AI Could Lead To Third World War, Elon Musk Says (theguardian.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Elon Musk has said again that artificial intelligence could be humanity's greatest existential threat, this time by starting a third world war. The prospect clearly weighs heavily on Musk's mind, since the SpaceX, Tesla and Boring Company chief tweeted at 2.33am Los Angeles time about how AI could led to the end of the world -- without the need for the singularity. His fears were prompted by a statement from Vladimir Putin that "artificial intelligence is the future, not only for Russia, but for all humankind ... It comes with colossal opportunities, but also threats that are difficult to predict. Whoever becomes the leader in this sphere will become the ruler of the world." Hashing out his thoughts in public, Musk clarified that he was not just concerned about the prospect of a world leader starting the war, but also of an overcautious AI deciding "that a [pre-emptive] strike is [the] most probable path to victory." Musk added, "Competition for AI superiority at national level most likely cause of WW3 in my opinion. [...] Govts don't need to follow normal laws. They will obtain AI developed by companies at gunpoint, if necessary."

Comments

I think I speak for everyone

[SensitiveMale]

Elon, shut the fuck up.

WHO CARES WHAT ELON SAYS?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, crazy bitch.

Or...

[CrimsonAvenger]

...Lack of AI could lead to Third World War.

See, I can do it too, Elon. With about as much actual, you know, evidence as you used....

Enough of this

[Tablizer]

If I wanted far-off pontifications from rich egotistical blowhards, I would have voted for Trump.

Re:There will never be another world war

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't know what you're talking about, and pushing socialism is akin to pushing slavery.

Fuck off, slaver.

You're retarded, aren't you?

Elon == Anti-VAXer?

[TiggertheMad]

Elon, shut the fuck up.

I'd have given you a +1 if I had any right now. I am a little sad that this post got modded down, because while it isn't lending much to the depth of the discussion here on /., it is probably what Elon needs to be told.

I have made posts about this before, but Elon is talented in running big businesses, not in AI research. At this point he is just approaching crank territory with his hysteric claims about the impending 'bot-pocalyps'. He is using his position of celebrity to promote theories that he has really no understanding of. (His degrees are physics and business)

He is rather similar to another 'beloved' celebrity idiot that likes to talk about nothing she has any authority to speak on: Remember Jenny McCarthy and Vacations? How is Elon really any different than Jenny? Neither are remotely qualified to speak authoritatively about their respective pet theories.

So, Elon, if you or any of your friends or flunkies happens on this post by chance, please take this message to heart: STFU and stick to talking about things that you know about.

Re:I'm much more concerned about

[mark_reh]

And we had an electoral college that was intended to keep people like Trump from happening, too. Plans are plans. Reality is a whole different thing. As Amerika slides into fascism, the old plans aren't worth the paper they're written on.

What an imagination

[Nicolas Cage]

Putin may be a dangerous person, but his statement was totally benign. I imagine every world leader would also want to have their countries by tech pioneers. That's pretty much all he was saying. How do you go from that to WWIII? I hate seeing these kind of outrageous statements so casually thrown around by the rich and famous who obviously are not experts in foreign policy, history, war, etc. I think that's dangerous too, maybe moreso than any off-hand comment by Putin or Trump. Their opinions carry a lot of weight and people look up to them in the same kind of way. Read about Henry Ford's political views before the US entered WWII -- he believed he was arguing for peace, but he was really enabling the Nazis. Hitler said he looked up to him and gave him a medal after taking power. He was a leader in the business world and very influential. By the way, do you really think saying "WWIII" repeatedly is gonna make it less likely to happen, or more likely?

post-biological escape velocity

[epine]

Every government in the world would go to war for that power or to keep that power out of t hehe hands of another.

Your fundamental argument is that the nation state has already achieved post-biological escape velocity.

In most biological models, actual conflict peaks when the status hierarchy is uncertain or in flux (e.g. merging two flocks of chickens). The rest of the time, most of the conflict is symbolic, and even conspicuous losers are marginalized, rather than killed outright.

If you believe in evolution, this is a natural (and opt repeated) outcome for cooperative–competitive systems.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
— F. Scott Fitzgerald

Almost everyone in who functions to a reasonable degree in human society has internalized some way to navigate the simultaneous cooperate–compete dynamic.

But the human mind loves to manufacture autobiographic memory and then adorn this with various stories used to project and inject the chosen autobiographic self-reduction into the social realm.

I can't find the quote just now, but Nabokov said of his own autobiography Speak, Memory that if an author can only write one valid autobiography, he or she isn't trying very hard.

(I was instead rewarded for my snipe hunt by chancing upon Playboy Interview: Vladimir Nabokov, which will surely stand up as the best-spent 30 minutes of my entire week.)

Between the ages of 10 and 15 in St. Petersburg, I must have read more fiction and poetry—English, Russian and French—than in any other five-year period of my life. I relished especially the works of Wells, Poe, Browning, Keats, Flaubert, Verlanie, Rimbaud, Chekhov, Tolstoy and Alexander Blok.

On another level, my heroes were the Scarlet Pimpernel, Phileas Fogg and Sherlock Holmes. In other words, I was a perfectly normal trilingual child in a family with a large library.

At a later period, in Cambridge, England, between the ages of 20 and 23, my favorites were Housman, Rupert Brooke, Joyce, Proust and Pushkin. Of these top favorites, several—Poe, Verlaine, Jules Verne, Emmuska Orczy, Conan Doyle and Rupert Brooke—have faded away, have lost the glamor and trill they held for me. The others remain intact and by now are probably beyond change as far as I am concerned.

So, too, for myself, have Poe, Verne, and Doyle faded away.

But this vertical-gradient singularity, status-hierarchy winner-take-all narrative of the Looming AGI Ascension continues to promulgated by those for whom Poe, Verne, and Doyle have not faded away.

The Gilder Paradigm — 1 December 1996

Though its details are complex, its basic tenet is startlingly simple: Every economic era is based on a key abundance and a key scarcity.

This notion of vertical-gradient AGI is even worse than brick-and-mortar rubbishing Gilderism (he was not wrong, but the gradient turned out to be twenty years rather than two years—and even at twenty years, Amazon has not yet engorged Whole Foods past its tonsils).

Here's a thing: if you discover that a class of problems admits good solutions using stochastic algorithms, it's probably because optimality is a prairie plateau rather than a pointy peak.

(How does one achieve Commanding Heights amid the dreary Saskatchewan vastness—find the most industrious gopher, add steroids to its local water supply until it's hindquarters resemble a modern chicken's forequarters, and then take up prominence upon its excavation mound).

Here's the thing about the thing: AGI might help you find a bigger, better s