Nourpool believes in the light of Bitcoin SV – CoinGeek

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

The mining ecosystem recently welcomed a new miner to the fold, as Nourpool mined its first Bitcoin SV block on December 7, 2019. To learn how this mining pool came together and why they chose BSV, we reached out to them to learn more about the men behind the effort and the plans they have for the future.

Nourpool was conceived last August by Alan Fu, a former Microsoft data scientist, along with two friends whove been involved in Bitcoin mining since 2013 and shared the same ideals. We all share the same belief that on-chain scaling is the only way for Bitcoin to grow, and we decided to run our own pool to participate in this important journey of Bitcoin, Fu told us, noting that the idea to build the pool was conceived during one of the groups regular meetups.

They decided on the Nourpool name based on a cryptic message consisting only of nour from one of Satoshis original accounts on the global network P2P Foundation forum. We interpret this word as light in Arabian, as Bitcoin SV has brought light to the long-dark-and-suffocating world of Bitcoin, Fu said. We like Nour and put it into our name, as Nourpool literally means pool of light.

They didnt decide on mining BSV simply due to a survey of talking points; plenty of work went into the decision. Fu explained the decision making process:

Since 2017 we have been doing detailed studies over the mechanisms of all the major cryptocurrencies and concluded that miners on all coins are either fed by a short-lived subsidy that has been grossly overvalued, or living off transaction fees that have been severely capped by scaling issues of the underlying platform, or both. Bitcoin SV however, with its to-be-removed block cap and elegant UTXO design, allows massive on-chain scaling. Combining real scaling capability with a stable base-layer protocol, we think there will be an exponential growth in the on-chain activities on BSV, presenting an enticing fee market for us miners.

Nourpool hasnt met much difficultytechnical wisesince mining that initial block on December 7. In the first two days of operation, they mined a total of 11 BSV blocks. But the future will have some issues to solve, Fu thinks. The difficulty lies ahead as we need to prepare for rising transaction volume. There will be an iterative process of we discovering and resolving one bottleneck after another. Fu also mentioned some challenges on the financial side of mining BSV: As much as we believe that the market acceptance of BSV will surely improve over time, reality is that currently there are fewer derivatives and worse depth/liquidity for BSV market comparing to that of the Segwit coin, rendering fewer mining strategies available to us, he shared.

All the same, the Nourpool team is gearing up for growth and will provide more for the greater community. We will be expanding our own hash power in the next 6 months, and we also seek to connect our pool with more BSV miners, Fu told us. The goal is to surpass the 10% mark by halving next year. In the coming months we will also release a set of new services for both miners and application developers, please stay tuned.

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Nourpool believes in the light of Bitcoin SV - CoinGeek

Bitcoin Buyers Grow Aggressive; is a Rally Around the Corner? – newsBTC

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

After incurring a significant influx of volatility earlier this week, Bitcoin (BTC) has been able to gain some tempered upwards momentum as its buyers attempt to push it up towards its near-term resistance that exists at $7,800.

This momentum comes about as buyers grow aggressive at BTCs near-term support levels, which one analyst believes is a bullish sign that signals it may see further upside in the near-term.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading up marginally at its current price of $7,630, which marks a notable climb from its recent lows of just over $7,200 that were set early this past week just prior to its rapid surge up to $7,800 where it met significant resistance that led it to plummet lower.

This movement confirmed $7,800 as a strong level of resistance for the cryptocurrency, but its recent climb up towards this level likely signals that it will soon test this resistance.

Assuming that Bitcoin does break above the resistance it faces at this price region, it will likely also face some further selling pressure at $8,000, with a break above this level opening the gates for significantly further upside.

Cantering Clark, a popular cryptocurrency analyst on Twitter, explained in a recent tweet that it is imperative for BTC to hold above its near-term support level at roughly $7,400 in order for it to see further near-term gains.

Holding here is going to be pretty important. Otherwise it has the potential to just be a LH and bulls can get back to the pre-amnesia state of realizing and accepting HTF market structure breaks are often retested, he noted while pointing to the chart seen below.

One interesting trend that investors should be aware of is the fact that buyers at BTCs near-term support levels are growing incredibly strong.

Cantering Clark also spoke about this, noting that the rapid increase in buy orders at Bitcoins near-term support levels signals that buyers feel a sense of urgency to defend these levels.

What is interesting is the amount of initiative aggressive buyers we have that step in lately right at support, not just passive. Plenty of imbalances right at support. Almost like buyers feel a real sense of urgency, he explained.

It will likely soon grow clear as to whether or not this bourgeoning buying pressure will be enough to send BTC surging past the resistance that lies directly above it.

Bitcoin Buyers Grow Aggressive; is a Rally Around the Corner? - newsBTC

Bitcoin and crypto Bears Back on MATIC 70% drop – FXStreet

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

In the last 24 hours, cryptocurrencies were rejected after trying to overcome their resistance levels. Most of the crypto sector is in the red. Bitcoin drops 1.9%, Ethereum -2.1% , Ripple -3.17% and Litecoin -1.84%. Tezos (-7.16%), ALGO (-9.78%), Vechain (-12%), and notably, MATIC (-70%) were among the most harmed. In the Ethereum token sector, there is a majority of assets underwater, although there are notable exceptions such as Link (+8.7%), Jewel (+14.5%), or MovieBloc (+48%).

The current market cap descended 2.45% to $200.4 billion on a $25.1 billion traded volume in the last 24H (+37.67%). Meanwhile, Bitcoin dominance keeps at 66.62%.

The price of MATIC drops 70% in an hour after climbing 200% in two weeks after rumors of the company liquidated over 1,495 billion coins at #Binance.

Swiss finTech Amun AG, which now is offering crypto ETPs (Exchange-traded products) in Switzerland and Germany, is now approved to provide them within the European Union. Amun offers currently mine crypto ETPs, among which are BTC-ETP, Ether-ETP, and XRP-ETP.

Bitcoin dropped hard on high volume yesterday, after a spike that brought its price to $7,689 to, then, fall below the $7,416 support and break the triangular formation. The inability to hold above $7,580 brought new sellers eager to take the lot of buyers with buy-stop orders above that level.

Currently, the price is holding above $7,300, but this won't hold for long if the weakness continues. Now we see the MACD in a bearish phase and the price below the -1SD line. Therefore, the critical level to watch is $7,300.

Ripple is making a leg down, after being rejected yesterday by the resistance set by its previous high of Nov 30. Now we see the MACD in a bearish phase and the price moving below the -1SD line. We see also the price held by its 50-period SMA, but the weakness is evident, as there are no convincing upward movements.

Ethereum was affected by the Bitcoin drop, as was the rest of the sector, but the drop seems unconvincing so far. The price is held but the $146.5 support, and it is making a series of small- bodied candles that are symptoms of indecision on the seller's camp. The MACD is in a bearish phase, although showing no progression. Also, the price is currently touching the -1SD line of the Bollinger Bands, although the bands move horizontally. That means the price also moves in a horizontal range. The critical levels to keep an eye on are $145.6 and $149.

Litecoin made a very similar movement, as Ethereum did. The price dropped at the time of the bitcoin's spike and crossed the $45.15 level to touch the 44.3 support that was at the lows made on Dec 5. Now we see the price losing volatility and making two doji. The price seems to stabilize below the -1SD line while the MACD shifted to a bearish phase. That situation is likely to resolve to the downside if no new buyers come to rescue. The critical levels to keep are $45.15 to for buyers and $44.3 for sellers.

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Bitcoin and crypto Bears Back on MATIC 70% drop - FXStreet

Permanent Record: Snowden reveals why he blew the whistle on Big Brother – Daily Maverick

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

At the heart of Daily Mavericks newsroom, a State Security Agency fly on the wall might be surprised to hear the following statement:

I dont care who taps my phone, I dont have anything on there.

That is not to say that Daily Maverick has a blas approach to sensitive information, quite the opposite. The journalists who worked on the Gupta Leaks were all given air-gapped machines that had never touched the internet, as well as strict instructions to immediately toss said machines out the window if SSA agents came knocking.

While the organisation itself is committed to protecting information by any means necessary, as journalists we can also be a pessimistic bunch. We know with relative certainty that the NSA is still monitoring Americans, that the GCHQ is watching over the British, and that Facebook and Google are keeping tabs on everyone.

And so, I dont have anything on there is more of an understanding that we, as everyday citizens of the world wide web, do not have the capacity to prevent governments and corporations from mining our data, than a flippant lack of regard for the privacy of our sources as journalists. It is an acknowledgement that to keep anything valuable on ones phone is to give everyone access to it.

In his biography, Permanent Record, both loved and hated NSA mass surveillance whistle-blower Edward Snowden explains exactly why the fear of ones information being collected is completely rational.

Snowden reveals the workings behind his decision to equip Americans, and the rest of the world, with the knowledge that they were being watched. In so doing, he gave citizens the power to start challenging governments and corporations control of their data.

Snowden details how he transitioned from growing up in a military household and joining the NSA as a consultant, to blowing the whistle on one of the USs biggest secrets.

Growing up in a military household, Snowden describes his familys first computer as his second sibling and his first love. He set back his family clocks so he could spend more time online, and gamed the school system by figuring out he could pass a class without handing in any homework.

Living in the shadow of NSA headquarters in Maryland, Snowden felt the shock of September 11 2001 intimately. His response was to join the army, but he was invalided out of service following a bad fall. He then became a consultant for the NSA, being granted top-level clearance.

As Snowden describes it, The geek inherited the world.

Through Permanent Record we see he had hoped to serve his country, but found himself working for it instead. This, he says, was not a trivial distinction.

In the preface to his 340-page biography, Snowden aptly explains his experience after being granted unlimited access to the USs secret service.

Deep in a tunnel under a pineapple field a subterranean Pearl Harbor-era former airplane factory I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman and child on earth whod ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were surveilled in a gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.

Permanent Record appears to be Snowdens attempt to absolve himself not only of his involvement in the agencies that created the USs mass surveillance economy, but also for his revelation of state secrets to the public.

Immediately after the release of the biography, the Justice Department sued Snowden for violating a non-disclosure agreement he signed with both the CIA and NSA. Snowden is still in exile in Moscow, Russia. Should he return to the US he will face two counts of violating the Espionage Act, as well as stealing government property.

Following 9/11, the US intelligence services jumped to comply with the order of never again. Snowden revealed to the world what never again truly meant for the US public. Whether he should be prosecuted for what he did is up to the reader, although if Donald Trump would have his way Snowden would be executed.

But did his revelation change anything? In 2016/17 the European Union implemented its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), giving citizens more power over their data, while the Investigatory Powers Act in the UK grants a commissioner the power of oversight of the British intelligence agencies.

Our data is still not safe, but we are more aware of the fact that somewhere, in some deep dark recess filled with government hard drives, there is likely to be a video of you using your phone camera to pick food out of your teeth. DM

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Edward Snowden & Twitter What On Earth? (2019-12-10) – Global Real News

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

Bonjour! Today we did a very comprehensive analysis of Edward Snowdens Twitter activity. Lets jump right into it. The main metrics are as follows as of 2019-12-10, Edward Snowden (@Snowden) has 4186110 Twitter followers, is following 1 people, has tweeted 4547 times, has liked 444 tweets, has uploaded 373 photos and videos and has been on Twitter since December 2014.

Going from the top of the page to the bottom, their latest tweet, at the time of writing, has 11 replies, 131 retweets and 375 likes, their second latest tweet has 100 replies, 2,233 reweets and 5,052 likes, their third latest tweet has 19 replies, 471 retweets and 1,570 likes, their fourth latest tweet has 2 replies, 206 retweets and 417 likes and their fifth latest tweet has 61 replies, 565 retweets and 1,198 likes. That gives you an idea of how much activity they usually get.

‘Citizen K’: Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the birthing of the new Russia – People’s World

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

Documentary filmmaker Alex Gibneys latest entry takes on the transition from the USSR to shock capitalism, the bargain basement selloff of the Soviet peoples hard-earned material infrastructure to insider cronies who in short time became billionaires, and the way those nouveaux riches became firmly entrenched in an authoritarian oligarchy led by Vladimir Putin.

One of those men, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, no better nor worse than the others, started asking impertinent questions; he was prosecuted on phony embezzlement and tax charges, sent to prison in Siberia for ten years, and is now, from his exile in London, one of Russias most prominent agitators for democratic governance.

The film title Citizen K inevitably recalls such other films about transparency in government, or the lack thereof, as Citizen Kane, a fictionalized life of newspaper titan William Randolph Hearst, and Citizenfour, a documentary about the exploits of the conscientious IT analyst Edward Snowden, still trapped in Russia for fear of severe punishment if and when he ever returns to the U.S.

The film takes us from the Boris Yeltsin years to the present, with Khodorkovsky himself serving as guide and interpreter of the tumultuous events of the past thirty years of cataclysm in Russia as the country jumped off a cliff into the void. Interspersed with interviews with the Great Man himself are numerous business partners, academics, activists and journalists, as well as historical footage illuminating the inflection points in this corrupt saga.

From his start in commercial banking, the brilliant and ruthless young upstart soon joined an elite group of oligarchs who came to control half of the Russian economy. Khodorkovsky got heavily into fossil fuel development, taking over Yukos, the oil empire that was a former state-owned enterprise.

Anyone who rose to such dizzying heights in those years was surely complicit in any number of serious lapses of discretion, not to say lethal crimes. If getting filthy rich was but a rollercoaster game to men like him, well, the sport could get deadly as uncooperative players soon found out. Khodorkovsky could legally return to Russia but he would be subject to a new trial on a murder charge.

For a period in the 1990s Russia became the murder capital of the capitalist world. The legal structure fell far behind the bitter and fast-moving realities on the ground as Wild West capitalism attracted a host of shady personalities.

Power, Khodorkovsky says, in an epigram that seems to sum up the whole socialist collapse as much as the present-day situation, is a question of how much people are willing to defend it.

The social compact, consolidated under Vladimir Putin, came to be defined as an agreement that the oligarchs not interfere with politics, in exchange for which they would be given free rein to do as they pleased without consequence. In one demonstration of his authority, when privately owned TV channels raised criticisms of the government at the time the submarine Kursk sank, an embarrassed Putin simply ordered a government takeover of the stations.

By such measures, Putin appealed to the mass public that had taken a serious hit with the fall of socialism, in lost jobs, security, housing, healthcare, etc., and saw in the autocrat a kind of new Stalin who would restore Russias rightful place in the world.

When Khodorkovsky started taking an interest in politics, Putin did not hesitate to make life difficult for him. Yukos was taken over and eventually became the re-nationalized Rosneft, which is today a leading player in the energy market. The former oil magnate served nine years at a prison camp near the Chinese border, and when the end of his sentence was coming near, he was put on trial again, now on charges of stealing oil. (Where did he put it? curious minds want to know.)

The show trial was patently staged in order to produce a new verdict that would keep Khodorkovsky in prison for 13 more years, But by now a new generation of sympathizers had arisen, fed up with a country not one of laws but of dictatorship. Protesters could begin to imagine a Russia without Putin.

By the time of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, Putin had been pressured to ease up on the persecution of his enemies, and he set a sizable number of prisoners free, including Khodorkovsky, who heard about it on TV. In his case, the condition was that he go abroad, thus becoming an international symbol of the strength of civil society.

Citizen K is totally riveting from beginning to end, assuming a viewer has some interest in the subject. Its documentary filmmaking at its best, without judgment as to the causes of the Soviet collapse in the first place. One need not accept Mikhail Khodorkovsky as Russias savior to appreciate the strange course of his life that has led him to where he is today.

Yet even the institution of bourgeois democratic rights, which Russia has never enjoyed at any time in its history, would be a historic advance, and to that extent Khodorkovsky has to be considered as a leader of the forces for good. In the meantime, Vladimir Putin shows few signs of surrendering the reins of power. This story is still playing out and is nowhere near the end.

The trailer can be viewed here. Journalist Christine Amanpour interviews Alex Gibney and Mikhail Khodorkovsky here.

Asha Curran, CEO of Giving Tuesday, appointed new board chair of theguardian.org; Vivian Schiller, Alice Rhee, and Lois Quam appointed to the board -…

Posted on December 11, 2019 by admin

Today, theguardian.org has announced new appointments to its board. Founding Board Member Asha Curran, CEO of Giving Tuesday, has been appointed as board chair.

Other new board appointments include Vivian Schiller, media and technology lead at the Aspen Institute, who has held multiple high-profile media roles including head of news at Twitter, general manager of NYTimes.com and President and CEO of National Public Radio.; Lois Quam, President and CEO of Pathfinder International, a global NGO that champions sexual and reproductive health and rights; and Alice Rhee, Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships and Growth at American Journalism Project, the first venture philanthropy organization focused on local civic news in the U.S.

With these new appointments, theguardian.org further cements its commitment to innovate new models of support for journalism, and to expand generosity and contributions from philanthropic institutions and individuals alike. These appointments also bring fresh board expertise to vital topics like global development and womens health, and affirm commitment to strengthen local and regional news.

Publicly launched in August 2017 and led by Rachel White, theguardian.orgs aim is to advance and inform public discourse around the most pressing issues of our time through the support of independent journalism and journalistic projects at the Guardian. To date, theguardian.org has worked with 12 philanthropic partners to support 20 editorially independent projects most recently The Fight to Vote, a one-year reporting project about voting rights in America, and a global reporting project called The Age of Extinction that focuses on biodiversity and species extinction.

Asha Curran, said:

Its a privilege and honor to become board chair of theguardian.org. High quality, independent journalism has never been more important, nor the need to find new and creative ways to support it.

Vivian Schiller, said:

Im delighted to join the board of theguardian.org, an organization that is leading the news industry in innovating new models to support essential reporting as a pillar of our democracy.

-ends-

For more information please contact:

media.enquiries@theguardian.com

About Guardian News & Media

The Guardian US, with newsrooms in New York, Washington DC and Oakland, California, brings a global perspective to America on issues including inequality, race & immigration, the environment, the role of technology in our lives, national security, womens rights, the rise of the far right, gun control and more.

Guardian News & Media (GNM), publisher of theguardian.com, is one of the largest English-speaking newspaper websites in the world. Since launching its US and Australia digital editions in 2011 and 2013 respectively, traffic from outside of the UK now represents over two-thirds of The Guardians total digital audience.

First published in 1821, The Guardian is renowned for its award-winning investigation, The Counted, which exposed and documented lethal police force across America, its agenda-setting NSA surveillance revelations following disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden, its globally acclaimed investigation into phone hacking and most recently the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers investigations.

artificial intelligence | Definition, Examples, and …

Posted on December 10, 2019 by admin

Artificial intelligence (AI), the ability of a digital computer or computer-controlled robot to perform tasks commonly associated with intelligent beings. The term is frequently applied to the project of developing systems endowed with the intellectual processes characteristic of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. Since the development of the digital computer in the 1940s, it has been demonstrated that computers can be programmed to carry out very complex tasksas, for example, discovering proofs for mathematical theorems or playing chesswith great proficiency. Still, despite continuing advances in computer processing speed and memory capacity, there are as yet no programs that can match human flexibility over wider domains or in tasks requiring much everyday knowledge. On the other hand, some programs have attained the performance levels of human experts and professionals in performing certain specific tasks, so that artificial intelligence in this limited sense is found in applications as diverse as medical diagnosis, computer search engines, and voice or handwriting recognition.

All but the simplest human behaviour is ascribed to intelligence, while even the most complicated insect behaviour is never taken as an indication of intelligence. What is the difference? Consider the behaviour of the digger wasp, Sphex ichneumoneus. When the female wasp returns to her burrow with food, she first deposits it on the threshold, checks for intruders inside her burrow, and only then, if the coast is clear, carries her food inside. The real nature of the wasps instinctual behaviour is revealed if the food is moved a few inches away from the entrance to her burrow while she is inside: on emerging, she will repeat the whole procedure as often as the food is displaced. Intelligenceconspicuously absent in the case of Sphexmust include the ability to adapt to new circumstances.

Psychologists generally do not characterize human intelligence by just one trait but by the combination of many diverse abilities. Research in AI has focused chiefly on the following components of intelligence: learning, reasoning, problem solving, perception, and using language.

There are a number of different forms of learning as applied to artificial intelligence. The simplest is learning by trial and error. For example, a simple computer program for solving mate-in-one chess problems might try moves at random until mate is found. The program might then store the solution with the position so that the next time the computer encountered the same position it would recall the solution. This simple memorizing of individual items and proceduresknown as rote learningis relatively easy to implement on a computer. More challenging is the problem of implementing what is called generalization. Generalization involves applying past experience to analogous new situations. For example, a program that learns the past tense of regular English verbs by rote will not be able to produce the past tense of a word such as jump unless it previously had been presented with jumped, whereas a program that is able to generalize can learn the add ed rule and so form the past tense of jump based on experience with similar verbs.

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artificial intelligence | Definition, Examples, and ...

What is Artificial Intelligence? How Does AI Work? | Built In

Posted on December 10, 2019 by admin

Can machines think? Alan Turing, 1950

Less than a decade after breaking the Nazi encryption machine Enigma and helping the Allied Forces win World War II, mathematician Alan Turing changed history a second time with a simple question: "Can machines think?"

Turing's paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" (1950), and it's subsequent Turing Test, established the fundamental goal and vision of artificial intelligence.

At it's core, AI is the branch of computer science that aims to answer Turing's question in the affirmative. It is the endeavor to replicate or simulate human intelligence in machines.

The expansive goal of artificial intelligence has given rise to manyquestions and debates. So much so, that no singular definition of the field is universally accepted.

The major limitation in defining AI as simply "building machines that are intelligent" is that it doesn't actually explain what artificial intelligence is? What makes a machine intelligent?

In their groundbreaking textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, authors Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig approach the question by unifying their work around the theme of intelligent agents in machines. With this in mind, AI is "the study of agents that receive percepts from the environment and perform actions." (Russel and Norvig viii)

Norvig and Russell go on to explore four different approaches that have historically defined the field of AI:

The first two ideas concern thought processes and reasoning, while the others deal with behavior. Norvig and Russell focus particularly on rational agents that act to achieve the best outcome, noting "all the skills needed for the Turing Test also allow an agent to act rationally." (Russel and Norvig 4).

Patrick Winston, the Ford professor of artificial intelligence and computer science at MIT, defines AI as "algorithms enabled by constraints, exposed by representations that support models targeted at loops that tie thinking, perception and action together."

While these definitions may seem abstract to the average person, they help focus the field as an area of computer science and provide a blueprint for infusing machines and programs with machine learning and other subsets of artificial intelligence.

While addressing a crowd at the Japan AI Experience in 2017, DataRobot CEO Jeremy Achin began his speech by offering the following definition of how AI is used today:

"AI is a computer system able to perform tasks that ordinarily require human intelligence... Many of these artificial intelligence systems are powered by machine learning, some of them are powered by deep learning and some of them are powered by very boring things like rules."

Originally posted here:

What is Artificial Intelligence? How Does AI Work? | Built In

Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence – Future of …

Posted on December 10, 2019 by admin

Many AI researchers roll their eyes when seeing this headline:Stephen Hawking warns that rise of robots may be disastrous for mankind. And as many havelost count of how many similar articles theyveseen.Typically, these articles are accompanied by an evil-looking robot carrying a weapon, and they suggest we should worry about robots rising up and killing us because theyve become conscious and/or evil.On a lighter note, such articles are actually rather impressive, because they succinctly summarize the scenario that AI researchers dontworry about. That scenario combines as many as three separate misconceptions: concern about consciousness, evil, androbots.

If you drive down the road, you have a subjective experience of colors, sounds, etc. But does a self-driving car have a subjective experience? Does it feel like anything at all to be a self-driving car?Although this mystery of consciousness is interesting in its own right, its irrelevant to AI risk. If you get struck by a driverless car, it makes no difference to you whether it subjectively feels conscious. In the same way, what will affect us humans is what superintelligent AIdoes, not how it subjectively feels.

The fear of machines turning evil is another red herring. The real worry isnt malevolence, but competence. A superintelligent AI is by definition very good at attaining its goals, whatever they may be, so we need to ensure that its goals are aligned with ours. Humans dont generally hate ants, but were more intelligent than they are so if we want to build a hydroelectric dam and theres an anthill there, too bad for the ants. The beneficial-AI movement wants to avoid placing humanity in the position of those ants.

The consciousness misconception is related to the myth that machines cant have goals.Machines can obviously have goals in the narrow sense of exhibiting goal-oriented behavior: the behavior of a heat-seeking missile is most economically explained as a goal to hit a target.If you feel threatened by a machine whose goals are misaligned with yours, then it is precisely its goals in this narrow sense that troubles you, not whether the machine is conscious and experiences a sense of purpose.If that heat-seeking missile were chasing you, you probably wouldnt exclaim: Im not worried, because machines cant have goals!

I sympathize with Rodney Brooks and other robotics pioneers who feel unfairly demonized by scaremongering tabloids,because some journalists seem obsessively fixated on robots and adorn many of their articles with evil-looking metal monsters with red shiny eyes. In fact, the main concern of the beneficial-AI movement isnt with robots but with intelligence itself: specifically, intelligence whose goals are misaligned with ours. To cause us trouble, such misaligned superhuman intelligence needs no robotic body, merely an internet connection this may enable outsmarting financial markets, out-inventing human researchers, out-manipulating human leaders, and developing weapons we cannot even understand. Even if building robots were physically impossible, a super-intelligent and super-wealthy AI could easily pay or manipulate many humans to unwittingly do its bidding.

The robot misconception is related to the myth that machines cant control humans. Intelligence enables control: humans control tigers not because we are stronger, but because we are smarter. This means that if we cede our position as smartest on our planet, its possible that we might also cede control.

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Benefits & Risks of Artificial Intelligence - Future of ...