Elon Musk Thinks We Will Have To Use AI This Way To Avoid a Catastrophic Future (cnbc.com)

Elon Musk has long said that artificial intelligence will have to augment human abilities, rather than compete with them, in order to avoid a portentous future. He has been active in trying to find ways to evaluate and reduce potential risks posed by AI. From a report: On Monday, Musk tweeted out a set of principles for AI research and development created by a group of scientists at a recent conference for the Future of Life Institute (of which Musk is a board member). Musk said in response to a comment that ensuring AI augments human abilities is "critical to the future of humanity." Musk recently told a Twitter user that there may be an announcement "next month" regarding such as device, which Musk has called, in the past, a neural lace.

Comments

Title is worded like clickbait

[diesalesmandie]

FFS editors, please don't word titles to stories like clickbait, it just makes you look less credible.

Re:Title is worded like clickbait

[SubtleGuest]

I don't think slashdot has enough visitors anymore for him to care.

I agree - AI's strength is with details

[lakeland]

I develop marketing automation software. Lots of people talk about 'set and forget' on their marketing, where the AI takes care of everything. This is a really bad idea. Every time I've tried to do something like this it has backfired with the AI doing something spectacularly stupid.

Instead where I have had success is where the AI's role is to fill in the little details that would be boring for a human. Essentially the role of the AI is to tune rather than create. For example, the human might craft the first couple emails and then leave the AI to start moving sentences around for better effectiveness. It is completely unrealistic for people to craft the best message for every single person on their database, but it is perfectly reasonable for a person to produce the first ten or twenty and then leave a computer to fill in the gaps.

Similarly, feedback from the AI needs to go back to the human so they can provide guidance. For example: "the content was not very effective with this segment", and the human provides more training data on how to communicate with people who fall into that segment. I think about it as giving power to the human - adding richness and fine-tuning to all of their decisions. The AI is never in control. Even if almost all the decisions are made by the AI, it is always within the guidance provided by the human.

Maybe this will change one day; at the moment AI sucks at extrapolating but is awesome at interpolating. This means a human is going to do a far better job of setting strategy, but will quickly lose interest if they have to do every micro-execution.

PS: What's up with the article title. How about 'Elon Musk believes AI needs to augment humans instead of replacing them'?

Re:I agree - AI's strength is with details

[aaronb1138]

I buy products when and where I want / need to. I don't need a personal relationship with the establishment or increased communication from the entity. In the cases where I do have a personal relationship which drives my desire to purchase goods / services, the relationship is with a person or people (e.g. my favorite bars).

What does drive me to going to a different competitor are advertising / marketing methods I find any of the following: invasive, absurd, immature, over the top, lacking in class, offensive, over budgeted, unethical, and others. I vote my pocketbook against vendors I dislike rather than for a particular or special one.

I don't need product offers in the first place. The idea that I need to be offered products that I am not already researching prior to purchase is intellectually insulting, and part of the the consumerism + marketing driven problem. You remove value from the interdependent system of producers and consumers and increase the cost of products.