Slashdot Mirror
AI Expert: AI Won't Exterminate Us -- It Will Empower Us
An anonymous reader writes: Oren Etzioni has been an artificial intelligence researcher for over 20 years, and he's currently CEO of the Allen Institute for AI. When he heard the dire warnings recently from both Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, he decided it's time to have an intelligent discussion about AI. He says, "The popular dystopian vision of AI is wrong for one simple reason: it equates intelligence with autonomy. That is, it assumes a smart computer will create its own goals, and have its own will, and will use its faster processing abilities and deep databases to beat humans at their own game. ... To say that AI will start doing what it wants for its own purposes is like saying a calculator will start making its own calculations." Etzioni adds, "If unjustified fears lead us to constrain AI, we could lose out on advances that could greatly benefit humanity — and even save lives. Allowing fear to guide us is not intelligent."
Except that Etzioni is
1) already rich
2) the head of an extremely well-funded (Paul Allen money) NON-PROFIT, with the business model of "let's try to do some cutting edge AI research with open source code"
and 3) an actual world-class expert in the field, rather than a smart person prognosticating about something he only casually understands
No one would claim that AI autonomy is a threat down the road. But down the road is decades from now, minimum. Fearmongering about it, rather than actual pressing scientific issues like climate change, terrible science education, research funding, etc, is irresponsible grandstanding for publicity.