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Let's Stop Freaking Out About Artificial Intelligence (fortune.com)

Former Google CEO, and current Alphabet Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt and Google X founder Sebastian Thrun in an op-ed on Fortune Magazine have shared their views on artificial intelligence, and what the future holds for this nascent technology. "When we first worked on the AI behind self-driving cars, most experts were convinced they would never be safe enough for public roads. But the Google Self-Driving Car team had a crucial insight that differentiates AI from the way people learn. When driving, people mostly learn from their own mistakes. But they rarely learn from the mistakes of others. People collectively make the same mistakes over and over again," they wrote. The two also talked about an artificial intelligence apocalypse, adding that while it's unlikely to happen, the situation is still worth considering. They wrote:Do we worry about the doomsday scenarios? We believe it's worth thoughtful consideration. Today's AI only thrives in narrow, repetitive tasks where it is trained on many examples. But no researchers or technologists want to be part of some Hollywood science-fiction dystopia. The right course is not to panic - it's to get to work. Google, alongside many other companies, is doing rigorous research on AI safety, such as how to ensure people can interrupt an AI system whenever needed, and how to make such systems robust to cyberattacks.It's a long commentary, but worth a read.

2 of 150 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Manufacturing your own obsolecence by invid · · Score: 4, Insightful

    What will happen to you programmers when the code programs itself?

    lol. I write software for industrial machinery. Given the level of complexity of the software necessary to move objects through space in real time, I really doubt an AI will be taking over my job any time soon. It's not only the complexity of the tasks, but it's the complexity of decades worth of software written in a variety of languages on a variety of platforms. I bet you're saying, "Scrap the old software and let the AI build it from scratch." The AI would need a requirements document, and just getting the requirements document into a form that would be comprehensible to an intelligent human unfamiliar with our machinery would take at least a year of work. I'm sure someday AI will be able to write software superior to humans, and believe me, there's a lot of crappy software out there that needs to be replaced, but writing software to drive a car is a hell of a lot harder than driving a car.

    --
    The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
  2. Re:Manufacturing your own obsolecence by St.Creed · · Score: 4, Funny

    Yeah, nukes tend to do that.

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    Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)