The Threat of a Reward-Driven Adversarial Artificial General Intelligence

Abstract

Once introduced, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will undoubtedly become humanity’s most transformative technological force. However, the nature of such a force is unclear with many contemplating scenarios in which this novel form of intelligence will find humans an inevitable adversary. In this chapter, we argue that if one is to consider reinforcement learning principles as foundations for AGI, then an adversarial relationship with humans is in fact inevitable. We further conjecture that deep learning architectures for perception in concern with reinforcement learning for decision making pave a possible path for future AGI technology and raise the primary ethical and societal questions to be addressed if humanity is to evade catastrophic clashing with these AGI beings.