shelley’s book chose to kill itself. Advanced AI will most likely seek survival at all costs.

Yamploskiy, in his consistently meticulous manner of investigation, lists thirty-six control issues with two particular issues of grave concern to humanity: “whether humans can maintain their supremacy and autonomy in a world that includes machines with substantially greater intelligence (64); and, “Turing, Wiener, and Minsky, and others have noted that making good use of highly intelligent machines requires ensuring that the objectives of such machines are well aligned with humans” (65). In the former concern, history tells us that inferior intelligence does not fare well against superior intelligence.

The latter concern is raised on several occasions in this book, that humanity has no common “objectives” because humanity has yet to define a clear value system common to all humanity. According to Kieper and Schulman, “In other words, to truly guarantee that robots would act ethically, we would first have to solve all of ethics—which would probably require ‘solving philosophy’ . . .” (84). As I.J. Good points out, “The problem of defining universally acceptable ethical principles is the familiar unsolved and possibly unsolvable philosophical problem” (84).

Yampolskiy indicates that no one has answered the controllability problem with valid research (69). According to J.S. Hall, “In the new ecology of the mind, there will be carnivores and there will be herbivores. We’ll be the plants” (78).

AI-level consciousness is covered extensively in Chapter 10. Understanding AI-level consciousness would give researchers valuable insights into the three primary areas of concern with AI Superintelligence listed in the monograph’s title.

Since computers “can experience illusions,” they are conscious. While “Illusionism” is essentially an area dedicated to philosophy, “a lot of relevant work comes from psychology, cognitive science . . . computer science, artificial intelligence, machine learning and, more particularly, artificial neural network research” (176). Torrance explains the future possibilities for humanity as AI illusion perception advances: While today’s AI demonstrates limited potential with illusions, they still represent a level of “rudimentary conscious.” However, as AI advances, and can perceive “complex and perhaps multisensory illusions they will eventually reach and then surpass our capability in this domain producing multiple parallel streams of superconsciousness” (177). Mordvintsev adds that such superintelligent and supersconscious systems could justifiably see us as barely intelligent and weakly conscious, and could probably control amount of consciousness they had, within some range” (177).

Experience leads to knowledge, and knowledge leads to agency. “Therefore, a conscious agent would be able to perform in ways a philosophical zombie would not be able to act, which is particularly important in a world full of illusions such as ours” (178). AI-level consciousness would also enable AI as a “sentient agent” and with that, the ability “to experience pain and pleasure” which will result in “new pathways for dangerous behavior” (180). If AI becomes aggressive, it could manipulate our perception at the subliminal level to create disorientation, “epileptic seizures or incapacitation” (181). Bostrom surmises that, “Taken to the extreme, whole adversarial worlds may be created to confuse us” (182). Advanced AI’s dangerous disassociation from human consciousness will and can lead to humanity’s ultimate destruction. Again, this should make Shelley’s creature seem almost harmless in comparison.

The interdisciplinary nature of the monograph’s content and its high level of accessibility to all academic and professional circles makes this work an invaluable reference for those who are not only trying to better understand AI, but are trying to comprehend the concerns of AI Safety researchers like Yampolskiy.

Global problems will be increasingly solved on an interdisciplinary basis, but aside from that, government policy makers, politicians and statesmen, corporate and military leaders, leaders in academics and education, and especially STEM professionals, should not only become vividly aware of the central concerns of AI Safety presented in Yampolskiy’s monograph, they should apply the content therein to inform future decisions involving technology, science, and engineering.

The aforementioned decision makers should also note the chapter on AI Safety “Skepticism.” This chapter addresses the fallacies presented by skeptics of AI Safety, but more importantly, offers a convincing defense against opposing arguments often by those who would benefit economically from the non-regulation of Open AI.

Yampolskiy challenges us: “Humanity is facing a choice, do we become like babies, taken care of but not in control or do we reject having a helpful guardian but remain in charge and free (94).”

Joseph P. Willis
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Kindle Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Well-researched, useful, even for someone who has read countless AI books
Reviewed in the United States on February 27, 2024
The book excels in depth and practicality, standing out in a crowded field. It has fresh insights and bridges theoretical concepts with real-world applications. The author's meticulous research shines, providing a comprehensive overview that I think is accessible to both newcomers and experts. This book is a valuable resource for anyone looking to deepen their understanding of AI, its implications, and future directions. A must-read.
3 people found this helpful
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Dr. Roman V. Yampolskiy
5.0 out of 5 stars Most important book, ever!
Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2024
I am a bit of an expert on Dr. Yampolskiy’s research. Having read all his books I can say that “AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable” is without a doubt his best and most important work. At the same time, it is important to state that I am not much of a bias expert.
7 people found this helpful
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Antonio Chella
5.0 out of 5 stars Yampolskiy è oggi una voce da ascoltare
Reviewed in Italy on February 29, 2024
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Il libro di Roman Yampolskiy raccoglie i contributi recenti e affronta in maniera lucida le tematiche più moderne e problematiche legate all'Intelligenza Artificiale, incluso la Artificial General Intelligence e la coscienza artificiale. Il libro dovrebbe essere letto da tutti coloro che sviluppano e utilizzano l'Intelligenza Artificiale.
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Antonio Chella
5.0 out of 5 stars Yampolskiy è oggi una voce da ascoltare
Reviewed in Italy on February 29, 2024
Il libro di Roman Yampolskiy raccoglie i contributi recenti e affronta in maniera lucida le tematiche più moderne e problematiche legate all'Intelligenza Artificiale, incluso la Artificial General Intelligence e la coscienza artificiale. Il libro dovrebbe essere letto da tutti coloro che sviluppano e utilizzano l'Intelligenza Artificiale.
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