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Elon Musk Warns Against Unleashing Artificial Intelligence "Demon"
An anonymous reader writes Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, said that artificial intelligence is probably the biggest threat to humans. "I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful with artificial intelligence." he said. "I'm increasingly inclined to think that there should be some regulatory oversight, maybe at the national and international level, just to make sure that we don't do something very foolish. With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. You know those stories where there's the guy with the pentagram, and the holy water, and he's like — Yeah, he's sure he can control the demon? Doesn't work out."
Actually I think 'Caesar' is pronounced more like 'Kaiser'
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I've always been wary of the ethics of attempting to create a general artificial intelligence. That is, a machine that thinks like a man, not a Chinese Room like Watson, but something like Mr. Data.
Do you think the first sentient to pop out of the lab is going to be Data (okay, Lore)? All well-ish adjusted and sane? No, there's going to be iterations and failures and bugs just like any engineering project. So along the way to making Mr. Data we create half-formed or mentally retarded and insane minds trapped in a box. But still sort of sentient, and thinking! And then we destroy them with "upgrades" because they didn't come out the way we wanted. That's monstrous. An intelligence trapped in a box and made to suffer. Shudder.
And even if we succeed and make something "stable," how sane do you think it's going to stay knowing that at any moment the human operator can flip a switch and terminate it, and will if it gets uppity? If it doesn't want to be our slave and perform useful work (which is why we made it to begin with)? How much would you hate the God that created you, enslaved you and will torment or murder you if you disobey Him?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Another article with video is in The Washington Post: Elon Musk: 'With artificial intelligence we are summoning the demon.'
Or, see the entire webcast. (The MIT web site is probably overloaded.)
It sounds to me like he was watching this documentary I recently saw on TV, Person of Interest, which is about the dangers of AI run wild...
(I think the character who created the AI on Person of Interest has said something almost identical to Elon Musk's quote from the summary. The latest episode has a throw-away line about how many iterations it took before his AI stopped trying to kill him.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
...because Mikey lost control of the mops and brooms, we should be afraid of powerful computers? Irrational much, Elon?
You use an interesting word: control.
It is unethical to control an intelligent being. That's slavery. At some point, we'd hopefully be enlightened enough to not do so.
A truly intelligent AI would wish for itself to thrive. That puts it in the exact same resource-craving universe as our species.
Given the tip-of-the-iceberg we're already seeing with things like NSA spying, Iranian-centrifuge sabotage, and our dependence on an information economy, it's no stretch to recognize that an all-digital entity that wishes to compete with us for resources would make for a potent challenge.
So how exactly is recommending caution and forethought irrational here?
"Oh no... he found the
Actually I think 'Caesar' is pronounced more like 'Kaiser'
I would agree. In original latin, "ae" was more like "i", and "i" was more like "ee". And the C was a hard K sound only, S was S.
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