Better late than never

[Drashner1]

One of the dangers of strong AI is that if, through some accident, it becomes psychotic, it could be difficult or impossible to stop. Especially if the psychosis was brought on by a flawed transcention. It's not just a psychotic ghost in the network, it's a psychotic ghost that's way smarter than anything else that exists--including the other strong AIs. If they try transcending to fight it, they could become psychotic too. It's Ted Kaczynski meets Sun Tzu meets Stalin meets Bobby Fisher vs. billions of toddlers--guess who'd win?

Weeelll - I don't think that that's necessarily a given.

A base assumption in your scenario seems to be that an AI would be a 'ghost in the network' - but is that actually likely (or at least the only option)?

For this scenario to work, an AI would need to be:

a) Purely software based - able to essentially transmit itself across the internet and various lesser networks (internal intranets for example) at will.

b) Able to run on 'conventional' hardware and within the bound of 'conventional' operating systems, network protocols, etc.

While I suppose that might be possible, I would suggest that it is at least as likely that an AI (or at least early AI) would be based on some combination of specialized hardware and software that would be incompatible with the wider world of computers and computer networks in use at the time. In which case, the AI would be essentially 'trapped' in whatever hardware it was created on, and only able to interact with the wider internet via whatever interface tools it was provide by its creators.

Later generations of AI might either be more flexible in terms of their ability to operate across more general purpose machines and/or networks or later generations of machines and networks might be designed to allow AIs to 'ghost' across them. But its not a given that early AI would have any such ability simply because they are AI (although I suppose someone could try to create a purely software based AI from the start).

As far as an early AI being/becoming transapient and psychotic - it might, but this would (at least in OA terms) require a big boost in hardware support, which it might be difficult for the AI to get unless its creators were either deliberately aiming to upgrade it to super intelligence - or the initial version of the AI is somehow able to manipulate it's creators into providing this too it. Possible, but also not a given.

Todd