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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."
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.
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.
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!
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.