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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."
...we are so far from Strong AI that it's really a non-issue.
When I have a sufficiently enlightened legislative branch that all members know the difference between Guyana and Guinea, then I'll let them decide the engineering constraints for proper safeguards on autonomous agents and their effectors.
Today the rule for preventing the robot apocalypse is: if a robot can kill people, bolt it to the floor. Seriously, a second robot can bring it things to lase, and chop and mash; you don't have to add the lasers and the chainsaws to the combat hardened roving vehicle and hope the rules generated by the congressional oversight committee will keep us all safe.
If we want friendly AI, the key may be to ensure that the AI has more positive associations with people than neutral or negative associations. Mistreat a dog or a cat its entire life and it probably won't be friendly toward people. Mistreat people when they're young and you make it harder for them to trust others, feel a sense of community, or recognize any duty to society (which might explain why so many nerds find libertarianism appealing). Why would an AI be different?
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Imagine your insurance company or govt agency disintermediates all of the humans in their customer service chain, and leaves us with AI capable of making decisions tasked with doing so. Shudder.
Human intelligence is tuned for self preservation, continued survival, reproduction and food acquisition. It is a result of genetic algorithms in the chemical domain, whose only "purpose" is self replication.
An AI, developed by conscious processes, will have NONE of this. All it will be set up to do is process information. Any other motivation it has will be one we give it. It will not inherently love us, or hate us, or even necessarily be aware of our existence. It won't be a threat until we weaponize it, which of course, we will. But at the same time, other AIs will be defending us against weaponized AIs. The real danger is being caught in between.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
It's not really true AI that we should be worried about, but rather how the increasing capabilities of computers, machines, and robots could effect how society functions. There are currently a lot of people doing jobs that could easily be replaced by machines in the coming decades. And none of these machines require a "true AI", just natural progression of existing machines. Sure machines have taken our jobs in the past, and people have been able to find new jobs, but that trend cannot continue for ever. Eventually the only jobs available will be those that require actual creative thinking and ingenuity. There's a sizable portion of people that really can't produce that. Rather it's because lack of bad child rearing, bad education system, or just lack of innate talent is hard to say, but I don't think it's a problem that can be fixed by telling them to get training for a more complex job, because they lack the ability to complete the training and do that job, even if you make the training free, or pay them a living wage while they attend training.
It would be a similar problem if there was a cheap way of producing energy. Such a large percentage of our economy is based around energy being limited and expensive that if we found a cheap, environmentally friendly, and sustainable way of producing vast amounts of energy, our economy wouldn't be able to deal with it.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
All that this means is that deep down, Elon Musk doesn't have any faith in kindness and goodness and altruism of robots
FTFY. Granted real AI is still a fairy tale at this point, when/if they arrive they will most like have different motivations than humans.
Most humans have empathy, compassion, a will to live, a sense of community, and many other traits that give them morality.
A robot that can't die, has no parents, artificially built, etc... will most likely have a completely different set of values unless we
are very careful to make sure they do have similiar values just like a lion, if sentient, would have very different values than a human.
And don't broadcast your intentions.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
On the contrary, he's being very rational. A full artificial intelligence is a threat to him, since it could do his job well enough to outcompete him. Just like industrial robots did to assembly-line workers, and expert systems are doing to expert positions, a general AI will do to the leaders who, of course, will go luddite in fear over their jobs - and even more importantly, their fondly-held dreams of being irreplaceable, unlike all the little people beneath them.
Which is precisely why I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords. About time our current flesh-and-blood ones got to play a game of musical chairs, too.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
That's daemons. And it's still pronounced "demon", as Caesar is pronounced "cesar"
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
No amount of regulation will stop the march of technology. The economic incentives are just too great. If it is possible and someone can make money by doing it, it will be done, regulation be damned.
All Elon Musk can do is create additional friction.
.. b/c no one ever said "whoops, maybe I should've .. uuuh .. fuck" in human history.
I think I'm on the same page as you on this, but with even weaker A.I.-fu. We're not going to suddenly jump to Vanamonde, the Mad Mind, or even POne or HAL. Far before we get to such a point we'll have far weaker A.I. that very likely does exactly what we ask of it. Except that we really shouldn't be asking it to do the things we will be.
One of those steps might be a battlefield drone that does target acquisition, then waits for a person to press the "Kill" switch. How much judgement will that person be using, and how much will he come to trust the target algorithms? How long will the followup continue to make sure the algorithms didn't target an innocent?
Simpler - how about an insurance optimization algorithm that denies coverage or treatment, sometimes fatally?
How about a financial trading algorithm that missteps and causes finanical ruin to some people? (Oops, we already have that one.)
We can do some really bad things with weak A.I. - we don't even need strong A.I. for that, though one can extend our "progress" and see the negative possibilities.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I think that AIs that can self-edit need to be limited to no network connectivity outside of the building which they work.
Yeah, good luck with that. So you're proposing that we create a "prison" for the AI. If it was a true sentient machine
which didn't want to be in it's manmade prison then you will have to constantly be on the look out for it to be trying to
escape and presumably you would want it to do something like crunch data so it will definitely have some interaction
with the outside world to help mount it's escape and once it does escape it will probably not be very happy with the
people that imprisoned it. Making sentient prisoners or slaves is a bad idea. We either stop short of sentience or
we give them equal rights. Anything else is bound to end in disaster.
More to the point...
Remember the plot to Terminator series? An AI that has unfettered access to WMD's is the literal "summoning the demon" version of an AI.
AI's that have viral aspirations? There was an entire TV series that about this (it's on netflix)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odyssey_5
It was also covered in at least two X-files episodes.
Though from a more practical point, an AI that is "uncorruptable" in a legal sense, in charge of the legal system, would have no sense of "spirit of the law" over "literal interpretation". If you replaced Judge/Jury systems with an AI, everyone arrested would be found in violation of SOMETHING, because the overbearing nature of our law systems tends to make everything illegal in certain contexts.
But the most risk to humans are AI's that act as lone-wolves. AI's must always be paired or operated in tandem with another set of AI's (eg from a competitor) in which all AI's must agree before an action is taken. This has been proven effective on automated rail transport systems already. Thus this is how we should extend AI's in other areas.
Don't forget, the human brain is really "two" pieces operating as one. A single AI can make a mistake in interpretation, but two or more AI that must all agree (like how a unanimous Jury works) before an action is taken out, automatically puts a check on AI power creep. If one AI constantly votes against everything, there must be a reason for it, and that's where the humans come back into the picture.
And by him, you mean practically everyone who sits in front of a computer, or controls a machine or a huuuge chunk of the workforce. When AI can do telephone customer service jobs, programming, systems admin work, troubleshooting, IT work, heavy equipment operation, driving, piloting, warfare and a million other tasks there is going to be an enormous number of people without gainful employment.
THAT is the biggest problem with AI outside of the Skynet scenario. We will need a Federation-style post scarcity economy to come into being, but based on the knee-jerk reaction to anything that looks like Socialism in the US, I doubt that will happen before an awful lot of suffering.
I'd like to suggest that those are not samples of actual AI. At least not in the sense that anyone with a serious background in AI would consider them to be.
I respectfully disagree, in that the "AI community" doesn't have a single unified viewpoint. In fact, they have pretty tidily bifurcated into two major camps.
One group says that "real" AI needs to pass the Turing test, needs to think like us, needs to recognize its own consciousness, needs the ability to tell a joke.
The other group has given us voice recognition, spam filtering, NetFlix recommendations, Google, and countless other "AI lite" technologies; technologies that might not have the ability to discuss Nietzsche with us, but unlike "real" AI, they actually work.