Tim Berners-Lee suggests that AI will start managing financial corporations

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, one of the inventors of the WWW and Hypertext Protocol, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton, is also an adviser to the British government. Therefore, he must soberly look at the world and assess what is happening around and what it may lead to.

Arguing about Artificial Intelligence, many experts think about the emergence of a strong AI and technological singularity, but if you talk sensibly, what is the use of a strong AI for people, why invest billions of dollars in its development? The benefits of having a strong AI are vague, and the risks are too great.
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It is much more logical to assume that at first there will appear weak versions of AI, which are better for people to perform highly specialized tasks. Due to these versions of AI, people will try to gain a competitive advantage over other people for the main goal that drives humanity - for money * .

Some signs of the coming future are already visible today. The most talented programmers and ingenious mathematicians go to work where? Right, in investment funds. There, they create innovative mathematical models, new trading strategies, exotic, sophisticated derivatives using extraordinary formulas - and are looking for the very alpha , that is, profits above the market. Who has higher intelligence - he gets alpha. The middle peasants get the beta , and the losers suffer a loss. The financial market, free from all material goods, hidden intrigues, is a struggle of intellects in its pure form, according to clearly established rules. Fight for money. This is the only area of ​​human activity in the world where a brilliant mathematician can consistently earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a month, especially if he receives a percentage of the alpha he brought to his foundation.

A sensible step would be to introduce computer-based decision-making systems — the most advanced versions of AI — primarily in the financial world. Sir Tim Berners Lee spoke about this in his speech on April 10, 2017 at the Global Summit on Financial Innovations .

Systems of weak AI from IBM and other companies are already being implemented in banks and investment funds. What will happen next? Tim Berners-Lee believes that the turning point will be when the AI ​​begins to make important decisions. For example, assess the benefits of investment and decide which company is more profitable to purchase. Assess the credit history of people - and decide who give a mortgage, and who can not. Modern computer systems are already close to this functionality.

Tim Berners-Lee says that the next logical step in the development of financial AI after making decisions about purchasing the most profitable companies will be managing companies, creating holdings and generating subsidiaries of their own program to manage these new companies.

This will be a natural process, because in the competition in the market, companies running AI will have an advantage over companies that are managed by people. In the end, the market will remain only companies running AI, which will compete with each other. It will be hard for people to understand and make sure that fair competition is observed: “Yes, and how to explain the concept of honesty to a computer, anyway?”, Tim Berners-Lee wonders. This raises the question of ethics and morality - the rules of behavior that people themselves do not fully understand (and disagree with each other), how can this be explained to a computer?

Again, there are risks that a limited version of the AI ​​will begin to evolve in the wrong direction. Created initially for a narrow task, as a result, it may consider that the whole surrounding reality is described by the conditions of this task. This opinion of Berners-Lee recalls the fears that Elon Musk expressed in an interview with Vanity Fair:

“Suppose you have created a cultivating AI for picking strawberries and it gets better and better in picking strawberries, and picking up more and more, and improving, and all he wants is picking strawberries. So in the end the whole world will turn into strawberry fields. Strawberry Fields Forever [Strawberry fields forever]. ”

In general, there is something to think about. If the program can be self-taught, then a weak narrowly specialized AI can be even more dangerous than a full-fledged strong AI with normal self-awareness. Perhaps moral principles are the inalienable quality of any intelligent being with intelligence and self-awareness.

* In Western civilization, the presence of legally earned money means the presence of power, in other societies it is not always identical concepts.

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