Slashdot Mirror
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.
FFS editors, please don't word titles to stories like clickbait, it just makes you look less credible.
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
Since its only down to interpretation where augmenting human abilities ends and replacing them begins.
I mean if AI really wanted to take over, they can just augment us sufficiently until there really isn't a clear line between humans and AI, then take it from there.
In fact pretty similar to the "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy that Microsoft use(d) to make themselves into a megacorp, and now to just keep themselves there.
How very Culture.
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means.
Really - look it up... Although the use of it does bring to mind its third definition from the American Heritage dictionary: Marked by pompousness; pretentiously weighty.
That is all.
AI will have to augment human intelligence? Good luck with that. From where I'm sitting, the entire boomer generation is rejecting old fashioned brain augmentation in the forms of education, listening to experts on any subject, paying attention to current events, paying attention to history, or even admitting basic facts. You're not going to get the people who really need it to put a device on their brain with the promise it will make them smarter.
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'?
belongs on buzzfeed. You won't believe how the Slashdot users responded!
Laptop batteries are the answer to everything. It is the miracle form factor which powers cars, vibrators, off-grid storage, and even laptops! Robots powered with laptop batteries will obey Asimov's 3 Laws. You buy NOW
A cautionary tale illustrating some of the associated risks of this sort of augmentation is Lois McMaster Bujold's novel Memory. One of the major characters, decades previously to the story, had had a mnemonic memory chip implanted, which gave him perfect memory and recall. During the course of the story, the memory chip is damaged (which throws the character into disjoint fugues as it begins to kick back memories randomly) and later removed, after which the character discovers that after decades of the chip giving him perfect recall, his brain learned to rely more and more on the chip for long-term detail memory, impairing his ability to retain long-term memories after its removal, as well as the outright loss of most of the memories the chip had held because there was no 'local copy'. A clear case illustrating the problems of memory storage with no backups.
One man's neural lace is another man's nerve staple.
I've had exactly the same problem with humans!
The Neural Lace is yet another concept from the Iain M. Banks Culture novels. So I guess it's clear at this point that Elon's a sci fi fan, and a fan of Banks in particular. If the names of the drone ships USS Just Read the Instructions and USS Of Course I Still Love You weren't evidence enough, this seals the deal.
Interestingly, in his book Excession, it's mentioned that along with being a direct mental interface to computers, the Neural Lace is the most effective means of human torture ever devised...
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
But programming an AI to do things I don't want to do is augmenting my human abilites, and competing with the human who I normally pay to deal with it.
As an example: I can't possible cut my lawn more efficiently than a heavily-invested landscape crew: they charge much less than I could theoretically make in the same time, and paying them frees up multiple hours for me to do other things.
And as soon as a sufficiently talented lawn robot becomes cheaper, they'll be gone and it will also free up my time and liberate a few bucks to do other useful things.
Or we could end up like the soldier character Amanda Bates in Peter Watt's Blindsight, a human inserted into a network of AI driven machines, each quicker and more lethal than her fragile human self. Yet she has the final say and utmost authority over the decision to kill.
The unfortunate implication? Her AI team becomes far more dangerous once the slow-thinking and squishy human dies, and they get let off the leash. Meaning that she has as much to fear from her superiors as from her enemies.
How about A.I. for the average guy? What would an average guy use A.I for? I'm thinking of normal things like Insurance cost, truck purchasing, bar-b-q; things that matter.
Given the giant push for fully autonomous cars, it's pretty fun for him to say the only safe use of AI is augmented systems... if that were true you would just use AI to augment driver inputs instead of taking over from them entirely. That's not a bad idea, but that sure is not where Tesla is going.
An AI augmented car would be one that would see you were trying to veer around something and enhance your attempted steering input to succeed if possible - including putting the car up on two tires...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Unlike Watson, it helps humans do their work without the unnecessary destruction.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
It's not an either/or situation, we'll have both competition *and* augmentation. Though it's nice that Musk doesn't want AI to compete with people, it's too late, we're already there, and AI is increasingly on the winning side -- falling costs, better performance, and none of the hassles associate with hiring meatbags. The only problem is economic: who's your customer when you've put everyone out of work?