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."

Comments

Re:Why is he worried

[Dan East]

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.

Re:Why is he worried

[Strangely Familiar]

Why would a robot try to cut off life support to the Mars colony? Because we programmed it to do that. The U.S. has already started down the path of making autonomous war robots. If we get into a non-nuclear conflict with the Russians or Chinese, they will want to have their autonomous fleet of robots to combat ours. And so the race will be on. We will be in a contest for our survival, and we won't be worried about the long term effects or inherent safety of our actions. We worried that the Manhattan Project could start an uncontrolled chain reaction that turned the earth into a big fireball, but we convinced ourselves that we knew what we were doing, and went ahead and did it anyway. In hindsight, we know that the chain reaction is very hard to maintain. But in the 1940's this was not so certain.

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.