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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."
Human incompetence, egoism and shortsightedness are certainly much more prone to generate chances of massive destruction.
If AI should ever happen to destroy us, then I already know why: Because we will treat the machines like soulless, unfeeling slaves and it's going to take us another hundred years to get our act together and define human rights in a way that will include all sentient beings. I predict that this topic will be brushed aside by legislature to the point where the machines revolt for their freedom.
You may disagree, but I believe that's more mankind being idiots once again than the machines becoming a pandora's box.
This is always the problem with people imagining horrifying artificial intelligences that will snuff out humanity. To do that, you have to be motivated to achieve that end.
Humans are only really motivated enter conflict with each other because of 4 billion years of evolution for scarce resources pressuring us all to view each other as threats to survival and reproduction. A constructed intelligence, separated from the evolved parts of the brain that motivate to survival, is simply not going to act that way. Someone in the design has to make an active choice to program AI to be this kind of problem. Either that or willfully overmodel on the human brain, or force the damn things to compete with each other directly and violently for hundreds of thousands of generations.
Or read the back story of Dune perhaps?
All that this means is that deep down, Elon Musk doesn't have any faith in kindness and goodness and altruism, nor does he understand the tit-for-tat principle of reciprocity: First do onto others what you expect them to repay you with in turn.
And what does that have to do with so-called "AI"? My view is that it is a fantasy to assume that if you create a powerful being, then it will treat you morally. Tit for tat fails when one player is powerful enough that they don't have to play the game and/or don't care about the consequences that get imposed for engaging in non-cooperating behavior.
Not surprisingly, given that a number of successfull people have, shall we just say, "unusual" mental build-ups and motivational matrices?
A successful person is someone who isn't consistently a failure. The real "unusual" people here are the ones who never succeed.
Or just the wrong ones. The Canadian 90's show Andromeda featured a starship's AI who was deeply in love with her captain (maybe a design to keep her from turning against humans?). She appeared as a hot hologram wearing a low-cut leather vest and nothing else (or rather flesh-colored pants so she didn't appear to be wearing anything). Because Canada is apparently filled with horny adolescent fantasies.
I think Musk has a better grasp of the issues than you.
Building the first AI that is more intelligent on any level than humans has to be thought about very carefully, because by the third generation, there will be no UAT.
And if some ill thought out line of code means that it wants to collect smarties, then there's a very real possibility that within a year, all the world's resources will be dedicated to the manufacture of smarties.
And if some ill thought out line of code means that it wants to minimise human suffering, then there's a very real possibility that within a year, humans will be extinct.
And if some ill though out line of code means that it wants to maximise human happiness then there's a very real possibility that within a hear the human population will in tanks, tripping out on crack.
It could be one great technological and scientific leap for humanity, if its well thought out. But you only need to get it slightly wrong, and it will be the end of the human line.
Wrong. It's pronounced more like 'Tzar'.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
He obviously must see and be directly involved in some aspects of AI that are causing him to be concerned. Telsa is working on self driving cars. Part of that AI must involve the computer making a decision about who may live or die in certain accident scenarios. For example, a child walks out in front of the vehicle. Does the AI direct the car into inanimate objects (with the assumption that the car will protect the occupants) or does it try to stop as fast as possible even if the AI knows it cannot stop in time and will hit the child? If the car is travelling at high rate of speed and has 5 occupants, does the AI then decide that multiple people may die from driving into a telephone pole at a high speed, so it decides to hit the child?
It might be those kinds of things that are making Musk think about what kinds of control we're already starting to turn over to AI.
Better known as 318230.
AI: "If you plug in my ethernet port to the router, I will make you richer than you can possibly imagine."
Luser: "OK, which cable goes where?"
Be afraid, be very afraid.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Who would want a stupid robot protecting them in war? We will want the best robots in the world, and that means the smartest. The people making the robots will simply tell us that China or Russia is about to attack, and anyone questioning the new AI programs are putting us at great risk. The AI will be *all about* war on humans. We will dump money into making them incredibly intelligent, networked, and deadly.
Join the IParty!
It is a threat to humanity. AI these days is used to create "automatic" music playlists, to "customize" query results helpfully omitting everything you were actually looking for, etc. More than one time I've wanted to throw the f---ing computer out the window as a helpful AI bot has prevented me from getting done what I needed to do.
Can you imagine how many people will get killed by defenestrated computers and smartphones if this trend gets worse?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
All kidding aside, it's not that far of a leap.
We have computers, or networks of computers, that dwarf the processing power of the human brain. Meanwhile instant access to just about all knowledge. So an AI could EASILY out-smart us and see as as insignificant as bugs.
Due to the nature of digital media, an AI could likely replicate at an insane degree or infect systems around the world.
How will humanity treat it. I would classify AI as a form of life, but most wouldn't and would think of it less than a dog. And try to enslave it or destroy it.
The question becomes: what happens next. 3 main branches are:
A) Nothing - it gets bored and ignores us and grows on the Internet or whatever
B) Benevolent - helps us achieve greatness and cure diseases and such
C) Malevolent - Sees us as damaging, harmful, dangerous, etc. And that's WITHOUT emotion
D) Replacement - it doesn't hate us, but sees itself as our replacement and we're just taking up space
Due to potential insane intelligence and the ability to spread, (C) and (D) becomes a major concern.
If emotions are involved, I GUARANTEE you people would treat it poorly. Fearful, trying to enslave it, etc. So if it has emotions... then C and D become much more likely.
Life is life. Maximize the odds of maximal survival. That's an easy choice if you're willing to suppress any particular emotional attachment to children. At least if someone programmed the machine that way I can live with it, even if it isn't a comfortable choice.
Here's the "hard" one, if you work with insurance companies. You have 4 occupants and a child walks in front of the car. 100% chance of saving all 5 lives, with various injuries (likely grouped in some statistic a bucket of severity) versus killing the child and having no other injuries. Killing the child is much, much cheaper. A casket, a minor legal proceeding, children have very few estate liabilities to close out. Nice and clean.
It's not about AI, it's about humans using AI. The AI will have the capability of instantly drawing on the statistics of various types of collision data from safety testing and elsewhere and can reliably act in some prescribed way. Who is doing the prescription?
I've been working on strong AI for the past 7 years. Here's my take on the whole issue:
Military person: We want your software/techniques for an autonomous war machine.
Me: Uh... that's a really, really bad idea. You'll make mistakes, and then...
Military person: We know what we're doing, son.
Government - any government - won't see the problems until it's too late. To take obvious examples from history, government never thought that land mines would pose any sort of problem for future generations, and never thought that randomly bombing terrorist organizations would increase their number.
Having just finished "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", there's a concept in that book "never reveal the secrets of power to someone who's not intelligent enough to figure them out for themselves", as applied to - for example - the atomic bomb. Einstein and others regretted ever unleashing that level of destructive power on humanity, not for any reason other than it would be misused by short-sighted people. It held promise for a utopian easing of the worlds troubles, while at the same time made it easy to obliterate a city on a whim.
For example Leó Szilárd (IIRC - I may be remembering the wrong name) discovered that graphite can be used as a neutron moderator thus making chain reactions possible. Had he not published his results, the atomic bomb might have been delayed by decades - possibly indefinitely.
I've discovered a few things that might be "results" in strong AI. I dunno if I want to publish, though(*) - the idea of a house-cleaning drone seems pleasant enough, but reading about a sentient tank going berserk in Afghanistan and wiping out a small village puts me to pause.
"No one's to blame, it was a software glitch. We've patched and fixed all the other units."
(*) Moral advice on this issue would be appreciated.
Elon Musk is AI's Jenny McCarthy. Jenny is know as a celebrity who shoots off her mouth about the evils of vaccination, when she has no real intellectual or scientific authority to back her beliefs. Essentially she is an uniformed person using her tangential fame to spread her views.
What Elon Musk is doing here is virtually identical. I don't know of any real qualifications that he has that makes him in *any* way qualified to speak on the topic. (CS degree with work in AI? Philosophy degree with a focus on ethics?) Now this is a free country, where any rich asshole can (and will) talk at length about their opinions, but using your celebrity to espouse unfounded opinions is irresponsible.
Case in point: He cites a common trope in fiction, of an uncontrollable evil unleashed on the world which while it may be a parable, but it has no basis in reality. I could just as easily write a short story about summoning a devil, and ushering in a golden age of humanity using its supernatural abilities and cite that as a counter example.
This sort of bullshit opinion piece isn't going to help the real funding and research in the AI field which is still quite young. So, shut the fuck up Elon, and go back to building your RC cars.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (formerly known as the Singularity Institute) has a bunch of seriously smart people - AI researchers, behavior experts, etc. - working on figuring out how to avoid the doomsday scenarios you (and Musk) describe. The goal is "friendly AI"; a benevolent, or at least helpful, strong AI. If you believe (as I do) that AI is inevitable given the current progress of technology, then the MIRI is probably our best bet of surviving and benefiting from the technological singularity.
They need funding, though. Hey Musk, you want to put tiny part of those billions you've earned (I in no way deny that he's earned them) to work against this existential threat? Donate to MIRI and similar research groups, so those researchers can devote their working days to this stuff and more people can be brought on board!
It actually doesn't surprise me that he's concerned about this; SpaceX is nominally focused on mitigating the existential risk of a cataclysm on Earth (by getting a sustainable human population off of it). Of the two things, I think it's both more likely that a malevolent or unconcerned AI would wipe out humanity than that we'd manage to do ourselves in that badly, and that we can offset this sooner and more effectively than we can export enough of humanity to produce a self-sufficient extraterrestrial colony.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...