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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."
Since strong AI is just as real as demons.
...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.
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.
We have not done so well natural intelligence. I'd be willing to give artificial intelligence a try.
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.
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.
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