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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.

12 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Title is worded like clickbait by diesalesmandie · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:Title is worded like clickbait by BradleyUffner · · Score: 5, Funny

      You won't believe how the Slashdot community responded!

    2. Re:Title is worded like clickbait by alvinrod · · Score: 3, Funny

      Slashdot editor users one trick to get more article hits. Longtime readers hate him.

    3. Re:Title is worded like clickbait by SubtleGuest · · Score: 3, Insightful

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

  2. I agree - AI's strength is with details by lakeland · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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'?

    1. Re:I agree - AI's strength is with details by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I develop marketing automation software.

      Kindly die in a fire, please.

    2. Re:I agree - AI's strength is with details by Rick+Schumann · · Score: 2

      Could you please do the world a favor, and spread the word, far and wide, what 'AI' really is, and get your colleagues to do the same? The world-at-large seems to think that what they see in movies and TV that is referred to as 'artificial intelligence' is the reality and not a fantasy.

    3. Re:I agree - AI's strength is with details by lakeland · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I develop marketing automation software.

      Kindly die in a fire, please.

      LOL!

      You don't like interacting with companies that try to understand you? You'd rather receive the same generic product offers as everyone else?

      I just don't believe this. I believe that the more a company tries to make their communication relevant for each customer, the more value the customer gets from the company. Incidentially I don't know if you've thought about the impact of AI personal assistants on marketing. If say Walmart sends you an offer that your personal assistant believes won't interest you then it will not show it to you. The only way that customers and customers are going to continue to interact is if the company can convince the customer that they have something worth listening to.

      Anyway, best of luck to you. I hope this at least explains where I'm coming from.
       

    4. Re:I agree - AI's strength is with details by aaronb1138 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

    5. Re:I agree - AI's strength is with details by JesseMcDonald · · Score: 2

      You don't like interacting with companies that try to understand you? You'd rather receive the same generic product offers as everyone else?

      I just don't believe this. I believe that the more a company tries to make their communication relevant for each customer, the more value the customer gets from the company.

      Yes, I would prefer to receive the same generic product offers as everyone else—the less relevant the better. That way, I am less likely to be subtly influenced against my will and contrary to my own interests. I'd prefer to avoid these ads entirely, but to the extent that is impossible, by all means, fill the ubiquitous ad spots with products I will never buy and services I will never require.

      It's a different matter when I'm in "shopping mode" searching for a specific product. In that case relevance is a virtue—relevance to the explicit search parameters, that is, not passive tracking data.

      If say Walmart sends you an offer that your personal assistant believes won't interest you then it will not show it to you.

      That's great so long as I can be certain that the AI assistant is working for me, and not Walmart or any other advertiser. Key test: Can I make it send all "offers" to the trash, or will it insist on letting some through? Assuming I do permit some offers, will it select the ones which serve my best interests—which I will not regret buying later—or will it select the ones most likely to maximize profits for someone else?

      --
      "The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
  3. More inspiration from Iain M. Banks by werepants · · Score: 2

    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...

  4. Re:Kind of naieve statement for him to make by JustNiz · · Score: 2

    >> not anywhere near human-level ...yet...

    >> is not conscious,
    being conscious is not a prerequisite to being a real threat to humans.

    >> You can't sit down and have a conversation with the damned things
    Actually you can: Siri, Google Home, Amazon Echo to name but a few already available as products. Admittedly all are currently very rudimentary and not about to do a SkyNet anytime soon, but you can bet they will only get more and more powerful over time. There's also already much better/stronger stuff going on in many research labs. What I'm trying to say is that the box has already been irreversibly opened.