Elon Musk Warns Governors: Regulate AI Before It's 'Too Late' (recode.net)

turkeydance shared a new article from Recode about Elon Musk: He's been warning people about AI for years, and today called it the "biggest risk we face as a civilization" when he spoke at the National Governors Association Summer Meeting in Rhode Island. Musk then called on the government to proactively regulate artificial intelligence before things advance too far... "Normally the way regulations are set up is a while bunch of bad things happen, there's a public outcry, and after many years a regulatory agency is set up to regulate that industry," he continued. "It takes forever. That, in the past, has been bad but not something which represented a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization. AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization"... Musk has even said that his desire to colonize Mars is, in part, a backup plan for if AI takes over on Earth.
Several governors asked Musk how to regulate the emerging AI industry, to which he suggested learning as much as possible about artificial intelligence. Musk also warned that society won't know how to react "until people see robots going down the street killing people... I think by the time we are reactive in AI regulation, it's too late."

Comments

AI lmao

[Anonymous Coward]

Regulate elon musk before his retarded opinions get out of hand.

Oh too late.

Never happen

[dpilot]

A - We don't really have true AI yet. (Or is this like One True Scotsman.)

B - As we get closer, the AI we're developing will be too profitable, so those profiting from it will prevent or subvert any regulation, anyway.

Somebody is confusing AI with robotics

[OpenSourced]

Now, everybody has seen Terminator, and Matrix, but it seems like some viewers keep the suspension of disbelief long after exiting the cinema.

AI may be advancing with giant strides, but robotics is still far, far away from doing anything remotely similar to a Terminator, even the simplest models ;-) Somebody as familiar with the limitations of current batteries as Mr.Musk must be, should think about how these killer robots are going to kill more than a handful humans before the batteries run out. Although I suppose they could hijack electric car's batteries, once those are ubiquitous. Or perhaps he was really referring to autonomous cars getting self-conscious and killing every pedestrian in sight for some reason. Again, first show a car that can drive fully autonomous, and then start worrying about how smart it's going to be.

Autonomous robot fighters will come, once the AI is in place. They will take the form of autonomous tanks, I suppose, at first. Something big that will have enough fuel to last some time. Second step I suppose would be swarms of small drones, every one with a camera and a small explosive load that will attach to foes and explode. Other devices will follow. That is unavoidable. If a country legislates against them, the other countries will gain an insurmountable advantage in the battlefield. And certainly rogue operators could use these devices and mount terrorist attacks with them. That's also mostly unavoidable. When the technology is there, you cannot legislate it away.

I don't know exactly why Mr.Musk did these declarations, perhaps he is genuinely worried about an apocalyptic future. But a public figure from the business world asking for regulation to politicians always smells like advantage-seeking or damage control of some kind to me.

Howard Hughes Mk2

[dbIII]

Sometimes the rich and famous get weird fixations outside of their skill set and produce noise of no more worth than noise from anyone else without a clue.
Artificial Intelligence? We can't even define the intelligence of a cockroach let alone model it.

Ostensibly smart guys being dumb

[Rick Schumann]

Why is it that so many supposedly smart guys can be so freakin' dumb about some things?
What we have so far, and for quite some time to come, is not what I and others in the know would call true 'AI'; your 'algorithms' aren't conscious, self-aware, or capable of true cognition; they aren't anywhere near capable of being able to think, not in the way that's necessary for 'robots walking down the street killing people', or 'Skynet taking over', or anything out of a friggin' Isaac Asimov novel. Please, please, PLEASE, people, get over it already, stop believing the media hype. You have more to worry about from your dog or cat trying to take over the world than you do any chunk of computer code.

The sky is falling

[nehumanuscrede]

Regulation is another feel-good measure along the lines of our current security theater.

Even IF we outright banned it, do you think other countries will adhere to the will of the US in such matters ?

Unlikely.

So the question becomes this:

Do you allow your adversaries to develop the tech that will be used against you, ( in war, economy, or any application ) or do you try to keep pace to keep the playing field even ?

Imagine if we had banned Science and Math outright early on in our history because of the potential for what it could be used for.

We would still be living in caves and hunting with spears.

Re:We'll be fine.

[Rei]

Apparently where you live a $16k car does 0-60 in 5.6 seconds (base model, not performance model), has front and side collision avoidance (standard), drives for 2-3 cents per mile and has 1/10th the moving parts of a normal car.

Hey, while you're at it, why not compare it to a Tata Nano? Or a used Yugo held together by duct tape?

Is it the bottom of the market? No, of course not. In fact, there's nothing about it that could be described as bottom of the market. But $35k is neither out of the ordinary for a car of its featureset / performance, nor some sort of unaffordable luxury cruiser or supercar. And they did this in half a decade from a small two-seat six-figure car. I mean, for crying out loud, how fast of a price reduction would make you happy? They've furthermore laid out clear plans to continue the price reduction trend, with Gigafactory and its successors. Even at the current price, their current preorders amount to over a year's wait at full production.

That some people find this to be some sort of slow pace of advancement and scaleup boggles the mind. It's like having to wait 8 seconds to heat up some food and complaining, "Come on!!! Isn't there anything faster than a microwave?" And at the same time you see the same people complaining that Tesla has to keep doing financing rounds rather than paying dividends. So they're apparently supposed to take their current supermassive production scaleup / price scaledown curve, increase it severalfold, and do that without investor money.