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Elon Musk Says Mark Zuckerberg's Understanding of AI Is Limited (ndtv.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elon Musk is a man of many characteristics, one of which apparently is not shying away from calling out big names when they are not informed about a subject. A day after Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Musk's doomsday prediction of AI is "irresponsible," the Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity founder returned the favour by calling Zuckerberg's understanding of AI "limited." Responding to a tweet Tuesday, which talked about Zuckerberg's remarks on the matter, Musk said he has spoken to the Facebook CEO about it, and reached the conclusion that his "understanding of the subject is limited." Even as AI remains in its nascent stage -- recent acquisitions suggest that most companies only started looking at AI-focused startups five years ago -- major companies are aggressively placing big bets on it. Companies are increasingly exploring opportunities to use machine learning and other AI components to improve their products and services and push things forward. But as AI is seeing tremendous attention, some, including people like Musk worry that we need to regulate these efforts as they could pose a "fundamental risk to the existence of human civilisation." At the National Governors Association summer meeting earlier this month in the US, Musk added, "I have exposure to the very cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned about it. I keep sounding the alarm bell, but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal." Over the weekend, during Zuckerberg's Facebook Live session, a user asked what he thought of Musk's remarks. "I have pretty strong opinions on this. I am optimistic," Zuckerberg said. "And I think people who are naysayers and try to drum up these doomsday scenarios -- I just, I don't understand it. It's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible."
Zuckerberg is just a glorified webmaster from the 90s, when you think about it.
Everyone's understanding of AI is limited.
Ooooh, goodie: a billionaires' pissing contest. And between techies, too. I'll get the popcorn!
I think Elon Musk is the one that has either a limited understanding of current AI technology or just hypes AI on purpose, while being fully aware that AI still has major limitations and they are unlikely to disappear within the next few years. Important and very important progress has been made, but General AI is likely still very far away.
Facebook's director of AI Yann LeCun gave a very good interview to IEEE spectrum: Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun on His Quest to Unleash Deep Learning and Make Machines Smarter
Jan
Both of them display a remarkable lack of knowledge about the limits of AI. Their respective knowledge about AI is purely from works of fiction, which is why at least one of them has, for the last five years, been bleating that self-driving cars are only five years away.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
The guy who ignores the fact that no one is currently researching strong AI accuses the guy who uses actual AI (well, enhanced pattern matching really) of having a limited understanding of the subject??
Lets face it: To have killer robots and the like as Musks imagines, we need to have a strong AI, of course we need to also have it go off the rails for some mysterious reason (whatever reason that causes this behaviour in movies wont cause it in reality), but first of all we need human-like AI.
This is a bit of a problem as we only have very, very limited understanding of natural Intelligence and no plan or clue how to even start implementing artificial intelligence. People have been falling for the "ZOMFG AI nau!" hype since the creation of Eliza. But so far neither the formal knowledge systems pre-AI-winter nor the deep learning and neurnal nets approaches have yielded anything more than very sophisticated pattern matching algorithms.
Take Googles Go engine: Impressive but it can play Go and only Go. Proof: they now have to spend a long time to retrain it for other tasks. This is not at all what the general population (and Elon) understands by AI.
You had the same kind of thing with nano technology.
Everyone was worried about Grey Goo and being stuck with the kids while your wife, whom you suspected of cheating because she worked long hours at her engineering job wearing shoes that did not meet Speaker Ryan's dress code, was in fact becoming a nano-bot zombie.
Instead, nano was a term you needed to sex up your NSF proposal and pitch to private capital investors, but what you were doing had nothing to do with Drexler assemblers and pretty much mass fabrication materials tech.
... All the way to the bank.
I find it hard to believe the CEO of one of the largest tech companies in the world, whose services heavily rely on AI for recommendations, image recognition, etc, has a limited knowledge of the AI industry. I'm not saying Zuckerberg is one of the world's experts but he most likely has a very firm grasp on the subject.
And whether or not Zuckerberg is correct, it is certainly a reasonable opinion that those who drum up negative sentiment towards AI research are acting irresponsibly. It isn't to the level of Edison spreading fears about AC current by electrocuting animals, but spreading fear about new technologies is likely not a good thing. Instead of more reasonable debates over AI caused displacement of jobs or privacy concerns, Musk is doom-saying about a robot apocalypse. I wouldn't use the term irresponsible, but it's close enough to me to not disparage those who do accuse Musk of irresponsible behavior.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Personally I think the answer lies in the middle. Machine learning will be dangerous when it replaces human decision making as people look at it as "the answer". Humans inherently do not want to be held accountable for their decision making and by passing liability to an algorithm we will get even more of the worst side of humanity: obliviousness and apathy.
AI doesn't have to come to the conclusion that all humans have to die. It simply to has to cross the line of killing one person and then be able to repeat it. Assuming it can replicate and resist our efforts to thwart it, once killing humans becomes a part of how it does things we will no longer exist. How many microscopic animals have you killed today? Do you worry about their dreams and feelings or just inhale them like the rest of us?
"I don't understand it. It's really negative and in some ways I actually think it is pretty irresponsible." - says the guy who's company has more deeply invaded the privacy of individuals, as well as the most people in history..I don't think he's a very good judge of what's 'irresponsible'.
Musk is falling for something that way too many before him did fall for: wild success in one area makes me an expert on just about anything.
Yep. Can you believe these kids think there will be a computer in almost every home soon. They clearly don't understand the obstacles and how much progress we would have to make for that to happen? - Almost every "expert" right before it happened
This is a popular but feeble argument on slashdot.
"People used to say man could never fly: now we have aeroplanes. Therefore time travel will be possible one day."
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
but until people see robots going down the street killing people, they don't know how to react, because it seems so ethereal.
Says the guy that lives in a country where every day dudes carrying big guns shoot at each others for no reasons...
Seriously dude, I'll be worried when I see swarm of robots building killer robots factories, replicator style. Until then, humans worry me the most.
Video of some good progressive thrash music